A busy week

 Last night were the monthly meetings at church. Because it's getting to be budget time (I am on that committee) and nominations time (fortunately not on that one), it was a longer meeting than usual, so that was basically my day after teaching yesterday.

Today I gave an exam and graded two (yesterday's and today's).

I found out that they kind-of solved the "broken chiller unit" issue - there are large (maybe 4 1/2 foot tall) "portable" air conditioners - I use scare quotes because they have to have flexible ductwork (it looks like the white polymer-fabric dryer vent tubes) that attaches into the building ducts, so you can't move them.

It is a solution, but they're very loud. I had to kind of shout in lab to be heard. The good news is the lecture rooms don't have to have them, the AC on that side still works. Also, there's only like 2 weeks of labs left for me in that room, and I don't teach summers (and hopefully it will be fixed over the summer). 

Someone on Bluesky posted - because everyone is sad and often it seems like cruelty is everywhere - that they wanted people to do one kind thing today and then post about it. I can't find the original post again to post to it, but the thing I did that I remember was to scoop up a jumping spider (we have little black and white fuzzy jumping spiders; they're cute. They're probably a Phidippus but I've never really tried to determine species; they're super common). It was walking down the hall near the lab room and I saw it and thought "someone's going to see that and squish it" and I didn't want it to get squished, so I took the paper I was carrying and gently slid it under the spider (I suppose they COULD bite, but they've never been aggressive towards me) and carried it to the nearest door. There's a small garden in the back of the building so I was able to set the spider down in some leaf litter around a clump of iris. Hopefully it can find food out there. (I know I get a lot of those little guys in the house, I just let them be because I'm not afraid of spiders and I figure they get food somehow or they'd not stick around)

So I don't know if trying to be kind to a spider counts, but that's what I did.

I got a few more rounds done on the sock cuff; you can see the full progression of colors here. I do think I'll keep doing the ribbing all the way down the leg and maybe on the top of the foot.