The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

Not being at work since last Wednesday was a wonderful idea.

Thursday was Vet Day, and I actually managed to catch Lily relatively quickly and shut her in the bathroom ten minutes before the vet got there. I met him on the porch so he wouldn't ring the doorbell and scare everybody including me. The doorbell is extremely loud. Anyway, Lily decided to be stoic about the whole thing, and got her blood pressure taken and blood drawn and got tartar knocked off upper molars on both sides, and it only cost me $500.

Friday I got the results of Lily's blood tests, and she's the poster child for well-controlled feline hyperthyroidism, so we're all good until November when it's time for rabies shots for both Hairy Beasts. I eventually hauled myself out of my chair around lunchtime and wandered off to the aquarium, which was a better time than I was expecting. After I had had sufficient aquarium time, I wandered off to the Boston Public Market and replaced the Japanese knotweed honey I brought to Noank at one point and which never came home again. Since I hadn't hydrated myself adequately and it was HUMID, I was in pretty sorry shape by the end of that, so I hauled myself home and ingested a quart of seltzer.

Saturday was the usual errands, and I bought six and a half pounds of cherries because they went down to $2.99 from $4.99. Today's Tuesday and I have two pounds left.

Sunday I didn't do a whole hell of a lot, except laundry, and I decided to do something about my craving for Vietnamese summer rolls and couldn't get them because the place in the Super 88 food court was closed for a family wedding. I could have gone to Le's, but Le's likes to stuff their rolls with mostly lettuce and the Super 88 place likes to stuff theirs with mostly noodles. I prefer mostly noodles. I settled for saag paneer from the Indian place instead, and it was good, but it wasn't what I wanted.

Monday I went back to the Super 88 and got the summer rolls, and came home and did some more embroidering. It's going to take three weeks to get a thousand stitches done, which is absurd, but the weather hasn't been cooperating and I don't like sweating all over the project.

Tomorrow when I have to be a Responsible Adult again, I have to reschedule my July massage appointment, and sign myself up to bring something to the chorus executive committee potluck dinner and meeting on the 19th, and schedule an eye exam, and go back to work and concentrate on getting the self-study actually assembled and out the door to be printed.

Next Monday is the drop-dead date for final revisions to all the supporting documents for Standard 2. I expect not to be having very much fun that week, especially since I also have to go to the chorus committee dinner and meeting. I would very much like to be going to a Bastille Day party in Bow, NH the Saturday after the not-fun week, but I'd have to rent a car, and I'm not in any mental condition to be driving anywhere after a week like that.

Just because life is like that, the weekend after the Tuesday-Thursday accreditation site visit in October, my cousin who currently lives in Florida is getting married in Falmouth. I'm trying to decide how bad it looks if I don't go, because the site visit will be three 8:30 - 7:30 days and I'm not all that close to this cousin in the first place. But I probably should go, because even though we're not all that close, I got a Save the Date announcement so they're going to invite me anyway. And Falmouth isn't impossible to get to from here.

My birthday is next Monday. I have no idea what I'm going to do about that. What I want to do about that involves a largish ribeye steak, probably from Mooo, but that's not the sort of place you go in sneakers. I do not like my physical self very much these days, to the point where getting dressed up feels like putting lipstick on a pig, and I don't see the point. I know perfectly well what I have to do about that, but all my will power lately is going to mental self-care because accreditation prep sucks diseased donkeys, and I can't seem to get into the whole physical self-care thing again. This being my 42nd birthday, maybe the answer to life, the universe, and everything will appear after we send the self-study out. Who knows?

The weather is lovely again, having been shoot-me-now hot Sunday through Tuesday. It was 85 in the living room at 9:30 on Tuesday night and I couldn't get any cooler air indoors for some reason, even though it was cooler outdoors.

Last night was excellent sleeping weather, and I went and ruined it by having a frustration dream. I've been having a lot of those lately, and they all involve shouting at somebody (usually somebody who I would really like to shout at, but I can't in real life; the two I remember are Trump and, last night, Dad). I've also bitten through my night guard sometime in the last couple of weeks. I do not shout at anybody when I'm awake, but maybe I should start. Or maybe I should go somewhere way out in the back of beyond and shout at trees or something.

For lack of shouting at things, I bought myself a ticket to the Boston Pops 25th anniversary gospel concert on Saturday. One of my coworkers sings with them, and I could use a dose of raise-the-roof music (especially if I'm not singing it myself, which is work). Besides, I haven't been to Symphony Hall in something like 15 years, so I'm probably overdue.

I'm taking the last two days of June off, and am considering going and finding out what the heck is in Providence other than at least one tattoo shop and the train station. I just have to get through tomorrow, all of next week, and three days of the week after next. I hope I can actually manage that.

The short version is, oof. That's all. Just oof.

The long version is, Standard 2 is now 300 pages long and has an introduction and tables and diagrams. And I have rewritten bits of the introduction and at least six of the 40 sections, and reformatted at least 32 of the 40 sections, and I still have a lot of stuff to stick in there (some of which is data I have more of than I actually want, so I have to prune it, and some of which is data I won't get until after graduation next week, and some of which is data I have, but it won't fit in the table allotted for it, so I have to figure out how to include it all and make it legible at the same time).

When I'm not doing that, I'm working on data for Table 2, which is Institutional Outcomes Assessment and has nothing to do with Standard 2. Table 2 is now 20 pages long. Fortunately I'm not responsible for all of it, but what I am responsible for is looking through six years of surveys and writing down results from certain questions, and then taking the average and hoping it comes out better than the benchmark from seven years ago.

When I'm not doing anything related to accreditation, I'm making a curriculum map for a six-year combined MD/DMD program, which is actually kind of fun. And I get the Dimly Aware award for looking at the narrative that turned into the map and saying "Wait a minute, this says they'll be going straight from second-year foundational dental courses to seeing dental patients two years later after a lot of medical school rotations. They can't see dental patients without at least taking Diagnosis and Treatment Planning and Treatment of Active Disease, can they?" No, they can't, so now they have to. I feel better. (I do feel sorry for the student who got her DMD in 2015 and is now finishing her first year of medical school, though. It's going to take her eight years to get both degrees.)

When I'm not doing any of the above, I'm messing around with journal articles. If I had known the deadline for the third set of revisions to the JDE article was in July, I wouldn't have been so worried about it. Oh well, it's off my conscience now anyway and I really hope the reviewers are done picking nits, because ain't nobody got time for a fourth round of revisions. The other article, for Innovations in Teaching and Training International, needs to be reformatted (why can't we all agree on one format for citations, and why do I always have to change the one we started with to something else?) before I can submit it.

It got HOT and the cats are, as usual, convinced it was my idea and would like me to take it back. It will be better tomorrow; I just want to know if we're really going to have a thunderstorm (I hope so), and if so, when. Hopefully sometime when I'm indoors, and preferably after Snip has eaten her dinner. If not, either I have to wait until half an hour after the thunder is done with, or I have to sit in the bathroom with her and play London Bridge so she can hide under my legs while she eats.

I'm glad tomorrow is Friday. I wish I didn't have two separate accreditation-related meetings at 10:00 and noon tomorrow, though. It's going to be a long morning, and I'm still sick and tired of meeting-food sandwiches. I could get around that by bringing my own sandwich, I suppose.

I was having an interesting dream this morning, half thriller and half sort of romantic comedy. It had something to do with somebody being poisoned (but not killed) by cocaine in food at a resort in Santo Domingo, and the cocaine coming from Egypt smuggled in ancient Egyptian artifacts. The woman (not me) who was investigating this was friends with the guy who got poisoned, and had a couple of other ditzy female friends who did things like get tied up in some sort of resistance bands while trying to do yoga with them. I was observing all of this, but not actually involved in it, and of course I woke up before I found out who the poisoner was. The whole thing might have made a decent novella if (a) I knew how it ended and (b) it had made any sense whatsoever. As a dream, it was entertaining, though.

Today isn't really my favorite day, because people keep asking me for things they could do themselves if they bothered to look for the one piece of information they don't have. That, however, is work, and it's easier to ask me for six things than it is to do one thing.

At least this morning the sidewalks were dry pavement all the way from home to the bus stop. I don't know if it was salt, sublimation, people with ice axes, or some of each, but whatever it was, that was nice. The bus stop is still in the street because there's a three-foot-wide plow berm between the sidewalk and the street, but it's nice that I can get to the appropriate corner without ice skates.

I managed not to go out for a Large Slab of Dead Cow the last time I wanted one, and I probably won't do it this time either, but right now a ribeye sounds like an excellent idea. I suppose I could have gone to Bartley's last night after the chorus committee meeting and had a Large Slab of Ground-Up Cow instead, but I wanted to get home because my brain had quit working. Taking minutes for nearly two hours of half of the committee convincing the other half to spend $2000 on advertising, in order to maybe make money on ticket sales, does that. Besides, it was snot-freezing weather, so the sooner I got the standing around waiting for buses over with, the better. I like Arctic air a lot more when it stays in the Arctic where it belongs.

The regiment has been investing in things that don't involve a million calories. So now I own the complete Fawlty Towers, which I should have bought years ago, and the CD of our last chorus concert. I like to listen to those because I never know how the pieces sound to the audience; all I hear is the alto section and whichever other section(s) I'm taking entrances or starting notes from. When I'm singing this stuff, I'm too busy to appreciate the whole thing. But I have to say we knocked The Golden Harp out of the park, pretty much. I still don't like Fern Hill (it was written in 1964 and the accompaniment has almost nothing to do with what the chorus is doing). The Harvest of a Quiet Eye was OK, but it's more "soloists accompanied by chorus and orchestra" and I'm not in the mood for that (although the baritone soloist was excellent). I'm also trying to adjust my listening out of "Pay attention and get this right" and into "I like this piece of music".

It's going to be snot-freezing weather again this weekend and snow tomorrow and Tuesday. I disapprove of both of those ideas, because even if it's only March, it's March and I'm sick of the sweatshirt-and-wool-socks routine. And I really need to buy a lot of kitty litter, and I'm going to have to do it tonight, because doing it in the snow is Right Out.

I may need to take a mental health day tomorrow, because I can't come up with a good reason why today isn't Friday. It's even been a quiet week, but I'm done dealing with specific people and office machinery (I really wish I weren't the copier expert again; every job I've had, I've sat near the copier, and become the unjamming expert by proximity). Not that not being at work tomorrow would fix much of anything, but I might have a more acceptable level of cope on Monday.

Welcome to New England! Black ice on Wednesday morning, 50 degrees on Wednesday afternoon, 10 inches of snow on Thursday and 10 degrees on Friday morning.

I managed not to wipe out on the black ice, but I did cross the street on my hands and knees. It just wasn't going to work unless I lowered my center of gravity. It was nice to step onto the bus and not have to worry about the floor being slippery.

Yesterday I was going to shovel at 2:00, and then it got dark and proceeded to snow HARD. So I waited until dinnertime, and cleared off the sidewalk and the plow berm (which, surprisingly, wasn't that bad yet). And when I wasn't shoveling, I did some embroidery and rotted my brain on various electronic devices and provided lap space for various cats.

What I should have done, of course, is get a jump on the weekend chores and do the laundry and clean the bathroom and wash the floors. But of course I didn't do any of that. Maybe that's why I had another frustration dream. New one, this time: I was trying to get across to somebody that I don't disappear when I'm talking to them and a specific third person joins the conversation. Somewhere in there was a bottle of hot sauce with a label on the bottom that said "Scientology supports this hot sauce." I don't know why Scientology, or why hot sauce (or why I was on a charter bus with the hot sauce). Maybe as long as my brain was bringing up things I don't like, it threw those in.

I'm not trying hard enough to get back into my size 8 pants. Every time I think I'm doing well, my willpower explodes and I end up buying and inhaling cheese ends or pork rinds or something. As much as I'd like to blame it on reading bad news every time I read the news, I can't; it's plain old lack of willpower on my part. Helped along by the fact that there's usually leftover meeting food lately. There are too many damn meetings going on around here.

I think I want to go to Seattle on vacation, whenever vacation ends up being. Sometime in April, maybe. It depends on CODA. But I don't need a passport to go to Seattle and I haven't been there since 1984. I know that because my sister got a souvenir shirt that said "I spent my 1984 summer vacation in Washington". I wonder if they still make those shirts?

Today's excitement consists of writing a business plan for a two-year MMSc in Dental Education program. Because we're not doing enough things around here right now with the DMD curriculum change and the accreditation self-study, of course. (Don't mind me, I'm grumpy, because I probably know more about curriculum development and dental education research than the prospective students do. But I don't have $100K lying around so I can take the two years to get the piece of paper that says so.)

Speaking of expensive pieces of paper, I suppose I ought to finish filling out all the legal documents and then pay the $1000 to get them witnessed and printed and filed and all that. Might as well get all the depressing stuff over with while it's still dark out before I leave work (which is depressing too). And speaking of depressing, I'm sick of remembering that I don't have a W2 yet so I can't get my taxes done and get on with the business of ignoring tax preparation ads until April.

At least today it might still be warmish out when I leave work. If I ran the universe, urban snow would stick around for precisely long enough to give everybody one day off to build snowmen on school playgrounds with. And then it would be 65 and sunny for a week. I think I miss the sun more than I hate the snow, actually. It seems to me like it hasn't been sunny very much lately.

One of the things I could do to maybe help with the lack of sunshine is stop reading depressing books. I got through Time's Arrow by Martin Amis, but only because it was short. I'm giving up on Until I Find You, which is by John Irving (I always want to say John Updike, but I'm always wrong) and which I also got from the FB book exchange. I kind of liked the first hundred pages or so, but after that, suspending disbelief got to be too much work and it's an 800-page book. I guess I should stick my head in Brookline Booksmith and invest in Babylon's Ashes, which I've been simultaneously looking forward to and putting off buying because I don't want a largish hardcover falling on my face when I fall asleep reading it. The Instant Gratification Monster is getting loud, though, so I think I'm not actually going to wait for the paperback.

Went climbing for the first time in roughly eight years, on Saturday morning. Then took my watch to be repaired (dropped it and shattered the crystal), got my hairs cut, went grocery shopping, went home, and fell over. I knew there was going to be pain, and I wanted to get all the moving I needed to do done before I couldn't move very much. On Sunday I couldn't bend my left elbow for more than about a minute before it started screaming at me, and my upper arms (though thankfully not my actual shoulders) were most displeased. I did laundry anyway, because clean underwear is a good idea. But I had to come back upstairs and whimper at Snip for a minute. She was mightily unimpressed. I got to the top of a bouldering route, at least. But the walls at Brooklyn Boulders are taller than the ones I'm used to, and I can't bring myself to believe in the auto-belays from that high up. And I don't have the strength to get all the way up anyway; bouldering routes are short.

Karma smacked me upside the head this morning, because yesterday I watched the Bills/Steelers game get snowed on in Buffalo and was glad I didn't have to deal with snow. This morning it was snowing when I got up, so I dressed for snow, and then stood in the rain at the bus stop for 15 minutes. My supposedly waterproof winter coat leaks at the shoulders. That'll teach me to be smug.

As usual, the fact that I work at a dental school is not keeping me from being surrounded by sugar at this time of year. There's a half sheet cake (chocolate) and a very large pie (undetermined) around the corner from me. At least those are slightly harder to eat than the usual five pounds of shortbread. And the faculty member who just came back from Istanbul came back with baklava. And one of my other coworkers made biscotti. And the lunch meeting today involved leftover chocolate trifle.

I have to figure out traveling for Christmas. Some of me doesn't wanna do it at all, but most of me does. Rib roast is not to be sneezed at, and after Dad's heart surgery extravaganza two years ago, I'll take family when I can get it.

Aside from the heart attack I got on Tuesday because FedEx declined to deliver my guaranteed-Tuesday-morning delivery to Indianapolis until Wednesday morning, it's been a fairly quiet week. I don't even really remember Monday, which means nothing exploded. Tuesday was heart attack day, and yesterday the weather was so nice that I nearly skipped chorus rehearsal in favor of staying outdoors in the evening air. But I didn't; I talked myself into going to rehearsal.

I'm in the middle of trying not to buy a Scantron machine. We used to do 200-question exams as prep for the Part 2 board exams, but the timing changed and we were giving the prep exam after the board exam deadline had already passed, so we stopped. A lot of the course directors are still doing paper exams, and some of them are still doing bubble-sheet exams, but we have to send the bubble sheets to BU to be scanned, and that doesn't make sense any more either. So I'm trying to either get the course directors to quit with the bubble sheets, or get the school to invest in Akindi, which is a program that seems to allow you to make up, print out, and scan your own bubble sheets and then makes reports out of the results. Yes please? The only question is, how much is it going to cost us, and can it fit in the budget? (OK, two questions. The second one is, can I talk the course directors out of using bubble sheets at all by next year?)

Normally, anything on Facebook that ends in a hashtag or depends on repostings is met with my own private circular file. I made an exception for a book exchange, though, and sent Captains Courageous off to somebody in Easthampton this afternoon, and reposted the original post. The skeptical side of me thinks this is just a massive address collection scheme and I'm going to get massive amounts of spam and junk mail. We'll see if I ever get a book myself.

I get an assistant in November. I'm trying to resist the urge to make a list of everything I hate doing and handing it all off to her. "Feeding meetings" is getting right up to the top of that list, though, especially because of the cafeteria strike. I'm tired of pizza and sandwiches, and I'm not sure where to get decent soup and salad except Milk Street, which we can't afford to make a habit of.

Yep. Ran right out of cope earlier this week, and got deservedly chewed out for it because of the way I did it. Better now, though. Still trying to take a Friday off sometime this month, but not really getting anywhere with that because things keep getting scheduled on Fridays. (This Friday, I get to interview the people who have been foolish enough to apply for a job that reports to me.) Given the weather forecast, up to the neck in the ocean is about the only acceptable place to be this weekend.

Having been to the dentist (a highly complex process that involves going downstairs and turning left), I have the most boring odontogram ever, and I can keep telling the incoming students that I have never had a filling. They tend to be mightily impressed when I tell them that.

I'm mightily impressed that it's only almost intolerably humid out. I wouldn't want to walk five miles in it, but walking up the street to get lunch wasn't as bad as I thought. Or maybe I was just happy to be done getting my teeth cleaned.