But in retrospect, it confirms my suspicions that Her Deanship has known all along that our office was on its way out. That she resisted my efforts to recruit new client journals when we took on a third RA told me, months ago, that she didn’t want to promise our services to some faculty member (and the professional association behind his or her journal) only to yank the rug out. What I don’t understand is why they’ve strung us along for this long.

Yeah, I’ve clued her in. She and I need to talk next week…but it’s also possible they changed her so they could cut a contract that will keep her on until December. If the deans are planning another bloodletting of classified staff, that might actually protect her until the end of the year.

Fact is, she earns more waiting tables at Applebee’s than GDU pays her to apply her master’s degree and considerable skills to our job. However, she’d like to retire from the waitstaff career.

With any luck, this will motivate her to press harder on marketing our little editing biz. We just got another assignment from our medico-client, and I’m hoping he will get us in the door with the teaching hospitals around here.

Has anyone told her? You should just tell her to call and check her exemption status. Anyway, I have great faith in both you and your plan, but still this sucks.

From what my friend said, I gather the community colleges here are also taking some hits, but nothing like the universities. In the first place, the right-wing legislature is hostile to universities, and in the second, the Maricopa County Community Colleges are financially strong because the metropolitan area has so few public institutions of higher education. The district is huge, second in size only to Dade County’s, and it hosts a very large student body, much larger than Arizona State University’s gargantuan population. This probably is true elsewhere.

Water is a huge issue. Why some developments pass the “hundred-year supply” rule here defies comprehension, and even the major cities, extravagantly bejeweled with golf courses and ersatz lakes, will eventually run up against the fact that a finite water supply cannot serve infinite population growth.

As for gasoline and urban sprawl, don’t get me started! It’s as though our City Fathers and Mothers studied Los Angeles, identified everything that went wrong with that city, and decided to clone those things here.

On the other hand, he also thinks that no one in the Southwest metro areas will be worried about income issues for very long–that soon water and fuel will become overriding concerns.

You can check out his blog–if you want to scare yourself further–at http://blog.ltc.arizona.edu/naturebatslast.