Monday, August 10, 2020

this and that

 * Mail seems to be working again. I wonder if my usual delivery guy was on vacation, or if some of the sorters were on vacation? At any rate, I got a great postcard from an ITFF friend today:



The card makes me happy because it feels like the "vintage" cards I remember from when I was a kid - the deckled edge and all. (Maybe these are more common in tourist spots or national park/state park areas? The postcards I get around here all have flat edges).

It reminds me very much in style (if not content) of the postcards my dad used to send from summer geology field camp when I was a kid - for a number of years, he went out to teach in Casper, Wyoming every summer. It seemed like the whole summer but I guess it was maybe just four or six weeks? I know he was often gone for the Fourth of July when I was a little bit older (when I was very small, we would go to Blossom for Fourth of July). 

I also think my parents saw this formation back in the mid-90s when they took a trip to the Pacific Northwest - I cat-sat for them (I was working on my graduate work then). 

* I dunno. Postcards are just one of the Good Things in my mind, and something we're maybe losing a little bit of in the Age of Instagram? It still makes me really happy to get one in the mail, though, and I periodically will send some out as I get my hands on some. I don't travel a lot (less now than I ever did in the past!) but I do try to track down nice scenic postcards when I do.

* I also had a letter from my doctor's office and I had ALL THE ANXIETY when I saw it in the "informed delivery" view because immediately my brain went to "oh no, she's moving or closing up practice and I am going to have to find a new doctor in a pandemic!" I tried to tell myself: Maybe it's a satisfaction survey from your recent appointment. Or a notice that she's taking on another PA (she has a PA working with her now, I've never seen him). Or a reminder I need to make an appointment in January.

It was...in fact, they MADE an appointment for me in January because I forgot. This is a new thing but maybe they want to work out their calendar well in advance? At any rate, it was about the least ominous thing it could be. (A satisfaction survey might have been less ominous, but whatever). 

* I got the prep done (making "arenas" for EACH student to use, rather than the old ones that would be shared among four, and gathered up the post-it notes the AA bought for me so I don't have to cut 2000 squares of each of 2 colors of paper) for the natural-selection simulation lab and I confess I am going to be slightly angry now if we go to all online by the end of the first week or something - this is the Week 2 lab. Maybe tomorrow I set up the bead-based population-growth lab, which will probably be Week 3 at this point....since I bought beads and ziplock bags for it. (I had NO IDEA how much of ecology labs would be "Arts and Crafts Supplies," but here you are, in a pandemic, when you can't do field trips and everyone has to have their own set up).

It is taking more time and more energy to do all of this, and so I admit I am mad at the calls I am seeing for "cut the professors' salaries since they aren't working as hard since so much is online" and PARDON ME about that but.....you try pivoting to online like this, and planning basically a bifurcated semester where maybe you'll be in the classroom and maybe be online, and then tell me if I'm worth less than the just-under-$60K a year I currently earn. 

 *I also finally got the BlackBoard/McGraw-Hill "pairing" thing fixed; it took yet another call, this time I got a rep who knew what she was doing and said "I'm going to reset something on  our end, then you will need to shut down and restart your computer, that should fix it" I told her I was going to ring off and not waste any more of her time - it can take close to 15 minutes for that computer to become functional again after being shut down. She told me to call back if I had a problem but once I got through the shut down it was fine. But it's not reassuring to see tech stuff failing in a semester when we are going to need to lean extra hard on tech.

*Big storms in my mom's area, but she called me to let me know she was OK after they passed. And also - and this may be a personality trait I inherited from her - to run what she did by me to get some reassurance it was OK - her central air conditioning, if the power goes out while it's running, it gets "locked out" and has to be reset by a tech. Okay, maybe it's a safety thing? But mine seems not to do that. But anyway, she lost power, got locked out of the AC, and it's almost as hot there as it is here. So she had a choice: pay a tech after-hours (so: more money) or wait in a hot house overnight for one the next morning. She chose what I would have chosen* - get the tech out ASAP. I think she wanted me to say I didn't think that was extravagant and I didn't. Anyway: I'm grateful my dad left her in a financial position where she can do this; some widows wouldn't be able to afford to pay for air conditioning, let alone getting it serviced after hours

 (*Well, I have the little window unit and I might have been just stubborn enough to stick that in the window and wait on the tech - though also sometimes the company I use gets backed up and can't get out right away) 

But I'm glad she called; I was watching the weather radar for that area nervously and it makes me glad to know she's okay.

* So yeah. Kind of a stressful day. I need to change the sheets on my bed tonight and I also might take a warm-ish bath (despite it being hot out) because I kind of hurt today. Not sure why though I notice that on humid days.

1 comment:

Roger Owen Green said...

Totally unrelated, but I went to http://www.dustbury.com and found his blog from 1996-2008! Apparently, he changed to https after that. BTW, if you want to find the newer posts, you need to go to the Wayback Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20191230043221/https://www.dustbury.com/