This last week was my spring break, and for the first time in many years I left town for part of it. Back in the fall I was asked to serve as a program reviewer for another university: they offered to pay me to come out and evaluate the quality and sustainability of their grad program, which is located in an area where I have good friends. Sure, I said, I can do that.
I left on time change Sunday and drove to my friend Becky's house. We have an ongoing daily text conversation about everything under the sun, but we hadn't seen each other in person since the summer of 2021. I'd never met her youngest; I hadn't seen her husband in-- hm, probably 20 years. We went to a concert that night, I got to tour her office the next morning, and then I headed out after that.
The weather was worse than I expected, and I hate driving in bad weather. The sky dropped so much slush on the front of my little rental car that its cruise control cut out because the radar system couldn't function. But I kept plugging and made it to the other side of the state, where I had lunch with friend #2. After one more hour of icky driving, I got to the city where I'd be staying.
I had expected the university to put me up in a hotel that was clean but un-fancy, so I was pretty surprised by the reality: mammoth chandeliers, high ceilings, much swankier than my usual hotel choices. I had a little time to review my materials for the next day before I headed out to dinner with my friends who live in the city. We had the nicest dinner together -- we talked and laughed and talked some more.
The next morning I met my co-reviewer and we headed into two days of meetings. I wasn't expecting the job to be so interesting, and it was fun to be looking at the program as an outsider, with the freedom to recommend anything at all. They built in time for us to start drafting our report, which we appreciated. I had an uneventful trip back on Wednesday evening.
Spring break is always filled with grading, and I hadn't really done the math on how many hours of grading I would be trying to squish into Thursday and Friday. I wound up working a fair amount yesterday and I'm still not finished. It will be okay, though; the grading always gets done. Spring break is usually a lonely week for me -- usually I am on my own doing the least pleasant parts of my job while the kids are in school -- but this one was the opposite of lonely.
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