Let the general whining about being too busy to post commence: I’ve been too busy to post today.

But the whining is too boring even to me, and so I’ll just call a halt to it there.

Except to say that one of the things that I was also too busy to do was to take the twenty seconds necessary to plug my camera into the computer in the office and download this weekend’s pictures, so as to properly post once I got a little less busy. And while the camera’s home with me, the cable’s in the office. So no pictures tonight either.

I’ll hold the pictures for a later date, but give you only a tantalizing preview-in-text: light fixtures. A hot water heater. Paved walkways. And a driveway. And the absence of that construction-fencing surrounding the building. And the presence of actual locks on my doors. And railings on my balconies.

So there’s been substantive progress, but there’s a piece of condo news that far outstrips any of the above. I was unable to get ahold of the director of real property here at the college today (have I mentioned before that we have an astonishing college mortgage program? If not—well, we do. And that makes the director of real property my lender, which is why I need to talk to her about what follows. But was unable to, because [see whining above]) in order to discuss this with her, so I’m not at all sure what’s going to happen. But the builder on these condos is apparently looking to get as many of them off of their inventory by the end of the year as possible, I suppose so they don’t have to pay taxes on them. So they’re trying to close every sale that can possibly be closed by December 30. But because the properties won’t actually be inhabitable at that point—the final inspections won’t have happened yet, and some work may not yet be done—what they’re asking for is to have the closing at the end of December, and then actually turn over the keys when everything is done.

What makes this even remotely interesting to me is the following: a flat $1000 for the general inconvenience, plus $150 per day for each day between the closing and the turning over of the keys.

We’ll see what happens. Whether my lender objects to the whole handing over a huge pile of cash without the thing it’s being handed over for actually being ready scenario. But it’s intriguing to me, and not least because the builder actually thinks that it’s financially in their best interests to hand me this cash rather than keep the condo on their books. Which means it can really only be so far away from completion.

Mileage for week:  16

Number of run days:  4

Long run for week:  5

Aches, pains, complaints:  None, really.  A bit tired, but that’s mostly the travel, and the overeating.  It’s astonishing how much difference lugging an extra three pounds over five miles can make.  All else is well, though.  So far, so good.

Despite last year’s suspicion that this year’s Thanksgiving would be spent with my family, at the usual New Jersey Italian feast, things changed.  My mother decided to stay in Louisiana; my sister decided to join her there.  And the Navy decided that they really needed R. again, right through the holiday season.  So I displayed adaptability and came to DC (or, more accurately, NoVa) for turkey day.

Alas, unlike last year’s London jaunt, this time out, I brought big stacks of work with me.  The bulk of the work on the anthology project I’ve been embroiled in since the beginning of the summer is due December 1, and I’m within spitting distance of actually making the deadline, if I press really really hard in the home stretch.  Unfortunately, pressing hard in the homestretch (and traveling to the ASA, and writing the paper that I delivered at the ASA) has meant, for the last few weeks, an utter slackitude toward my students’ work; I managed, just before I left town for the break, to get back the drafts of one class’s term papers, but only because I absolutely had to.  I’ve still got a massive stack of writing from my other class, which I’m hoping that I might be able to read on the plane home.

The point I wanted to make in that paragraph was this:  I’ve been working pretty close to non-stop during this break.  Yesterday was lovely; we took it easy, did some work, and celebrated our thankfulness with a wonderful Korean dinner.  The holiday’s officially over, however—R. had to go in to work today, and I’m about to get back at it myself.  Six anthology entries and a big stack of student writing remain between me and a clear conscience.  I hope that proper posting will resume imminently.

I walked down to check on the condo’s progress yesterday afternoon, and stumbled across a colleague, who came to check the place out with me. This was the first time that anyone other than R. has seen the joint, so I was pleased when I discovered that there was actually something to show off: the kitchen!

I found myself amazed, once again, by that whole optical illusion thing whereby a space that is completely devoid of furnishings looks smaller than one that’s actually got stuff in it; I’d been a little concerned over the last few weeks that the kitchen was seeming smaller than I remembered, but now that the cabinets are in, it actually seems much bigger.

This is also the first time I’ve gotten to see the cabinets and the countertops together, and though the granite is massively dusty here, you can nonetheless get a sense of how the whole thing will look.

The odd sheet of paper in the middle of the countertop is covering my lovely sink, which has been installed. (As have my toilets, and my showerheads, and my bathroom cabinets. I held off on taking pictures of those, not out of any sense of decorum, but only because the bathroom counters and sinks weren’t in yet, and I wanted to wait for those.)

My colleague was a bit surprised by the whole return to the kitchen-in-the-middle-of-the-living-area thing that the loft’s layout produces, but I have to say I’m just ecstatic about that—especially given the way that the fun part of any party always seems to segregate itself in the kitchen. Now, instead, one room, and we’re all in it.

You’ll notice that there’s a big empty spot on the far right-hand side of the kitchen, where it looks like a cabinet’s missing. Indeed it is; apparently there was an installation mishap with one cabinet, which sits broken in the living room. I assume they’re waiting for a replacement.

Anyhow, between the installed kitchen and the sense that my colleague has that the place looks like it’ll be ready in about a month—a month!—I’m beside myself with excitement. The baseboards have been installed, which I would have thought came after the flooring, but whatever. What remains, at this point, as far as I can tell, are electrical outlets and switches, some light fixtures, the bathroom sinks and counters, plumbing for the kitchen sink, the flooring, appliances, railings for the balconies, and a good coat of paint. I imagine there’s probably more, but I’m not thinking of it this morning.

Instead, this morning, I’m typing with numb fingers, as it’s positively freezing here—and by freezing, of course, I mean freezing for Southern California, where it’s gotten down to about 40 the last two nights. Saturday night, it poured, and so yesterday, looking out from my soon-to-be living room balcony, the mountains were simply glorious.

Alas, the glory didn’t quite get captured as fully as I’d like; I’m still wrestling with the new camera a bit. It’s got this Automatic White Balance “feature,” which makes many pictures taken in the glary, hazy SoCal light appear overexposed and washed-out. So I’m experimenting with stepping down the exposure, but… well, I’m experimenting.

Now back to grading.

Mileage for week:  15

Number of run days:  4

Long run for week:  4

Aches, pains, complaints:  A little tired, but that’s got far less to do with the running than it does with the insanity of this week’s work schedule.  The running, in fact, has been lovely—a little hard to get started, and a little sluggish through the first mile, but strong and comfortable after that.  The pace of training steps up quickly from here, however, so I’m feeling a bit cautious about my optimism.

As if enough of my life weren’t already spent googling, there now comes—and I kid you not—Google Scholar, wherein one can ostensibly search for scholarly literature, including “peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.”

Alas, the thought may in fact be better than the execution, at least in my field; a little auto-googling resulted in no hits that actually bear any reference to me.  But I’m giving it time.

So I walk out of the building tonight on my way home to find that the intersection I have to walk through at College and Sixth is cordoned off, and surrounded by fire trucks and cops and campus safety and all kinds of other nervous looking guys.  And a campus safety guy spots me and tells me that the intersection is closed, so I ask him how I can get around, and he gives me some basic directions.  And then tells me that there’s been a toxic chemical spill, and that the hazmat folks have been called out, but that no one’s hurt, and they’re cleaning it up.

So I’m a bit curious about what the deal is, right, because I’m unavoidably thinking airborne toxic event, and so I do some trolling and come up with info from a student here, posted on a campus LJ community:

A student in one of the labs opened a refrigerator door only to have a bottle fall out and spill about 200mL of liquid on the floor. The substance that was spilled is beta-mercaptoethanol (BME). Hazard info can be found here. BME interferes with disulfide bonds and so denatures most proteins. That means that if you splash some on your skin, inhale the vapors, or get either liquid or vapor in your eyes, it can cause severe irritation. This is probably the reason the student was taken to the hospital - to monitor them for respiratory distress.

BME is NOT a carcinogen. It’s easily airborne and is a sulfur compound, so it stinks like none other. The evacuation of the science building complexes is due to airborne contamination - although the BME spill occurred in Seaver South, the fumes quickly spread as far as the second floor of Seaver North, and could easily drift across the street to Millikan and SACS.

Pomona has called in its contracted HazMat team to clean up the spill. They hope to have the buildings open by tomorrow morning, and perhaps as early as midnight tonight.

And.  Um.  Excuse me?  Because, yeah, Millikan and SACS are right there across College Avenue from Seaver South, sure.  But, hello—Crookshank Hall?  Us with the books and the papers?  Across the other street from Seaver?  The narrower street?  We don’t rate evacuation?

I knew there was a vast gulf between the sciences and the humanities, but I had no idea that chemical fumes were incapable of wafting across.

Via George (and, as he points out, a host of sources before him), the Guardian’s article, Cracks in the Ivory Towers, on problems in the academy.  As George points out, though the study being reported on is focused on the UK, it bears significant comparison with problems in the profession here in the US.  Among the more interesting, and more sadly familiar parts of the article:

Kinman and Jones polled 1,100 academics and academic-related staff at 99 universities. Nearly half say they are constantly under strain, over two-thirds (69%) say that they find their work stressful and 78% believe that the status of their profession is in decline. Seventy-two per cent of academics find that their first thought every morning is about work.

The list goes on and gets worse. Half show borderline levels of psychological distress. Eight out of 10 say that as the result of that stress they are tired even when they’ve slept; over half say they experience headaches and 41% have trouble sleeping. One in five report dizziness, heart pounding or skin rashes, which they put down to stress.

The study’s authors do point out a bright side:  “University workers do feel they have a choice in what they do at work and how they do it. Some 81% agreed with a statement that said they had the possibility to ‘learn new things’ in their jobs.” And I’ll back up the idea that the kinds of autonomy we in colleges and universities have are crucial; the freedom to do my job the way I want to do it is part of what drove me into academia in the first place.  But I’d like to re-examine that “possibility to ‘learn new things’” that we ostensibly have in our jobs—what percentage of that 81% might say that the requirement that we never cease learning new things adds to the stress that seems to be causing us so much physical and psychic pain?

Me, I sleep like a rock (thank you, Sleepytime Extra, now with Valerian!), and I try to burn off as much tension as I can by running.  But I spend my days hovering somewhere between a little tired and bone-crushingly exhausted, I feel I’m always fending off the potential for sliding into depression, I’ve got frequent palpitations from my stupid floppy valve, and I’m still being treated for an increasingly bad case of acne at thirty-fucking-seven years of age.  And while I don’t have a desire for the marriage-and-children scenario, the profession has demanded things of me that has made such a scenario, had I desired it, difficult if not wholly untenable.

Don’t get me wrong:  I love my job.  I love my students.  Life here is more good than not.  But there are aspects of this profession that are much more problematic than many realize, aspects that seem to be causing many of us serious pain.

And now back to my regularly scheduled grading.

Yes, that’s right: the cabinets are in!

In a big pile in the living room, that is:

There also begin to be doors, much like this one, which leads to the master bedroom:

What you can’t quite tell from these pictures is that the subflooring is now complete; we’ve gone from walking on plywood to walking on what’s supposed to be plywood topped by a layer of some kind of tightly coiled plastic insulation-type layer, topped by a layer of concrete. I can only vouch for the concrete.

Other small things have happened, none of which really show up here terribly well, so I’ll content myself with one last detail; it may well be that my garage is at this moment—“this moment” being a week ago Sunday—the cleanest it will ever be:

Next edition: a kitchen under construction. I hope.

Actual marathon training begins tomorrow; this week was a so-called “base” week, making sure that all was in shape for the gradually intensifying training of the next 16 weeks.  I’m hoping that reporting in here will keep me honest and on-track, but we’ll see:

Mileage for week:  14

Number of run days:  4

Long run for week:  4

Aches, pains, complaints:  none.

(Okay, one complaint:  jet-lag.  Waking up this morning at 5.30 am EST was excruciating, and I’ve spent the entire day sense struggling against falling asleep.  But I’ll be safely seated on my plane in an hour, and I’ll be able to give up the struggle then.)