Another busy week

 It's gonna be a close thing if I finish the cowl in time to leave for Thanksgiving (it's for my niece; we exchange presents then)

I just finished chart 2; I have the 16 rows of chart 3 and then 10 rows of ribbing left. I plan to take Saturday off working and both set up my tree and maybe work more on this. I really would like to finish this. 

Next week, four of the five days are going to be late-afternoon Zoom interviews of candidates. Good news is we have four good ones; not so great news is that we'll have to do multiple Zoom interviews. I might skip CWF this month because I'd just barely be done with the Zoom interview when it started. 

I took my students out for the last field lab this week. It's always a bit of a logistical pain: getting the van, getting folks out there, getting back in time (we were a little late; it's a good 20 minutes to the site, we have an hour and 50 minutes for lab - so that doesn't leave a lot of time to DO the lab

Also, fallout from having to park in an alternate spot last week: I was told I "parked badly" and I noted that I was 10 minutes late for a meeting and also the last van space had been taken by someone's *personal* vehicle and I was discombobulated trying to park in a different and smaller space. And the response was "yes, there was an Athletic Thing last week" in the sense of (a) "you should have KNOWN" and (b) Athletic Things are More Important. I admit, I tend not to be that kind of person but it DOES rankle to be made to feel that I matter less than other things I personally would regard as less the raison d'être of a college campus. I didn't really SAY anything but I admit - this happened before class - I walked out of there in a bad mood and told myself I couldn't carry it over into class. (Again with the stuffing down of how I really feel)

But things got better once we got out there. I spotted a rough green snake, a common small snake species around here. It's a colubrid snake, so nonvenomous, and my understanding is they're pretty docile and unconcerned by people, and you have to really harass them to get them to bite. (I did not let the guy who wanted to try picking it up pick it up, I didn't want the snake to get stressed out). But it did hang around for a few minutes and we got photos

they're small snakes but this one was really long - maybe 2 1/2 feet

They're probably our brightest-colored snake; we don't have the scarlet kingsnake (the coral-snake mimics) here. The rough green snakes are a very vivid green and I tend to pick up on subtle color differences and I spotted it even before it was moving. They're nice little snakes; they mostly eat insects and as I said, they're not really fearful of people or aggressive. We just left it alone and it eventually slithered off on its snake business. 

That was the last warm day; it turned chilly and rainy today but it's SUPPOSED to be chilly and rainy; it's November.  I hope the snake found a protected hole to hang out in away from the cold. I think these guys must hibernate in the winter.