Scene: My office. Random student walks in. Him: Hi. Can I borrow one of your chairs?
Me: Um. Why?
Him: We don't have enough chairs in our classroom.
Me: OK. You can have it on one condition. Raise your right hand.
Him: Uh. OK. (raises hand)
Me: Repeat after me. I solemnly swear ...
Him: I solemnly swear
Me: on the soul of my firstborn child ...
Him: on the soul of my firstborn child
Me: that I will return this chair ...
Him: that I will return this chair
Me: at the end of my class period.
Him: at the end of my class period.
Me: Carry on, then.
Him: Thanks.
posted by Kate at 5:45 PM link/comments
Tuesday, August 27, 2002
It's the first week of classes here at ye olde university. I hate this week with a burning passion and try my best to stay in the office with the door closed. Nevertheless, my office is in a building full of classrooms, so I'm essentially screwed ... students who can't find their classes, confused professors, doors that need to be unlocked, freshman lumbering around confused and bumping into things, etc., etc. Students keep wandering in here asking me questions and getting huffy and nasty because I: I can't wait for Christmas break.
a) write websites, therefore have no authority to sign course override forms.
b) do not have a pencil sharpener.
c) have no idea why Econ 212 was moved to the building across the street.
d) have no affiliation whatsoever with the registrar's office
e) will not allow them to borrow my stapler if "borrowing" it involves removing it from my office.
posted by Kate at 2:35 PM link/comments
Monday, August 26, 2002
Oh my, the Star Trek endorsement is amusing. Why not blur that boundary between entertainment and politics a little more...So in class today I got to check out a brand new classroom, and hello technology, the classroom comes with a laptop computer, a DVD, a VCR, and a sound system that looks intense. I actually have to take a afternoon lesson on how to use my classroom. Meanwhile, my other class is in an outdated room that features wooden chalk holders and not enough desks. Yeah.
posted by Jen at 3:03 PM link/comments
Attention Aspiring Politicians! When considering your target demographic, don't overlook the Star Trek contingent!
posted by Kate at 1:15 PM link/comments
Saturday, August 24, 2002
The Lentil Fest, although intriguing in that "wow, look what small towns do" sense, failed to hold my attention for long, but what can one expect of lentils. I actually enjoy lentils quite a bit when they are the subject of a meal. Also, comparisons abounded to that end-of-summer fling from back in the day, the Valley City Street Fair, where the one street in my hometown was blocked off, carnies invaded, and I cruised the strip testing my dart-throwing abilities in order to win various priceless trinkets.
posted by Jen at 11:37 AM link/comments
Friday, August 23, 2002
Yeah, I hate Dubya. Such an obvious pandering ploy to please the timber industry.
And hold tight to your seats because my exciting evening may involve attending the Lentil and Pea Festival. This after waiting an hour in line to make copies for my stupid 8:30 am class on Monday. Lentils and peas cannot fix any of this.
posted by Jen at 7:39 PM link/comments
Oh, man. This is the best one in a long time ... Dubya startles from an uneasy slumber, sits bolt upright in bed, presidential jammies and nightcap aflutter, and declares, "Egads! I've got it! Trees are made of wood! Wood is flammable! The reason we have so many forest fires is because the forests are full of trees! Ergo, if we get rid of the trees, we won't have any more forest fires!" Good job, Dubya! So following your logic ... do you think the reason we have so many shooting deaths in this country is that people use guns to shoot other people? Hmmm.
posted by Kate at 2:57 PM link/comments
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
So this week we (teaching assistants) have had a series of meetings about various policies for the upcoming year. One thing is that we have to post our schedules and office hours on our doors, and the department secretary print out these schedules on 3x5 cards that are in the middle of big blue sheets of paper, so you have to cut your schedule out and hang it up. (Bear with me on this, it's amusing). So being inept grad students, none of us had scissors last year, so we all artfully tore our little schedule cards out and hung them and all was well. Today, our supervisor went on this ten-minute mini-lecture about how the torn edges of the schedule cards really bothered him last year, and if we all could please use scissors this time, he'd be a lot happier.
Ah, the delightful trivial details of an existence in higher education.
posted by Jen at 7:28 PM link/comments
One of the professors I work with just got back from Paris armed with a box of chocolates for our office. Working on websites while nibbling on Parisian chocolates ... My life could definitely be worse.
posted by Kate at 2:34 PM link/comments
IKEA shelf-painting is more fun than juggling fish in a barrel of monkeys. I also installed a metal shelf/spice rack/pot hook thingy in my kitchen last night, which involved finding a wall stud and using a level. I am a domestic diva. I rule.
posted by Kate at 10:25 AM link/comments
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
Looking for an effective, yet essentially useless, way to pass the time? Head here.
posted by Kate at 2:22 PM link/comments
Yeah, I survived the RV adventure. We took the tent, but the RV park was completely paved. The whole thing was asphalt. But we all had a good time, played cards into the wee hours of the morning and did some sightseeing, which included a tour of the old silver mine at Wallace, Idaho. Our tour guide, a third-generation miner well-versed in the lore of northwest mines, was really cool and funny until he went on this political rant against the EPA. Seems the EPA shut down all the smelting plants a while ago (you know, since they were MASSIVE polluters in a completely unsustainable business that was essentially stripping the mountains of their natural state). Seems our tour guide blamed the EPA for everything wrong with America these days, and he justified his stance by claiming that "everyone" in the Northwest agreed with him. Then I thumped my head against the mine wall a thousand times and wondered if he realized that had the EPA not stepped in and slapped the mining industry around a bit, the Northwest would now be a strip-mined barren wasteland shedding silt and toxins into the Pacific.
posted by Jen at 11:58 AM link/comments
Sunday, August 18, 2002
I hope you will survive/are surviving/ have survived the RV adventure, Jen. Went to IKEA in Pittsburgh yesterday, where I nearly had a religious experience. God bless Swedish furniture engineering. My largest (both financially and physically) was a shelving unit for my kitchen. I need said shelf because over the past 6 months or so, my dad's mother has been on a "make-sure-Kate-has-enough-to-eat" kick. This means that every time I go to my parents', my grandmother has prepared care packages for me. This is mostly fabulous (albeit a bit odd seeing as how I'm 26, but hey) except for the part where she's giving me canned goods at a rate much faster than I can consume them. The result of this is a grocery-store-display-like stack of canned foods taking up all my counter space, because there is simply no more room in my cabinets for anything. I'm sitting here now debating the merits of running out to buy paint for the shelf, because in true IKEA fashion, it's just untreated wood at the moment. The only thing holding me back is the giant cold sore I seem to have developed on my lower lip. I feel like a social pariah. "Hi. Welcome to Home Depot. Can I hel .... AIIIYEEEE! What is that thing on your FACE? Get AWAY from me!!!!!!!"
posted by Kate at 11:26 AM link/comments
Thursday, August 15, 2002
The trip to Couer D'Alene has morphed from a two-night stay into a three-night stay. Have bargained with Paul that we take our tent and strike out on our own one of those nights, in order to maintain sanity and just a shred of privacy. Seems the parents still want to view Paul as approximately 10 years old, at which age multiple nights in the RV would be downright fun, like a sleepover, but alas, youngest sons do indeed grow up, and we're pretty sure the novelty of the RV bed will wear off within a few hours.
posted by Jen at 12:35 PM link/comments
Wednesday, August 14, 2002
I have two weddings to go to in the next month. I was just sitting here viewing online registry lists filled with sleek, beautiful chromey kitchen gadgets and 300-thread-count egyptian cotton sheets. Suddenly I felt myself becoming very melancholy. After 20 minutes of internal lamentations and "oh-god-i'm-never-going-to-get-married" self-pity, it hit me. It's not a wedding I'm looking for. I just want someone to buy me a pot rack.
posted by Kate at 7:23 PM link/comments
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
So Paul's parents are in town with their giant RV. Apparently, towing that load over the various mountain passes resulted in the stellar gas mileage of four miles per gallon. We're headed up to Couer D'Alene for a two-night three-day all-expenses-paid odyssey with the aforementioned parents and the aforementioned RV, wherein Paul and I are required to sleep in the hide-a-bed in the RV, possibly with the family dog, a very old fellow (13 in dog years, 91 in human years) who seems slightly disconcerted that he now lives in a house on wheels.
posted by Jen at 12:31 PM link/comments
The other night, while at dinner in Myrtle Beach, my cousin dropped a piece of garlic bread, butter-side down, on the table. This prompted my brother, Ted, to ask me whether I'd heard his "buttered cat theory." His hypothesis goes like this ... "Since toast always falls butter-side down, and since cats always land on their feet, if one were to strap a piece of toast, butter-side-up, to the back of a cat, then toss the cat off a counter, the cat/toast combo's descent will come to an abrupt halt two feet above the ground, where it will hover ad infinitum in a state of quantum uncertainty." That kid slays me.
posted by Kate at 11:22 AM link/comments
Friday, August 09, 2002
"roof access" dilemma solved. Seems our neighbor noticed her roof access was ajar, so naturally she assumed that Paul and I had crawled through the attic to break into her apartment, look around, and steal nothing. Luckily, the landlord apparently retains the building's blueprints in his head at all times, so he pointed out that there is a firewall between each apartment, making a midnight scamper across the attic impossible, unless you have a jackhammer.
posted by Jen at 2:32 PM link/comments
Thursday, August 08, 2002
Sorry for the protracted silence, folks. I'm currently on vacation on the coast of South Carolina, so I'm not in my usual glued-to-the-computer mode. More like glued-to-the-margarita-pitcher mode. I'll be back on Monday. *pads off toward blender*
posted by Kate at 12:06 PM link/comments
Friday, August 02, 2002
Huh. Cabinets do Roam. The diagram was the best part. Applause.
While we were away, our landlord's wife left a message saying that she needed to check our "roof access" soon. Apparently we have a little ceiling door in our closet that is also, apparently, the only way to reach the roof. So Paul and I spent a good ten minutes trying to ascertain if they had already been there (we had no idea when she left the message, because the electricity had gone out, rendering all our messages ungrounded in space and time). Was it an emergency? Just a routine roof check? What's up with that? So we've called a couple times, but no one is around. The roof remains unchecked.
posted by Jen at 11:33 AM link/comments
The cabinet (see below) has been securely reattached to its proper wallspace, and all is once again well within my paradigm. The fix-it man was nice enough to leave screws all over the floor for me to step on.
posted by Kate at 9:54 AM link/comments
Thursday, August 01, 2002
Voice treatments. That explains a lot. She has the eeriest voice. When she was talking about melons, it sounded like she was talking about "mmmeallinz." I got home from work yesterday, arms laden with the groceries I'd just picked up, and set about the task of putting away the dishes I washed the night before. I turned around to put some bowls in the bowl/plate/coffee mug cabinet only to realize that the cabinet was no longer there. The following figure illustrates the usual arrangment of my kitchen: In the cabinet's place was a cabinet-shaped patch of yellowed paint from paintjobs past, a screw hole where once there was a cabinet-attaching screw, and a giant gouge in the wall. I looked around puzzled and found the cabinet resting neatly on the floor, flush against one of my kitchen counters, like so: I opened the cabinet to discover that all my dishes were still inside, all in their proper places. Whomever removed the cabinet from the wall must have done so with all the dishes inside (rendering the cabinet inhumanly heavy) and without managing to move or break a single item. I sat down for a while and came up with some possible explanations. First fearing that I had been victimized by some treacherous cabinet-moving criminal outfit, I walked around the apartment making sure expensive electronics were in their proper places. I also checked closets and under-furniture-spaces for scary knife-wielding men who might be considering the relative merits of slicing me to bits. Worst case scenario ruled out, I called the landlady, the reigning theory being that one of her toolbelt-clad henchmen had been up to something in my apartment. The landlady had no idea what I was talking about, and it quickly became clear that she thought I was completely crackers. On and on like this for 10 minutes, after which I called her head fix-it guy (equally befuddled, but promised to reinstall it within 24 hours). Next I called my dad. I didn't really expect him to solve the mystery, but I figured he might have some insight. After all, heavy things made of wood (like cabinetry) fall squarely into Dad Territory. Dad: Are you sure it didn't just fall off the wall? Finally, at 10:00, Melinda called to quell my insanity. Melinda has a key to my apartment. Melinda (who's a teacher and thusly has summers off work) came over earlier in the day to play with my computer. She looked up and noticed that the Wandering Cabinet was sticking out of the wall at a 45 degree angle. She quickly deduced that something was amiss. In order to get the cabinet off the wall, however, she had to unload the dishes. Then pull the cabinet down. Then move the cabinet. Then load all the dishes back into the cabinet. Which explains a lot. I thanked her for not allowing my semi-decent ceramic dinner plates to come crashing down atop cats. We then had a brief discussion entitled "When You Extract Cabinetry From Your Friend's Wall, Leave a Note of Explanation."
Her: Whaddya mean the cabinet moved?
Me: It's detatched from the wall and it's on the other side of the room.
Her: Well then it must have fell off the wall.
Me: No. There's no way that could have happened. (see figures 'a' and 'b', above)
Her: And your dishes are fine?
Me: Yes. Completely.
Her: Uhhhm. Wellll... Are you sure it couldn't have fallen off the wall?
Me: ARRRGGGGHHH!!!! Yeah, Dad. Clearly that's what happened. The cabinet yanked its own screws, shimmied down the wall, mosied on over to the other side of the kitchen, made a 90 degree turn, and backed itself up against the counter.
Dad: Maybe you have a ghost.
posted by Kate at 4:31 PM link/comments