Snippets
October 12th 2007
Ok I simply must write. There is so much going on these days that capturing at least some of the minutiae is in order. I always like reading back a few years later and seeing these really mundane little slice-of-life moments that usually get lost in favour of recording ‘meaningful’ events. All events are meaningful, I say!
I had a rather interesting day on Thursday.
A leg fell off one of the teaching skeletons (poor Raj) while the prof was demonstrating – so that is on my slate for Monday. A repair job! I am excited! I have hired a really great student to be my workstudy student this year as well, so I need to get some projects sorted out for her. I am realising more and more that it’s harder to do all this supervisory stuff because I have to not only prep things and plan them, but do it enough in advance that I have lead time. Creating lead time where there is always a backlog is really hard. Oh well — I can say that this job is now all about changing and developing new skills at least.
I also have a high school student doing co-op for me. I got her to go through an old smelly plywood shipping box with rope handles that had been languishing in the Orange Hall. We rescued it in an emergency reno call (I must write about that day soon). It appeared to be full of geological samples from White River, mostly Taconite. Pretty, but showing effects of years of mouse and insect activity!
I was marking at my desk and my student popped into my office, wringing her latex-clad hands (I am not mean enough to make her go through that bare-handed) and asked “um….what do I do with a dead mouse?”. Turns out a little baby mouse had met a sad end at the bottom of the box, entombed in a cist grave of shredded paper grocery bags and taconite flakes. My student also had a pseudoscorpion come out of the box out at her. She had killed it before I told her it was harmless. I disposed of the mouse for her and she soldiered on! Dead mice and insects, oh my!
I have to come up with something nicer for her to do next week.
I will take some pictures tomorrow – we have sidewalks, a new front door glass panel, and a graded back yard…very exciting!