The good news: it’s the last Horrible Thursday of the semester!
The bad news: it’s particularly horrible. On top of the usual day-long load, add 5 hours of phone interview work.
The worse news: looking ahead to next semester, it seems I’ll get another Horrible Thursday, with a Horrible Tuesday, too.
So that you share my mood, here is the 2016 Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog.
I have a $10 pot from IKEA that works great for fondue, *and* for anything else I’m up to.
Sofia Vergara: US actress faces lawsuit ‘from own embryos’
The logical extension of the “fetal personhood” argument
I get a Horrible Thursday next term: first class at 8:30 AM (which means I have to be down at the bus stop not too long after 7 AM); last (which is three hours in one go) ends at 5:30PM. No, it’s not continuous in between, but still. I’m getting too old for this.
Ah, the link is to Adequate Man! He did a great primer for Utica greens. I could quibble with some of the details, but his love for and desire to push said greens onto everyone is entirely correct. I like him.
Tuesday, you oppressive calendarist.
I have less than two weeks and I am off to Florida.
Boy opens his new restaurant on the 17th, so I am taking that day off. And the 16th.
Which means 7 more days of work this year.
So, Thpppbpbpbpbt!!! you oppressive calendarist.
(Seriously, take care of yourself. Shit days can drag one down.)
#3: Next semester, I start Tuesday & Thursday with an 8am class…a class that will depend on students being alert and interactive. May have to invest in a classroom coffee maker. Or maybe an espresso machine.
Here’s my Thor’s Day Mood.
LOVE the Hater’s Guide! Two thumbs up! Thanks for sharing that.
A good effort, but pales in comparison to Nordstrom’s holiday shit. They are selling an $85 “Los-Angeles area rock” inside a leather pouch.
That’s it, that’s all it is. It’s a fucking rock inside a bit of leather. What is this shit?
Come now, taraskan, *nothing* compares to the Nieman Marcus Holiday catalog! This year it included a gold-plated private jet. I kid you not.
Gold? The better to conduct eletricity through the craft in a storm? They must have a hell of an ad campaign.
I should come up with several horrifying images and sell them jets encased in a PVC sock.
*Tartan of course
I have a confession to make. We have a literal bricks-n-mortar Williams Sonoma right here in our town. Last year I walked in and saw the thing of my dreams — a stainless steel, Made In Germany, hinged basket, garlic press. A true thing of beauty. The BMW of garlic presses. I can press an entire head of garlic in under two minutes flat and clean the press in another 30 seconds. I can crank out a litre of Romesco sauce quicker than Emeril can make a blonde roux. Now I have my sights set on an 8 inch Japanese kitchen knife whose blade resembles the layers of an onion. Oooooh. Hold me back.
Just finished a grueling marathon phone interview session. The terrible news is that none of them sucked at all, so this weekend we’re going to have all kinds of ferocious arguments over which ones to invite to the on-campus interview.
I remember when my department was hiring when I was a grad student, the candidate they went with ended up being the one the most students wanted to work with, even though they were going to come with a $20,000 lab we’d have to build. That’s probably a myopic assessment, it probably had more to do with differentiating themselves, as we didn’t yet have anyone doing that sort of thing.
The grad students did get to come to all the job talks and participate, as well as vote through a questionaire at the end, though I wonder just how much it mattered.
I had a Lovely Friday. (I’m in Japan, so we’re a bit ahead.) I went to the smaller of my two elementary schools where I only have two classes and the kids are sweethearts. Most of the day was eaten up with the construction of a “word math” quiz board (“butter + fly = ?”) and an X-mas tree poster with almost two dozen rearrangeable shiny cardboard ornaments. Thankfully I’d already made the ornaments last year when I did the same poster at the other school because I still ended up staying late.
If only I’d known sooner how much artistic creativity and design skills being an assistant English teacher requires. Maybe then I wouldn’t have spent so long resisting giving it a go. It’s really stimulating to make interactive stuff for kids to learn English with out of nothing but office supplies and the odd ¥100 store doohickey. (Granted, Japanese office supplies and “dollar” stores are both insanely nice, which makes it easier.)
For some reason we used to get the Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog regularly (no idea what mailing list they’d bought). Some of the stuff was really quite cool, if a bit beyond our price point. The two-person submarine, for example….
($2 million, IIRC. Included the necessary qualifying course to operate it legally.)
“For every bond villain’s subterranean escape plan. Dragons, henchmen, and black turtlenecks sold separately.”