November 2009

Why I secretly feel glad my job is ending…

November 19, 2009

Overjoyed, even. Today I started about 8:30 ayem and worked straight through until 6:30 p.m. without a break—well, with one break long enough to bolt down a piece of cheese slapped on some dry bread—typing the last stage of an index. My RA had compiled about half the book’s index; I took the rest. It [...]

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Where does the junk come from?

November 18, 2009

Does junk reproduce inside closets, the same way wire coat-hangers spawn in the dark? How does so much JUNK accumulate, after you think you’ve shoveled out every drawer, closet, and cabinet in the house? Where does this stuff come from? Well, some of it just blew in from the Great Desert University: a week or [...]

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Who’s that comin’ down the street? Someone who’s hungry!

November 17, 2009

Next time you walk up a busy sidewalk or drive down a crowded street, consider this: twelve in every one hundred people around you may be going hungry because of the recession. Yes. That would be three in every twenty-five of your fellow townspeople. That’s if you’re in one of America’s more privileged regions, somewhere [...]

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Coming down to the finish line…

November 16, 2009

No time to write this morning: overslept and so have only 45 minutes before the morning constitutional with La Maya. Then must get back to indexing medieval and Renaissance history. And in the “only” department: only about 130 pages left to go on that: then the task of typing it all up. This will be [...]

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Budget: Positive news

November 15, 2009

Well! Only six more days till the end of the current budget cycle, and an amazing $352 is left in the kitty. Not, we might add, through any extreme deprivation: I’ve gone out to eat with friends four times in the past three weeks; bought $38 worth of scrumptious wine at Costco (some of which [...]

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Wish I’d written that…

November 14, 2009

Among the dusty books and junk I brought home from the office is an anthology of essays that some publisher donated to me, in hopes that I would adopt it for one of the many classes I used to teach at the Great Desert University. In an idle moment yesterday, I happened to pick it [...]

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