Snowshoe Saturday

Today the sun shone and Craig and i did a gorgeous snowshoe hike up in Big Cottonwood Canyon. I can't usually get him to accompany me, but today he did and it was lovely. Except I have sunburned cheeks. It is hard to remember that despite the nippiness, the high altitude, sunshine and snow means you should wear sunscreen.

Dreaming of sabbatical

Which is silly, because there are two more years as chair before my glorious, wonderful full year off at full pay. But I am already planning and dreaming about spending a couple of months here:



Or here:



Or here:




So what is this all about? I am a card carrying extrovert and I find myself looking at bleak, remote getaways where I can be all by myself. Hmmmmm.

Saw this on a colleague's door and couldn't resist

DID I MISS ANYTHING?
Tom Wayman
From: The Astonishing Weight of the Dead. Vancouver: Polestar, 1994.

Question frequently asked by
students after missing a class

Nothing. When we realized you weren't here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 per cent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I'm about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 per cent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring this good news to all people
on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human existence
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren't here

Let's talk about money

The current topic in my Language in Society class is language change. It is a fun chapter where we talk about, among other things, new words and new meanings of existing words. Had a great example in the midst of an otherwise grim budget meeting. This is the time of year when we department chairs submit our budget requests to our dean as well as provide an accounting of where things currently stand. This makes it sound like I would actually be able to do this, which is ridiculous. Our fantastic departmental financial person is the one who produces the numbers, the spreadsheets, asks the hard questions and generally gets Fernando and me into shape on these matters. Monday morning we had our audience with the college financial person. I have now had quite a few meetings with him and the combination of his non-native English speaking-ness and his general financial-ese means we all usually leave scratching our head and carrying a piece of paper on which he has done endless diagrams that I suppose represent cash flow and so on. So there we are on Monday morning and we are talking about the latest money minding strategy that people smarter than I have come up with (but can I just say, that fast and loose mortgage thing hasn't worked out well elsewhere) which is to "mortgage" faculty who are approaching but still hopefully still somewhat distant from retirement. The idea being that they won't leave before things improve and we can "unmortgage" them and retain our ability to replace them when they do go. So Fred says: "Now I'm not a native speaker of English, but the linguists have told me I have stop using that word, because it is related to the word for 'death' historically and that just isn't a way to be talking about people." But never fear, he had come up with a replacement. A phrase so banal, so euphemistic, so deliciously inane, that I can't stop using it. A little background on budget speak. Sometimes, when times are really good, the university is able to take some of our soft cash flow and "harden" it, i.e. turn it into perpetual state funding no longer subject the ups and downs of each financial year. So, Fred announces that he is now only going to "talk about reverse hardening."
I also know that I have some serious Craig rubbed off on me, because I found myself asking if viagra could help with that.

gloomy times

Chatting in the mail room with one of my colleagues in Spanish trying to decide whose study abroad program is a tougher sell at the moment. Hers goes to Chile while we travel through Moscow. I see your earthquake and I raise you a suicide bomb attack.