Point of Reference

Winter is slowly returning here, after the unseasonably warm weather we returned to last week. We got a little snow on Sunday, and a little more yesterday--enough to lightly coat the ground, but not enough to create huge piles of snow and slush to wade through. The perfect amount, in other words. January and February are always the time when I really feel the length of winter; there's nothing to do but hunker down against the cold and endure. But it's not too bad right now.

I decided to take on a second TA job this term. I got through last term on just one, but only because I had savings from the previous year, and those are pretty well depleted. The new job is for a Soc of Work course, which is an area I've never studied. I'll have to do a bit of catching up, but hopefully it will be interesting. I've been asked to attend class since I don't know the field, but that will have to wait another week as this week and next, I'm guest lecturing a course on the mass media at the Scarborough campus. That particular course has proven to be a bit of a bad luck course--the original instructor went on sick leave at the beginning of the term, and the replacement instructor had to head home to Europe because of a death in the family. Happily, my only bad luck has been not being able to show my slides during the first lecture because I couldn't get the key to open the computer cabinet. (Happily, I don't believe in bad luck, and I do believe in coincidence.)

I may also have some RA work coming my way this term; it doesn't pay as well as TA work, but the experience can be useful. I may get a chance to edit a book coming from conference proceedings, but that isn't certain yet. I may also get to help with another book, though nothing that would get my name on it. It will be a bit more of a challenge to carve out space to work on my dissertation and my own publications, but maybe being busy will force me to be more efficient, something I usually only accomplish in short spurts, right before deadlines.

The cat was left alone for most of the weekend, as I was at my boyfriend's and my roommate was visiting her sister. Wow, is she making me pay for it! Roommate's not back yet, so it's just me and the cat. Every waking moment for the past two days that hasn't been spent paying attention to to the cat has been spent with her trying to get my attention. Usually by knocking things over and generally being a pest. I've picked up more garbage cans over the past two days than I care to think about. I like having a people-oriented cat, but gah. Oh well, at least she's been letting me sleep in the morning.

And what am I doing up so late, you ask? Marking papers, of course. I really don't think this batch of papers are as good as last year's, but that may be my memory playing tricks on me. Nonetheless, I wish someone would explain to these students the difference between a topic and an argument.

27 essays down, 40 to go. Well, in theory, if you look at the class list. If I count the ones I actually have in my possesion, there are only 29 left. These essays were due six days ago, with a penalty of 10% per day (excluding weekends). Admittedly, there were a couple of extensions granted for illness, and I haven't checked the assignment box since late Thursday, but...there are either a lot of people who dropped the course recently, or a lot of people who are going to do very badly on this paper.

Oh--last night's chicken turned out wonderfully. I used the brown at high temperature, then cook at moderate temperature method and stuffed the cavity full of lemon and onions and garlic and fresh rosemary. And put butter seasoned with garlic and rosemary and sage under the skin, and a bit of olive oil on the skin to help with the browning. Not healthy, but very tasty. The gravy, sadly, did not turn out so well, so my goal for next time will be to work on that. And test the slow roast method. In the meantime, B's fridge is full of rich gold chicken stock, and I'll be heading back there later this week for some homemade chicken noodle soup.

I was invigilating a first year exam today. It was in one of those lecture halls that have tightly packed seats with little pull up desks, and so we made the students leave their bags at the front of the room. We ran into problems when two students protested that they didn't want to leave their laptops at the front of the room. Eventually they did, and we promised to keep an eye on them, and nothing bad happened. But I can see this becoming an increasing problem as more and more students bring laptops to school, and I'm not sure what to do about it.