Point of Reference

We've cooked a couple of meals in our kitchen now, and have made a few vital discoveries about the sink-stove-oven-fridge unit, and the kitchen in general:

1. The oven is too small for a standard baking sheet. We actually discovered this the day after we moved in, when we tried to cook a couple of frozen pizzas to feed the people helping us unpack, and found that we had to leave the open door propped open slightly to get the baking sheet inside. Black crust, anyone?

2. The stove has a lousy UI. The dials for the range are set in a straight horizontal line and thus offer no indication as to which dial corresponds to which burner; in order to use a particular burner, we have to test them all.

3. The above process is complicated by the fact that the front left burner doesn't seem to respond to any of the dials.

4. The front right burner does respond, but it appears to have only two temperatures: off, and bright orange.

5. The ice is already starting to accumulate in our defrosted-one-week-ago freezer.

The landlords have not yet responded to my requests for a new fridge and an electrician to deal with the melting chandelier. The super is great, but the management office is not promising.

Night spent working instead of sleeping + Early morning shower = Inspiration!

The move out was fairly smoothly--the boxes were (mostly) packed, the elevator was booked, and the truck proved to be big enough. The super even decided to drop the threatened charge for carpet cleaning.

The move in was less smooth.

Getting the keys proved to be simpler than I had feared, and the wait for them gave us a lovely four hour break which we spent wandering the Annex in our best geek style--comic book and music stores. Then came the actual arrival at the apartment, and the realization that moving in would involve hauling everything up to the second floor via a slightly rickety fire escape. That difficulty paled, however, next to what I discovered when I walked into my new apartment. The place was a complete disaster. There was garbage everywhere: Mail and assorted papers. Broken boards. A broken vacuum cleaner. Various pieces of furniture. Rings. Coins. TTC tokens. Panty hose. Bags of plastic bags shoved in the fireplace. A plate of chicken on a shelf. A pan of water in the sink. A candle that had been burned directly on the toilet, leaving dark blue wax caked to the toilet and splattered on the walls. Assorted cleaning supplies that as far as we could tell were just there for show. Bits of flotsam everywhere. And then, of course, there were the things that were missing, like the bar from the towel rack in the bathroom and the plate covers from the phone jacks. The worst part, however, was the smell. The place absolutely reeked of cat urine. thoughtfreely and I ended up cleaning the bedroom that smelled the least, and then piling all my stuff in there. Happily, when we spoke to the super the next day, he was quite reasonable in agreeing that we shouldn't have to clean it up, and promised to have it done by Saturday. NewRoommate has her old place until the 9th, so I've been staying at her place (while she's off moving a friend to Boston) and checking in periodically to watch the progress. Big props to thoughtfreely, stillvisions, and the entire H. family for their help with the move. I couldn't have done it without you.

I'll post before and after pictures of the new place once I dig out the cord for my digital camera.

I've discovered that the secret to being a good packer is not, as I've long thought, the construct accurate 3D mental models of space. The secret is having enough boxes, of adequate size. I broke down and bought some actual boxes rather than using what I could beg from family and stores, and packing is actually becoming almost easy. Amazing.

With only slightly more than a week to go, I decided to give up the search for the perfect apartment and go with one of my fall backs. It's a decent apartment on the whole: a two-bedroom apartment located in an old mansion that's been converted into a low rise building. The rent is more than Roommate-To-Be is paying now and less than I'm paying. It's a decent size, with good light, on-site laundry, and a shared balcony. The bedrooms are on opposite sides of the apartment rather than side-by-side, which offers a nice psychological separation (something we may need when we're sharing both an apartment and an office on campus). The best part is that it's in the Annex, only a five minute walk from my department. I think that will make a big difference in a lot of little ways. More home cooked meals because I'll be able to go home for supper and then back to the department to work; more brunches with the friends who also live in the area and aren't inclined to take a twenty-five minute hike before breakfast; and easier access to the athletic centre, which I'm going to need since I'm losing my fitness room.

On the downside, the apartment is a bit rundown, there's practically no storage space, and the kitchen appliances are all ancient. I'm hoping to finish up the paperwork tomorrow (fortunately they've decided we don't need anyone to co-sign after all--just letters from our banks and the department) and get a move-in date so that I can begin facing the fully justified mockery that will be heaped upon me by various rental agencies and movers at the thought of someone trying to arrange a move so close to the end of the month. (I would have done it earlier, but I was clinging to the hope that I'd be able to find a place that would let me move in before Sept. 1st, thus allowing me to move out and move in all in one day. In fact, I'm still clinging to that hope, because the current tenants are graduating students who will probably be gone before the last day of August.)

( Other loose ends for those who read my previous entries and wondered what happened. )

I'm marking the deferred exam of one poor student who apparently misread the question. On the one hand, I feel sorry for her, because I've been there...once...and I know how frustrating that is. On the other hand, she did a pretty lousy job of answering the part she did read correctly, so that tempers my sympathy quite a bit. Either way, she fails the question.

When I first starated marking, I perceived it through the lens of my own undergraduate experience. When I was an undergrad, any mark less than an A on anything (except for first year calculus tests) was a source of serious disappointment to me. (On calculus tests, I was ecstatic about a B-. I was even more ecstatic when I got a B+ in the course, a feat that required either a 90% on an exam where I don't think I answered 90% of the questions, or some serious mark boosting for the class.) As a result, I often felt horribly guilty about giving anyone a mark below an 80, unless they really, unclearly, undeniably deserved it. As in, their answer, assuming there was one, bore no resemblance to the material covered in class, and only a passing resemblance to the English language. It took a while for me to realize that for many students, a B or C is a perfectly respectable mark. The past three years has mostly cured me of this attitude, because I've seen the stuff that some students will try to pass in. Now, while I still feel slightly sorry for the students who write apologetic comments rather than answers on their exams, I feel no guilt in handing out low marks. They're almost always well-earned.

I am irritated with this year's 101 class. I am so very tired of students emailing me (or the professor) to ask why they got such a low participation mark (apart from the fact that they, you know, didn't participate, as they will freely admit). There are so many variations on the "I know i didn't speak much, but I didn't realize that would affect my mark so much" theme. People, it's called a participation mark for a reason. They wrote the final exam last night, so hopefully the email will soon taper off. And then you can all stop hearing me whine about it. (Or seeing my whine about it, but that doesn't sound quite right. English seems to be structured such that certain types of content are embedded in an assumption of oral transmission, despite at least a couple of centuries of exchanging gossip-filled letters.)

When I showed up to invigilate the exam last night, I found out that the professor had scheduled five TAs coming as well as himself to be there. That was six invigilators for 155 students. He eventually decided that it was too many and sent the two tutorial leaders home, keeping the marking TAs to hand back the papers. Sadly, the exam appears to have cost me an opportunity to get a really great looking apartment. I was scheduled to go see it tonight, but the owner called me this morning to say that she had already rented it out. I don't begrudge him asking us to come to the exam--it is part of my job--but it's a bit frustrating to show up and not be needed, and then to lose the apartment because of it.

On the topic of apartments, I've decided I need a second roommate. This would have two advantages: first, it would mean I could split the apartment hunting with someone else; and second, it would let me go look at some of these really great looking 3 and 4-bedroom apartments in the Annex and Roommate-To-Be and I can't afford on our own. I wonder who I can talk into moving? Because I really am getting desperate.

To complete the whining, I should really insert something here about high expectations, perfectionism and the difficulty of editing my own work, but that's too depressing. So instead I'll end by noting that semiotic_trader and a_just_society are arriving in town tomorrow, and I'm really looking forward to seeing them.

Roommate-to-be (who will need a new and shorter name soon) went to look at another apartment last night while I was in class. (Yes, that's all I think about these days. She leaves tomorrow until the end of the month, so it's getting kind of urgent that we find something.) She really liked the place--apart from the fact that what was billed as a two-bedroom is actually a one-bedroom + very-small-sunroom-that-can-kind-of-double-as-a bedroom--so I'm going to go see it tomorrow. My main concern, having not seen it, is that the landlords are apparently demanding a security deposit in addition to first and last month's rent. That's a lot of money for a couple of students to put out all at once, and since security deposits are illegal in Ontario, we shouldn't have to. I rather suspect, however, that if I bring up the illegality of their request, the situation will end with us not getting the apartment. After all, who wants tenants who know their rights?

Last night was my last tutorial for the course. All of the feedback I received was positive, probably because the ones who hated it were out the door as fast as possible. I was told by a few people that the tutorials were fun, and that my tutorial was the only one they talked i because it was the only one where they felt comfortable doing so. I didn't have a lot of people gushing about how much they learned, so perhaps I need to work on that for next year. That shouldn't be too hard--the more I do this, the more I realize how many students enter university lacking even basic skills, so there's lots to teach. One of my big goals for the next 101 course I TA for is to teach them the basics of how to critically analyze a piece of writing. I had them do it on their own as a bonus exercise, and many of the responses were awful.

I got a letter today from Revenue Canada telling me that I've been selected for random review. They're requesting that I send them my tuition credit forms. I think they might be suspicious of the amount of tuition I'm claiming (it's a bit high since I was paying for two programs simultaneously). I hope they'll accept the dual registrant explanation, or I'm going to owe them money.

I've learned that the department is determined to run the research practicum this fall, come hell, high water, or little pink bunny rabbits. They've now got the Graduate Chair teaching it, and they're still searching for a co-instructor. (I wish them the best of luck with that.) The point of the course (insofar as it has a point, something that I think that year's students weren't too sure about) is to develop a publishable paper by the end. I think I need a project.

I think I've finally figured out how to fit Putnam into the chapter without disrupting it. Hurray! And it only took a week of staring at it and about a dozen rewrites to get it right. I work at the pace of a snail sometimes, I do. But it flows now...I can just sense the words waiting to leap from my fingertips.

Four more hours of work and then a big birthday/farewell party for a friend. Now to concentrate on work and not on guessing whether tonight's crowd will tend towards casual or dressy...