TGTBATW #11

Standard mitraillette post... (which should really be mitrailleuse but doesn't mitraillette sound pertier?? of course the French word for "machine gun" should not, necessarily sound perty, so one of these days I'll have to default to the real version. Meanwhile I persist with mitraillette....)... i.e. glorified journaling with a few glimmers that might actually interest you buried in the muck, which just made me think of a cool Margaret Atwood story called "The Bog Man" (I think).

• People don't answer emails as well here as they did on the Plains. Seriously.
• And once in a while I catch myself being offended by someone not saying hello like they would have in the Heart of Dixie, among other things - these weird ultra-southern sensibilities surprise the hell out of me every time. Guess I got more southern-fried than I thought while I was down there. Not that it's all that far but truly if any of my Aub*rn friends spent a little while up here you'd see how it feels like you're pretty much in the North, aside from the twang and the cigarette smoke and the vinegar-based BBQ.
• The other day one of my 202 students missed the root for futur simple on mourir (to die - don't even ask me what he was trying to say - yikes - he really doesn't seem all that morbid!) and when I told him the correct form, he looked at me in amazement and quite sincerely asked, "How did you know mourir was an irregular?!" I looked at him with equal amazement at the question, and then the whole room, including him, erupted in laughter. "Oh, I don't know... 30 years of speaking French perhaps?" He realized what he had asked and shook his head. It was really funny altho perhaps you had to be there. It was the 4pm class and we're usually pretty slaphappy by 4h45 or so...
• My new mini-postit cube is stupid pastel Easter colors. But I had to stop buying the interesting color ones b/c they invariably have one (if not two) levels whose colors are too dark for notes to be legible unless you have a Sharpie handy... Which, of course, I do, but it's a pain in the cul reaching for the Sharpie every time you want to write a postit (for me this is somewhere around 23 times/day). Of course I could buy the individual postit pads but I like the cubes dammit!
• I made a curry last weekend and ate it for every meal from Sunday thru Weds. Except for breakfast when I grabbed a Hershey bar one day, a slice of banana bread another day (made it the same day as the curry - equally yummy even tho I used not to like banana bread! crazy!) and nothing the other times. I made brown rice in the microwave and stirred it into the curry. Quel yumminess. I might have to make another one soon. It was the vegetable curry from Anna Thomas' Vegetarian Epicure (Vol. I) but I added three frozen chicken fillets, too, b/c I'm afraid I'm not getting enough protein these days. I'm probably not getting enough Anything these days - eating like crap for the most part (which doubtless explains my having gained all the weight back - well I mean I'm about what I was when I left Aub*rn anyway - so only about 7 pounds I guess but still - the last couple of weeks have been better so lessened stress level has resulted in bingeing rather than not eating like I was before - but it's still all crap and I'm not riding my bike to school anymore since the time change and since I'm too wimpy due to the cold). Anyway all the more reason to make curry again and keep it around.
• My ears are killing me. I accidentally left my earphones on again while sitting here at the pooter. Whenever someone sends me something to watch or listen to online or if I start listening to music, whenever it stops and I haven't realized it I forget and keep the headphones on my head for ages until all of a sudden my ears start hurting abominably - all at once, too - no warning I swear. Like right now. At least it's the outsides - better than killing my eardrums. Can you get cauliflower ear from headphones? Do people still get that? Wrestlers used to get it I think. I also think I'm glad I never saw any. Can people still eat cauliflower with no emotional problems after someone in their family has had cauliflower ear? Do I need to get a life?
• I really am going to get crap evals from students this semester I bet. I've never ever ever EVER worried about evals before - even from classes I knew didn't go great - I still knew that something scoring a -10 on the Susan Perfectionism Scale still is worth a solid 6 on even the next most critical gauge. But this time, truly, some of this "teaching" hasn't even registered on SPS and would be in the negatives on almost anyone's list. You all have had the emotional fallout here and via email but what it's translated into in the 202 classroom is: 3 major components taking almost 2 weeks each to be graded, 6 major changes to dates and components on the syllabus (all to the students' advantage, really, and no changes to test dates in case anyone had thought to plan around them), repeatedly forgotten homework take-ups (3 years of doing all homework via Quia online workbooks at Aub*rn resulted in my only just the last two weeks or so remembering to ask for homeworks consistently), and general flibbertygibbetness in class. This latter never seems to bother them that much but I hate it as I know how big an effect it has in the lessons' having any cohesion whatsoever (usually the students can't tell this - in French most of it seems pretty non-cohesive to them anyway), plus it makes me more susceptible to our going off on tangents about wacky stuff in English at the beginning of class (again something they really don't mind and probably rather like) which results in less French exposure/practice time. Speaking of evals I better go activate them on Blackboard. Then I guess I'll get outta Dodge, since obviously I'm not going to do any more work this afternoon.
• John & Adrienne are coming to visit Sunday - cross your fingers the rain goes away by then and anyone who wants in on our incredibly yummy lunch, email ahead so I can make some extra bouffe and get your tails over/down/up here! We won't be having cauliflower.
• I seriously haven't had caffeine for hours.