Random Bullets

• I am procrastinating grading again. There is something about the structure of summer classes that means that I have to limit the actual time I procrastinate, but I still experience the same level of intensity.

• This is only an admission I would allow in a random bullets post. I have been such a bad commenter lately because I still have a dial-up connection to my home computer. Writing and posting comments takes forever with crappy dial-up and often by the time I have completed the comment, the time has expired on the veri code and so I have to start all over again. I know, I know, must improve the situation but that leads me to

• My laptop is 10 years old. It is the only home computer I have and is just on the verge of crashing. I know I need a new one but am currently broke (hence teaching summer. See bullet no.1) and so can’t buy one without indulging in credit and can’t really justify a better internet connection because my old computer is not set up for it.

• Speaking of credit indulgences, when I was in my first 2 years of grad school I accumulated $20,000 in credit debt. I paid most of it off by moving to Japan and teaching English when the dollar was weak (I got paid in yen), but I still have some of that and added more in the last 4 years of grad school and so am very scared of indulging (again) in credit.

• I am moving into a new office (a bit bigger...not much) and have no earthly idea when I am going to find the time and the help to get my stuff into the new digs. This is especially trying because every year at about this time my department goes through the great office shuffle which means that timing is everything. If one person (call them A) doesn’t move when they need to it causes a huge backlog because person B, who was supposed to move into A’s office, can’t move and person C, who was supposed to move into B’s office, can’t move and so on. Why does this happen every year, you ask? Well, we have a policy that bigger offices are assigned according to seniority and so when people are promoted, they search for new space by taking the space of folks retiring from prime space and by rearranging GTA space. Then us lower ranked folks fight for the newly opened space vacated by the freshly promoted folks and so on. (ooooh, our office czar just stopped by and said my new digs are getting cleaned AND painted before I move. Eeeeeeeeeeeee!).