Crazy Week
Posted on Wednesday, April 12, 2006
This last week has been crazy. Here’s the balance sheet:
Good Things
- Gave presentation at SRI this weekend. Went really well, both the presentation and the questions: the questions all touched on things I had to cut from the presentation for time, which was very nice.
- Was a discussant for Loic Wacquant's keynote at SRI. Also went pretty well. (Is there a verb for being a discussant? I almost started this sentence: "Discussanted for keynote..")
- Rocked the house at the SRI banquet as guitarist for The Talcott Parsons Project, the baddest sociological tribute band there is. Setlist included: Crazy Train, Purple Haze, Sunshine of your Love, and an uplifting finale of Purple Rain with Chris Uggen on the vocals.
- Won a departmental service award for my job as IT Fellow the last two years.
- Found out I'll be teaching Politics and Society this Fall. It'll be a Tues/Thurs class at 8:15 a.m., but I think it's gonna be fun anyway.
- The weather ever since our little flood (see below) has been beautiful.
Bad Things
- Basement flooded. Spent Thursday night shoveling water into buckets and towards the drain in our basement - conveniently located in a part of our basement where no water naturally flows. (Literally, I shovelled: all I could find to use was our snow shovel.) Spent Sunday cleaning out the gutters to prevent future flooding. Note to first-time homeowners: do not naively forget this chore.
- Garage door broke. About time, really, as both door and opener are ancient. For the last three months, we had to get out and manually "help" our garage door opener lift the door up. The problem, it turns out, was not just the opener, but the door as well. So by tomorrow afternoon, we'll have a nice, new garage door and garage door opener. We'll also be about a grand poorer.
- Spent way too much time yesterday working on a problem as (an award-winning) IT Fellow and failed miserably. You know, sometimes people don't like adopting new technology because the technology just sucks.