This has been one of those weeks that wouldn't end. It was the first week of classes, so I had students piling into my office to discuss the schedule changes I'd hoped they'd make over break at the start of the week, a new course and a course with a new book to prep for, meeting back to back MWF, an AI case (academic integrity - never fun), and on Thursday, my pre-tenure review dossier was due. It came in at 199 pages. That's NOT to say that I wrote 199 pages all at once, since quite a bit of it was just compiling stuff I had, but still. On Tuesday, I discovered that somehow about half (i.e. 100 pages) of it was having some weird template issue, and so about every third line was either a different size or a different font. Which doesn't sound like it'd be hard to fix, until you understand that the packet included things like exams with funky characters and stuff, so it wasn't like I could just select all and set it all to the same font and size. Thank Dog I had a back-up from Friday. Ultimately, it was a big cut-and-paste extravaganza, as I debated whether or not to fix the content or to fix the formatting.
Yes, I know Word has a "compare" function that would have made it easy to find two days of changes. Unfortunately, Word won't compare master documents. I could have compared subdocuments, but only about 20% of my text was actually in subdocuments. Note to self: either (a) never use subdocuments again (thus not having a master), or (b) keep absolutely all of the text within the subdocuments.
Anyway, I got it done, I got it printed, I got it hole punched, collated, typed tabs and got them into dividers, and dropped it on my chair's chair at 6pm on Thursday (no one having said anything about WHEN on Thursday it was due), with some pithy note about leaving her a little light reading...
The only thing that I don't like about the finished document is that I accidentally set the margins to mirror, thinking I was going to print it 2-sided, and then I decided that might annoy the promotion committee, so I didn't, but it means my left margin is different on half of the pages. It's only a 1/4 inch, and we just got a department-wide email asking us to reduce copying, so I just left it.
I should have given back some graded pharm chem homeworks today, but I told them that I'd had a 200 page (ok, I exaggerated) document due the day before, and that they'd just have to understand. Now I have two sets of pharm chem and a set of organic chem homework to grade this weekend. At least its the first week, so my lab section hasn't turned in any work, or else I'd have even more work piled up.
Pharm chem seems to be going well - I'm enjoying having a class full of people who are (at least mostly) there specifically because they thought it might be interesting.
We went for dinner on campus tonight. Dalton ate ice cream and part of an apple, and two bites of potato-cheese soup. (Actually, I'm not sure it was two bites - it might have been one.) There's a reason we don't go there very often - ever since he figured out they have ice cream and that you can just walk up to the freezer and get it, it's been all over.
The snow was sticky enough that I could actually do arms. Dalton demanded snow bears. These are on the opposite side of the house from the snowmen so we have to walk from one side to the other to look out the windows at the snow things outside.
So we had some snow fall today. It was five or so inches and right around freezing which made it perfect for making snowmen. Both Dalton and Cathy hadn't had the experience of making snowmen before and a good time was had by all. I personally had remembered snow being heavier. I haven't been working out so it's not that I'm pumped up.
It is a great deal of fun to watch Dalton progress in various skills. Something I recently realized is that he has become quite adept at putting block castles together. The building on the left was pretty much his creation.
I've never really gotten into the Black Friday thing. This Christmas, however, there was something I wanted that was going on deep discount (a little cheaper than ebay) at Michael's.
