iBummed

Hello there, blog. Sorry I’ve been neglecting you of late. Didn’t really mean to, but things have just been busy of late. So let me catch you up on things.

My boss is back. He’s been off on a six month sabbatical and returned last week. Oddly enough, for most of the time he’s been away, I could see a healthy portion of the top of my desk. In the past few days he’s dropped so much of his work on my desk that I’m just now able to see small areas of wood grain. And now that he’s back it seems that whatever joy and happiness existed around here over the past half year has disappeared overnight. My boss is a nice guy, but it’s a bit of a pisser watching someone else get paid an exorbitant amount of money while others do his job.

On the plus side, though, I’m glad I got most of the planning for our spring course schedule out of the way before he came back. I’m sure most students think that departments arbitrarily create class schedules, but there is a rhyme and reason when creating them. We try to offer a certain number of classes, usually about four, in each area of concentration in our major. More often than not what our faculty want to teach is in line with what we need to offer in any given semester, but sometimes it’s a bitch trying to get folks to plug gaps in the schedule. In addition, we try to limit the number of basic introductory courses to just a handful each year. These courses are the gateway to everything else, and limiting them helps manage the demand on the upper level courses, which are already straining under the ever increasing number of majors (which has grown roughly 250% in the past few years) in our department. But I think between increasing support from further up the administrative food chain on campus, as well as me working directly with our advising office to create a schedule that meets demand as best as possible, we’re in good shape for the upcoming academic year…so long as nobody quits or my boss doesn’t start meddling with the schedules.

The Live Earth concerts for raising awareness of global warming were this past weekend. Like most folks, I didn’t watch them. Well, I should say I saw about 8 seconds of one of the concerts. Saw enough to catch the message that we should all change our lightbulbs to newer florescent ones. That’s what I’ve been doing at home the past month: spending a small fortune changing out all of our conventional bulbs for florescent ones. I’m wondering about the wisdom of these bulbs. Oh, sure, they’re supposed to save electricity over the long haul, but these bulbs contain mercury, which is not environmentally friendly. They work differently, taking half a second to actually come on and then about ten seconds to brighten up. The biggest difference is in the amount of heat the bulbs throw off. In our master bathroom the light fixture over the sink takes eight bulbs. There are darkened spots over the fixture where heat from the old bulbs had discolored the ceiling, and the bulbs would make the bathroom uncomfortable warm, especially during the summer. That’s not the case with the new florescent bulbs, and it makes getting ready for work in the morning easier as I’m not breaking into a sweat right after taking a shower. Down side to these bulbs is that they really highlight the increasing number of grey hairs on my head. Crap.