Back at work again, and actually getting things done for a change. I looked at my email on Thursday night when I got home (shame on me) and reduced 87 emails to 42 (I don't need all the "HMS in the News" and server update notifications and "I'll be in late last Wednesday" emails). By the time I got in this morning, I only had 56. And most of them didn't count. That's an acceptable Monday.

Now that I've spent last week eating everything in sight and gotten gluttony out of my system, it's time to Do Something And Mean It about the way my pants don't fit. I've done it once before, which means I can do it, so I'm going to do it. It can't be that hard to stop eating leftover meeting food from meetings I wasn't at. I shouldn't have stopped walking home from work, either, so starting that again can't hurt in the long run. In the short run it will, because I still have one spot on my left big toe knuckle that's healing but isn't currently happy with me.

It is gorgeous out. I should open two or three windows when I get home and get the Hairy Beasts drunk on fresh air. They haven't had any since February, and they get silly when they aren't used to it. I have to open at least two windows so they can each sit in one. Lily crammed herself onto the windowsill between the back of the futon and the (closed) living room window yesterday morning, and I had to go disturb her just so I knew she wasn't stuck back there. She usually only does that when the window is open and she has the windowsill and all the space before the screen to lounge around in. She wasn't stuck, she just wanted to charge up all her little furry solar cells. I firmly believe the Hairy Beasts are solar-powered, and apparently while I was gone they ran down, because since I got back they've been in any sunspot they can find.

Hopefully now that the weather is getting better and I've had a vacation, it won't be such a chore going to chorus rehearsals. I kept getting to Wednesday and finding my heart wasn't in it. It'll be over after May 5, so I don't have to keep hauling my carcass to Cambridge for much longer. I don't know why my heart isn't in it this semester; it's not that Mendelssohn is boring (in fact, he's sneaky; he looks easy, but he isn't), but I just haven't felt like putting in the work of actually singing for either conductor and I don't know why not.

I have now been to my last Faculty Affairs office retreat, and I'm glad this was the last one, because it was nowhere near as useful as the others have been. If this is how they're going to go from now on, I won't miss them.

Last year somebody went to a leadership class and came back with a Communication Skills Diagnostic, which promptly got integrated into last year's retreat and was interesting as a one-off concept. This year they brought it back (which I think was unnecessary) and made it the focus of the retreat (which I think was thoroughly unnecessary), and it didn't do anything useful other than make us all argue about whether being Planners is a reflection of who we are, or a reflection of who we have to be in order to do our jobs. So we argued about that for a good chunk of the morning and didn't arrive at any useful conclusions, nor did we come up with any useful ways to apply the results to anything else. At least after that we all went to the annual summer outing at the Dean's house and there was way too much food and a pool to dip feet (and toddlers, of which there were five or six, and teenagers, of which there were four or five) in, and that was nice.

I may be being overly harsh on the retreat, since today started at 4:30 this morning when Lily suddenly developed a burning need to wake me up, get scritched, settle down for three minutes, jump off the bed, come back again five minutes later and start all over again. She nearly got flying lessons, except that I couldn't move that way because the left side of my neck and my left shoulder are locked up with muscle spasms. So they're sore, and they wake me up when I want to roll over, and then Lily won't let me go back to sleep, and then I get up and go off to the retreat and it takes me an hour and a quarter to get from Brighton to Cambridge. So I might have started off on the wrong foot just a bit.

I'm still happy with the weather. Right now I wish I could bottle the breeze and sell it in Mississippi or someplace where a cool breeze doesn't happen in the summer. (I'd say Saharan Africa, except I don't want to get into the whole question of taxes on international sales.) Failing that, I think I'll merely meander into the other room and enjoy the breeze in there.

At 1:00 it was tolerable outdoors as long as you didn't intend to move much. By 5:00 it was downright pleasant out. And here was me disbelieving the weather forecast that said it was going to be better today. Silly me.

It's ridiculously quiet in here, because I turned off the fans that had been on 24/7 for the last five days. There's a nice cool breeze coming in on the bedroom side of the apartment, so not only is it sleeping-under-the-sheet weather, I might even have to put a blanket on the bed.

Proving that life isn't all beer and skittles, the two weeks of vacation I was going to take in August have become three days between jobs. Oh well. At least I'm getting the three days, and they're the last three days of a week, so they're really five days. I hope in this case a change is as good as a rest, although I'm getting a little rest too. (Drat, shouldn't have used that word, now I really want to go to bed, but it's too early.)

I got past the interview, and was asked for references yesterday. That process has changed some since the last time I did it, and for once, having six supervisors in eight years came in useful. They wanted five references, at least three of whom had to be previous or current supervisors. So I gave them six references, five of whom were previous or current supervisors. (My TUSDM supervisor probably won't answer, because he didn't the last time I put him down as a reference. That's why I gave them six references. I hope this is like the faculty promotions process, in which you can give up on expecting a reply from one person as long as you have enough other replies to cover the requirements.)

It's a tad bit warm out, but it's better than yesterday. Yesterday even the breeze was hot, and it was like standing in front of a bus exhaust. (I ended up standing in front of a bus exhaust for a little while besides, and it was even hotter.) Today the breeze isn't quite as hot. The Hairy Beasts still think it's my fault, though, and between the daytime temperature and the thunderstorm last night, they spent quite a lot of their spare time glaring at me. I admit to not being sorry at all about the thunderstorm, because it cooled off into decent sleeping weather afterward. I hope it does that tonight too. Aside from liking sleep, I like thunderstorms. Snip hates them so much that she won't even be distracted by cheese. I'm considering getting her a thunder shirt.

Yes, voting is important. Yes, if you don't vote, you can't complain. But just once I'd like to be able to vote FOR somebody under the level of President. I seem to always have a choice between the guy who's been entrenched for 20-odd years and has nothing much to say except "don't vote for the other guy!" and the other guy, whose platform I don't like. Or, if it's a local election, I get a choice between the guy who's been entrenched for 20-odd years and has absolutely nothing to say, and the other guy I've never heard of.

Interview(s) (there were three of them) have happened. I met with a HR guy who I already knew, and the Director of Predoctoral Curriculum, and the Director of Education Services. I should hear in 2-3 weeks, but I think it went fairly well. And if I don't get the job, I've still got this one to fall back on. I can't leave this one until July 15 at the earliest anyway.

Unfortunately the interviews started at 1:00, and I was afraid to eat anything beforehand, so now it's almost 3:00 and I'm STARVING. And I know where they stash the potato chips next door. (OW. I seem to have tried to drive a shard of potato chip through my soft palate. I really don't recommend that. Of course, it's my own blasted fault for eating potato chips for lunch in the first place.)

There seems to be a big bright thing in the sky again. I missed the big bright thing in the sky. And I've got two whole days to do whatever I feel like doing with it, too. That is a lovely thought. I think the first thing I'll do, once I get done answering other people's phones, is take myself out for a drink somewhere.

Today should really be Friday. P&R week always does that to me; having an 11-hour work day on a Tuesday makes the rest of the week ridiculously long. (I completely forgot I was taking Monday off, until I told my boss that I would send a huge batch of emails on Monday and my coworker said "No you won't; you're not here on Monday!" I'm glad somebody is keeping track of these things.) I suppose Thursday is an acceptable day for it to be. It might be an interesting voice lesson tonight, though. And this being the third night in a row that she's going to get her dinner late, I suspect Lily might finally have something to say about it. One meow from her is the equivalent of a five-minute lecture from any other cat.

You know you're tired when you get home and find a package waiting for you, and can't be bothered to open it for two hours. Granted, I already knew what was in it because it was a Zappos box, but it's the principle of the thing. I still have the college-mailroom "I got a package!" mentality, since usually what I get in the mail is bills, or takeout menus from places I've never heard of. So when I can't be bothered to open a package for two hours after I get my hands on it, I'm beat. (But the dress sandals that were in it were precisely what I wanted, and I wore them all day yesterday without getting blisters. Clarks Wendy Land 7.5 W, for future reference.)

I've been drinking too much coffee lately. I can tell, because I'm tired of the flavor.

Sometimes if I'm having a less-than-ideal day, something completely random will snap me out of it. Today it was axolotls.

See, I got a promotion file for somebody who studies axolotls in order to try to figure out how exactly they regenerate limbs. One of the letters in the file referred to "the worldwide axolotl community" (in the context of it not being very large), and for some reason that phrase cracked me right the hell up. That is, until I got to the next sentence, which contained the phrase "technical questions of axolotl husbandry" and I lost it again to the point where I had to go get a drink of water.

Now "axolotl" is a pretty amusing word all by itself, but I have no idea why I found that letter so hysterically funny. A couple of hours later I still giggle every time I think about "axolotl husbandry".

My brain is a very strange place sometimes.

P&R yesterday. We had the conference room reserved all day since we have a morning meeting and an afternoon meeting. Because the room predates computers by quite a bit, it's not set up to deal with 25 laptops, so we have to construct a web of extension cords and power strips to keep the elderly laptops running for two hours. Somebody came into the room after the morning meeting, ripped up the whole web and dumped it in a corner (still plugged into itself and the wall outlets, mind you; there's some crawling around on the floor involved with plugging things in), and rearranged the tables. We now know that we can reset the room in fifteen minutes, but we shouldn't have had to. We're looking for the responsible party so we can have words with them. (The conference room does lock, but the Security office has the keys and won't let us borrow them. If we could lock it, we wouldn't have to put all the laptops away between meetings either.)

The conference room kerfuffle happened immediately after I went to Starbucks and watched somebody else with the same name walk off with my drink. By the time I realized where it had gone, she had started drinking it, so I really didn't want it back. I ended up with hers, which was at least in the same family as mine (the "cold coffee" family), but wasn't what I had wanted. First world problem, I know, but it mattered to me at the time.

Today I'm limping around acting geriatric, because yesterday I wore eight-hour shoes for eleven hours. My left foot is still not sure what I did to it. (It's not alone; I'm not sure what I did to it, either.) That's the problem with having P&R on Tuesday; I have to get up and go to work on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afterward. At least today I can wear sneakers with impunity, and I don't have to stand up more than I want to.

Lily appears to have decided she isn't done shedding yet. She stopped for a couple of weeks there and I thought she was done. I should know better. Fortunately she doesn't object to being brushed, as long as she doesn't get zapped when I do it. Beats me how I ended up with an ex-feral cat who likes having her nails clipped (but only with the human nail clippers; she hates the ones designed for cats) and lets me try to brush out mats before I resort to scissors. Snip, who likes people in general, thinks being groomed by humans is an assault on her dignity and will just barely permit herself to be brushed. Not sure how that works, since she likes to wash humans. Silly beast.

Since I can't get it from anywhere closer than Cambridge any more, I ordered a case of Granny Squibb's Mojito/Lime iced tea online. For some reason that made me feel like an idiot. If it were wine, I wouldn't have felt like an idiot. I wonder why that is? And is it related to how it seems socially acceptable to read in a coffee shop, but not in a pub? Hmm.

GAH, sick again. I woke up on Saturday morning with a brand new sore throat and cough, and yesterday I couldn't muster enough energy to take a shower until lunchtime. I did manage to do that, though, and eventually I re-potted my jade plants. That was kind of fun, actually. I like playing around with dirt, and I don't get a whole lot of chances to do that these days.

I think jade plants are related to the hydra, because I started with seven pots and ended up with nine. Granted, that's because I kept every living offshoot of the mostly-dead stalk, and if they die I'll be back to six pots. Which wouldn't be a disaster, since I am now out of simultaneously plant-friendly and cat-unfriendly surfaces. (I realize that in saying this, I have just guaranteed that all of the pots of offshoots will grow like gangbusters, and next spring I'll end up with about twelve pots and nowhere to put them.)

Having successfully dealt with the jade plants, I semi-successfully made coconut curry for lunch this week. It looks vaguely dreadful because all of the potatoes got overcooked and some of them disintegrated and made the sauce a little too thick, but it tastes pretty good. And hopefully between the garlic and what all is in curry powder, it will give this particular cold something to think about.

If being pissed off about being sick actually helped me to stop being sick, I would be better already. I think I caught an Irish cold in March and an American one just now. Either way, I can't afford to keep being sick, especially since I have to haul my carcass out of bed for P&R tomorrow morning. This is never fun, but I suspect that tomorrow it's going to be even less fun than usual.

I hate that I start dreading Tuesday morning P&R on Sunday night. Mostly it's because even with hauling my carcass out of bed before 6:00 and taking a three-minute shower before running out the door to get on the earliest possible bus, there's still never quite enough time for two of us to get the power strips and 20 or so laptops set up before 8:00. And there's nothing we can do the night before to make the morning any easier. If I ran the universe, there either wouldn't be a morning meeting, or it would start at 9:00. But I don't run the universe, so I start dreading Tuesday morning on Sunday night.

At least I have next Monday to look forward to. I'm taking the day off, because the marathon screws up the bus routes to such an extent that I had to walk two miles to get home last year. (Normally a two-mile walk isn't an issue, but I wasn't planning on it and thus wasn't wearing shoes to walk that far in. OW.) This year I decided to avoid the whole thing, use up a personal day, and stay home. Or at least stay away from the marathon route.

Today started off as the very definition of "inauspicious". For the last two nights I've had what isn't quite insomnia, but is a complete lack of wanting to sleep until about 1:30 in the morning. Which is fine on Saturday night, but not so much on Sunday night. And last night the invisible ice pick in my left ankle wouldn't stay in my ankle, and kept moving up and down my calf and keeping me aware of it. On top of that, I had a major set of disturbing dreams when I finally did get to sleep.

This morning I woke up with the ice pick transferred from my left ankle to my left pectoral muscle. Explain me that, I dare you. And then since the one P&R meeting we're having tomorrow is of course the morning one, I had to remember to take out the trash today, and rolled my already-unhappy ankle and fell down a couple of stairs with the trash bag. (Fortunately I landed on my ass, which is one of the more padded spots on my person.) So I limped off to the bus stop and missed the bus I usually take by less than a minute. (That's actually not a bad thing, because that's the bus with the screaming driver, for whom I was truly not in the mood at that point.) So I got on the next bus, and proceeded to go to work with the ice pick still in the pectoral muscle and a more unhappy ankle.

Upon arriving at work it turned out that the Board of Registration came back to bite me, so I had to fix that. Then we had a staff meeting (which included breakfast, and by "breakfast" this time we meant "eggs and french toast and fruit and croissants", so that was good too), and I had another meeting immediately after that. At least it took a good chunk out of the morning.

Here it is almost 2:00 already, and I hope the fact that I'm exhausted means I won't be up until 1:30 in the morning again. At least I'm getting things done in spite of being exhausted. The shorter the list gets before Thursday, the better off I'll be when I get back to it.