I got nothing more to say but this.  It seems to be coming a few months later than I expected, but it’s on the internets, so it must be real.  Right?

Something very weird is afoot.  I’ve been daypopped for no reason that I can discern.  Through some weird glitch in the matrix, I own spots 9-16 out of the top 40, and number 14, the one of the batch that isn’t one of my pages, is referenced by a link from this page.  And it’s not even like the posts in question are terribly interesting.

I’m beginning to think that I’m producing some kind of weird electrical charge that’s blowing transformers and creating a false magnetic north in the net.  Something like this, perhaps.

I was awakened just before 1.00 this morning by one heck of a thunderstorm.

In Southern California.

In September.

And it’s still raining.

Here’s one way to get out of the office before dark:  have the power go out.  The Claremont Colleges are on one of those reduced-cost power dealies (I think that’s the technical term), whereby we have to shut off the power in the event of rolling blackouts, but pay a vastly reduced price per kilowatt-hour when the juice is flowing.  Since the colleges got all generator’d up, this has not been a problem; as I noted this time last week, we generally move pretty seamlessly to backup power, and so don’t even notice the downtime.

Today, not so much.  Apparently something exploded at approximately 2.30 this afternoon, a few blocks down from my office building, near where a bunch of construction is being done.  As of 6.30 this evening, when it got too dim to continue working in the office, the power had not yet been restored.

So the good news is I’m home early.  And I got to walk home through one of the weirdest SoCal September evenings I’ve ever seen:  the sky was positively yellow, with dark clouds up above, and the sunset striking them from underneath.  The only reasons I know they were clouds and not, for instance, the smoke that has blanketed this area during the last two years at this time, is that there were these weird drops of water falling from them at random intervals (not many, but some, nonetheless), and a ginormous rainbow arrayed against them.  Aside from that, the skies were positively apocalyptic.

Now that I think about it, though, this is the second Monday in a row that some fluke has kicked out the power in this area.  And weren’t there those completely unexpected rolling blackouts just a couple of weeks before that?  Is there something going on here that we ought to know about?

Every semester for the last two and a half years, I’ve arranged things such that my scheduled commitments for the week all fall between Monday and Wednesday.  The good news in this is that generally speaking, by Wednesday at 5.00 pm, I’m free to operate by weekend guidelines (that is, appointment-free:  working with the door closed, if in the office; working at home, if I feel like it; working in the most comfortable clothes possible, in any case).  It would be hard to call the Thursday-to-Sunday stretch a “long weekend,” given that I usually take no more than one day of it “off,” and that one’s only spent not-working in order to take care of all the details of my non-work life that are utterly neglected six of seven days out of the week.  Nonetheless, the absence of scheduled commitments during those four days creates a feeling of freedom that, if illusory, is nonetheless damned nice.*

That’s the up side.  The down side is that Monday, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks.  The intensity of the Monday-to-Wednesday stretch is such that I’m left feeling pretty battered by Wednesday at 5.00 pm, and it all begins with Monday.  I get whatever work done in the morning I can manage, zip to the gym if there’s an hour to spare, run to the noon department meeting, rush off to teach my two afternoon classes, and conclude with a just shy of two-hour long committee meeting.  After which I usually end up in the office, cleaning up details and answering neglected email, until nearly 8.00 pm.  The result is that I wake up every Monday morning absolutely dreading what’s ahead.

I’m not sure that the alternative—spreading the commitments out over five days—would be any better.  But I have fantasies of this leisured professorial life I keep hearing about, and wish somebody could help me figure out how to get it.

—

*Not to mention that it’s the only tenable way I’ve found to maintain a long-distance relationship.  But that’s another story.

Things that have been accomplished:

– Writing the first draft of a position planning document.
– Catching up on reading and commenting on a backlog of student writing.
– Re-reading the volume of poems for one of tomorrow’s classes.
– Washing, drying, and folding nearly a month’s worth of laundry.
– Responding to a big pile of email, and initiating another big pile.
– Beginning the review of the copyedited manuscript of my soon-to-be book.
– Making a big pot of something I can bear to eat multiple times over the course of the rest of the week.

Things that have not yet been accomplished:

– Re-reading the essays assigned for tomorrow’s other class.
– Re-reading the essays assigned for Tuesday’s class.
– Reading anything at all assigned for Wednesday’s classes.
– Finishing the review of the copyedited mansuscript.
– Writing the lecture I’m giving at the end of the month.
– Writing the big strategic planning proposal I’ve been asked for.
– Revising and submitting the position planning document.
– Drafting the next stage of the curriculum revision document.
– Copyediting material for my volunteer gig.
– Grocery shopping.
– Exercising.
– Breathing calmly and evenly like a person convinced she’s got enough hours in the day to accomplish all she needs.

In the category of things I failed to blog yesterday:  Bill Germano, vice-president and publishing director at Routledge, has apparently been forced out by a restructuring of the press’s British parent company, Taylor & Francis.

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After what feels like days, my head is at last clearing, and I have my sights set on a productive weekend.  Today, however, began with (a) me sleeping in, still recovering from the skull-splitting of the day before, and (b) an early-morning meeting, which, ick.  But I’ve just gotten my hair cut and colored for the first time in months, and I’m about to do some work I’ve been putting off for what feels like just as long, so life is on the upswing.

Not to mention that I’ve got tickets to see these guys, and also these, tomorrow night.  So I’m feeling all fired up.

That is all.

For sheer absurdity, perhaps the most dumbfounding thing I’ve seen all day.

This is the so-called leader of the free world, folks.  But you gotta love those guys at Reuters for pulling out the caption-knives.  [Via Wonkette.]

The first one I’ve had in almost five years, I think.  I used to get one roughly every six months, until my doctor decided that getting my allergies under control would help rid me of the migraines.  Weirdly enough, it worked.  But the downside of not having had one for so long is that my migraine medication (which was back then one of the new -triptan varieties, which knocked the hell out of my last migraine) has gone totally out of date, and so Did Not Work.

(More below the fold.)

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