Six down....

...Two to go. Our latest faculty candidate was apparently loaded onto a plane this morning without incident. We are now 75% done our on-site interview schedule! That's six accident free interviews -- a fact of which I am inordinately proud.

The other two major things I did today was to run a short faculty meeting related to faculty searches, and attend a meeting on research at UTPA. The research meeting was surprisingly... promising. It's not exactly been a secret that we have had problems with research here. The infamous ice machine saga has been one that I documented at some length in this journal. So a few of the biologists, myself included, showed up loaded for bear. We were vocal.

One of the people in the meeting, though, was a gentleman who is responsible for implementing a new computer system that is pretty much going to run UTPA. And although it took him way too long to get to the point, ultimately he got around to saying that pretty much every procedure in the entire university is being torn apart and reworked from the ground up. No more physically carrying paper around from building to building for signatures; we'll be able to send this requests through electronically and and track where requests and orders are. If something is sitting in someone's office for a week, we'll know -- sort of like tracking a package when FedEx ships it. Should be brilliant if it works as advertised.

Not only that, but I found 55 cents in the return slot of one of the Bio department vending machines! Woo-hoo! (Probably happier about that than I should be, but things like that have always made me smile.)

Other things that make me smile? Ice cream. The sound an ice cube makes when you put it into ice tea on a really hot day and it cracks. Godzilla toys. (I got this one Mechagodzilla figure on a bottle cap recently that I love. It's molded in translucent plastic that looks black, but if you hold a light behind it, is more a smoky grey. It looks sooOOOOooo cool. The picture doesn't do it justice. I was having a major geek out about pulling this out of the box because it’s one of those “can’t see what you get until you buy it” toys.)

Lest anyone think this was a good day, though, let me balance that out. I've spent most of the week mad, and yet again, anger bit back. I was reaching around a cabinet to pick up something, with a little more force than strictly necessary, and caught one of my rings on the bottom of a cabinet drawer. Ouch! My poor students got a very loud Irish curse. I am cultivating what is sure to be a lovely bruise on my ring finger. Less drastic than when I messed up my back the last time I got mad, though.

But I think I gave a pair of great lectures today. I seem to lecture really well when I’m angry.

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People unclear on the concept: “You remember that? How do you remember that? Do you study?” (heard in hallway outside teaching lab).

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More lines I'd like to use in a movie: “I’d rather French kiss a moose.”