Today I spent most of the day on campus. I had told a colleague I'd guest-lecture for her, and I needed to prep for a meeting coming up tomorrow, and I needed to return a set of author proofs for a recently accepted manuscript.
Did I tell you that I had to move out of my office? The building is being renovated, which requires asbestos abatement, which meant that on top of the usual end-of-the-semester stuff (which was especially abundant in this particular semester), I was packing and purging the space where I'd worked for 8 years.
I have a temporary office in an adjacent building, but it has no air conditioning and I am shoehorned into a small space partially vacated by a person with a nine-month contract. So I've mostly been working at home.
But I needed to review a big data file created in SPSS, which I don't have on my personal laptop, and I needed to be in the next building over anyway to visit my colleague's class. Ergo, a day on campus.
I enjoy guest-lecturing. I've given this particular guest lecture a bunch of times, so the content fits well in its allotted time, the jokes are road-tested, and I feel pretty confident about what the students already know and what they need to learn.
After class I needed to stop at the library to pick up a book on hold, and in the browsing section they had a new Nick Hornby book: Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius. I checked it out, because how could I leave it on the shelf? I am not entirely sure I find the pairing plausible, but I suppose we'll see.
In the afternoon I spent a couple of pleasant hours unraveling the mysteries of my dataset. I figured out a major reason why my colleague was not finding the associations we expected to find (surprise disappearance of a huge chunk of the dataset! whoops! but a fixable flavor of whoops, thankfully).
I also met with a colleague who is teaching a tough summer class and needed a little brainstorming session. I enjoy thinking about how to help students who are struggling, but I have to say it is so much less stressful when it's not my class they're struggling in.
After we wrapped up our talk I submitted my author proofs (all easy queries, thankfully) and walked home through a beautiful summer evening to eat a dinner prepared by my 18yo. It was a good day.
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