Sam

Here are a couple of pictures from Sam's fishing trip with his Dad last weekend. They went to Wyoming.

transparency

Sometimes things just are what they are. I love this response from our very opaque college finance person:

Dear _________ ,

When ________ says 2% in base funds, that means that the 2% has to come from our base funds.

Thanks,
_______

one other detail

PS - the time she actually came to my office two years ago and we arranged for her to visit a class, at a certain point during the conversation she whipped out a camera and took my picture. To my sputtering, "what are you doing" she responded brightly, "I am an artist, I collect pictures of people." FREAK.

creepy woman

So there is this Russian woman in the community who has been a presence for the last couple of years. She calls periodically to leave messages about her art shows -- really terrible drawings of Russian peasant woman and so on. When this first started she also bent my ear about her passionate interest in how Russian is taught in America (always understand this as code for "I want you to hire me to teach Russian in your department"). I (very generously I thought) told her that she was welcome to come and observe one class session of mine and we set it all up. She didn't show up. Since then just the occasional phone message about her 'exhibits'. There was such a call a couple of weeks ago - on a weekend to my office so I got a voice mail. It doesn't occur to me to call her back since the call seemed purely informative and I have no interest in getting friendly with her. Well, yesterday I come in to the office and there is another Saturday message from her. This time it is long, rambling and includes such choice phrases as "well, you are arrogant" but she goes on to say all Americans are. Then there is rambling about how she speaks two languages and while she knows that she has "heavy Russian accent" in English, "it is so funny that all Americans have accents, and they don't even know it." Clearly a nutcase. I saved the message and played it for a couple of colleagues who confirmed that it really was weird and inappropriate. Well, today she called again. In addition to all the previous content there is now extensive ranting about how she is a real Russian and I should not be duped by those Jews and Ukrainians who speak Russian but hate Russia. CREEPY. And I'm not even a Jew or a Ukrainian...Will call the woman on campus who deals with weird, disturbing people in the post Virgina Tech world that we live in.

addendum

Just talked to my brother who always has apt phraseology for administrative situations. I told him of our delightful staff exodus and he said, "Yes, when an albatross slinks off, the step is lighter and the world is brighter." Couldn't have said it better myself...

mass exodus

Some of you may have listened to my whine about some problem staff members; indeed managing administrative staff has been another steep learning curve in this whole chair job. Last year was spent positioning for one person's removal, but luckily, towards the end of the process, said person, got another job and gave notice. Oh happy day. We had also begun several weeks ago working on the ouster of someone else and shortly after the first announcement, this person too gave two weeks notice. Not a little rejoicing about that too. Over the summer our incredibly competent undergraduate advisor had left to go to law school and we had already replaced her with someone who is working out extremely well. Today, the second to last member of the original office team also gave notice. We're beginning to think we are either doing something very wrong (or very right). We are now left with 2 of 5, but 2 incredibly skilled people. Fernando and I will be answering phones and making photocopies as of Friday.... but with smiles on our faces.