4/30: What I Accomplished Today

(I appear to have messed up yesterday's date. Oops.)

1. Went to a meeting this morning with representatives from the local school district about college readiness. These have always been perfectly pleasant meetings in which I have enjoyed getting to know some of the K-12 people, and my colleague from the local university is there, so that's been good. However, few people were there today, which was supposed to be our final, "Here are our recommendations" meeting, and suddenly several issues that hadn't been discussed before popped up (like, we have a recommendation to assess writing, but not reading). Now this is certainly a good idea which I fully support, but I do wonder why nobody brought this up when we started last September. Ah, well.

2. Continued the big signature hunt for the Arthur class; if I can get signator #3 to inter-campus the forms to signator #4, and signator #4 to leave the forms in the mailbox of the chair for the curriculum committee, this should be good to go.

3. Graded two sets of papers, prepped tonight's class, taught tonight's class.

4. Finished an issue of The New Yorker and a few pages in the Paul book.

5. My Co-Vivant finished my dumb Pogo Pool badge! Hurray! My joy knows no bounds. Having badges the weekly badges, I worked on some previous badges.

6. We watched a not-bad comedian (Pat Dixon, I think) and The Sopranos. Tonight, Tony was a compulsive gambler; it seems a little late in the game to throw in that rather important piece of information, but okay.

7. Much to my surprise, got my Human Paladin to level 25 and finished the paperwork and mailcheck to switch tomorrow to the level 20 Human Mage.

8. Today's BigFishGame is PetSet; the screenshots looked different, but it turned out to be a three-matchy aimed at kids. Some games need a height requirement: "If you are taller than this stick, you will probably not enjoy this game." I played the first three levels just to be fair; a little on the poky side.

9. Saw the announcement for the next Sims 2 product; it is based on a European chain of stores called H&M. I have all of the other Sims 2 expansion packs and stuff packs, but except for the holiday one, I think they've all been thin, and I've been disappointed. However, this one has something the Sims 2 has been missing for awhile: shirts that cover women's stomachs. Heaven knows I'm no prude, and if my teen or young adult Sims randomly end up in belly shirts, it's all good, but I don't think anyone older than let's say 20 ought to run about so clad. It just isn't attractive in my opinion. It has nothing to do with relative fitness or height or anything of the sort; I just think grown-ups should wear shirts that cover their tummies. (I also think it dates the game; that's fine for now, but in three or four years, I can't imagine that look is still going to be au currant. Granted, in three or four years, heaven only knows what the Sims franchise will be doing.)

10. I've been having little flash-in-the-pan earaches; it hurts for maybe 10 or 20 seconds, and then it stops. I would guess they're allergy-related; it seems to be a gummy-air season so far.

11. When I got home, I set out the paper recycling (my Co-Vivant had already taken down the trash and the cans, bottles, and plastic, but the paper is too heavy for her). She had also washed and dried my towels, so I put them back on the towel racks. She said she decides to wash the towels in my bathroom when my handtowels are gross and disgusting, which seldom takes longer than a week. She made some comment along the lines of, "Who knew teaching was such dirty work?"