0909.5
22:21:05
This one’s not about Catholics, I promise.
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Hey so it’s September or something! Whatever that means.
I was going to put a joke here, but it seems that my macintosh has eaten its install of my preferred video editor so it’s just not going to happen.
Anyway, school is going to be much, much less suck than what I had thought about a week ago. If you remember back to May  although honestly I don’t remember if I mentioned this publicly  I had gotten notice that I’d be teaching this year. Which is what I wanted to do. Since high school.
Well anyhow I show up in Norfolk and get a new message that I’m going to continue to be doing essentially administrative work in the fall and eventually teach in the Spring. Now about this I was nonplussed. How could I get an official document from the college saying that I was on a Teaching Assistantship, and that I’d be paid as such and had to attend a seminar about being a lecturer, and I was still doing what I was doing last year?
Well, fortunately one of the people in the program that I’m friends with had the exact opposite problem  had been stuck with being a TA as a masters assistant and has no intention of teaching in the future. So, as of Tuesday, we switched jobs for the fall. I am officially a TA a physical geography class. I only have to come to two of the class meetings a week, grade the professor’s scantron tests and sit in my windowless office on the 7th floor for a couple hours a week. While this is much more to my interests compared with my last semester’s workload, I’m mainly excited that I’m in a classroom. It’s in one the big lecture hall of the old science buildings that is un-renovated 1960s cast-concrete-and-wood-and-helvetica. This is to me even more what I think of when I think of a university than the neo-gothic architecture and oak paneling like Oxford or Harvard or whatever. Oh man I love it.
Of course, the week wasn’t all perfect serendipities and smooth sailing. I had signed up for a class in the Spring essentially as a placeholder as I needed a full course load for my assistantship, but wasn’t sure what class I wanted to take. So, after taking care of an erroneous library fine, I switched to a modeling and simulation class the day of its first meeting. In Banner, this course had very strange class room number assigned to it, with a building abbreviation I’d never heard of before. Something like OCNPS 0204. First of all, all of the buildings I’ve ever been in here have the floor level as the first of four numbers, so was this going to be in a basement? And what the heck does OCNPS stand for? At first I had decided that it was the south campus in Portsmouth, about 30 minutes away by car, since that’s where a similar class was offered last year. But when I was looking up directions to that campus I figured out that none of those buildings at the other campus used that abbreviation. So I went to school and looked at the campus maps by the parking garages. The only building that stars with an O is Oceanography, so I decided that was just as good as any other, and hiked over there. At this point I was still a few minutes early, but as soon as I realized how big the building was, and that it was really unlikely to have a basement, I looked around for a 204 or a 2004 or something like that, and finally found the room. And I found it! But there was a note on the door that the class was in BAL 7009. Which is to say, the conference room about ten feet from my office in Batten.
So I walked over there and finally got up to the seventh floor about 15 minutes after class started. The door was closed, so I was going to have to bust in the middle of class ever-so-inappropriately. But, as I’m walking in the room, Dr Earnest introduces me! “So, this is Ben Lamb, he’s a second-year doctoral student in the program.” My response was “Uh, Oceanography?!” Apparently Dr Earnest had sent out an email to every one in the class telling of the room change, but he did it two days before I signed up for the class, so I didn’t get it. Oh well.
My Thursday class (Int’l History) is taught by a professor who was on sabbatical last year. He essentially looks like Steve Martin. I find this hilarious. It might be a good class, it might not be. I’m holding off on making a judgement for a couple weeks.
I’ve started to get back into cooking and taking care of the house. Fixed the running toilet downstairs, I hope. I’m letting the seals sit for a few days before I fill the tank in hopes that they will harden and be water-tight for once. My next project is my driveway, which is being taken over by lawn when it isn’t being taken over by idiots who park in front of it. I got some Agent Orange Roundup and sprayed the crap out of it today, tomorrow I’ll pull out what’s left and dump a few bags of gravel on the apron. Hopefully that will take care of things in the short term.
I was going to put a joke here, but it seems that my macintosh has eaten its install of my preferred video editor so it’s just not going to happen.
Anyway, school is going to be much, much less suck than what I had thought about a week ago. If you remember back to May  although honestly I don’t remember if I mentioned this publicly  I had gotten notice that I’d be teaching this year. Which is what I wanted to do. Since high school.
Well anyhow I show up in Norfolk and get a new message that I’m going to continue to be doing essentially administrative work in the fall and eventually teach in the Spring. Now about this I was nonplussed. How could I get an official document from the college saying that I was on a Teaching Assistantship, and that I’d be paid as such and had to attend a seminar about being a lecturer, and I was still doing what I was doing last year?
Well, fortunately one of the people in the program that I’m friends with had the exact opposite problem  had been stuck with being a TA as a masters assistant and has no intention of teaching in the future. So, as of Tuesday, we switched jobs for the fall. I am officially a TA a physical geography class. I only have to come to two of the class meetings a week, grade the professor’s scantron tests and sit in my windowless office on the 7th floor for a couple hours a week. While this is much more to my interests compared with my last semester’s workload, I’m mainly excited that I’m in a classroom. It’s in one the big lecture hall of the old science buildings that is un-renovated 1960s cast-concrete-and-wood-and-helvetica. This is to me even more what I think of when I think of a university than the neo-gothic architecture and oak paneling like Oxford or Harvard or whatever. Oh man I love it.
Of course, the week wasn’t all perfect serendipities and smooth sailing. I had signed up for a class in the Spring essentially as a placeholder as I needed a full course load for my assistantship, but wasn’t sure what class I wanted to take. So, after taking care of an erroneous library fine, I switched to a modeling and simulation class the day of its first meeting. In Banner, this course had very strange class room number assigned to it, with a building abbreviation I’d never heard of before. Something like OCNPS 0204. First of all, all of the buildings I’ve ever been in here have the floor level as the first of four numbers, so was this going to be in a basement? And what the heck does OCNPS stand for? At first I had decided that it was the south campus in Portsmouth, about 30 minutes away by car, since that’s where a similar class was offered last year. But when I was looking up directions to that campus I figured out that none of those buildings at the other campus used that abbreviation. So I went to school and looked at the campus maps by the parking garages. The only building that stars with an O is Oceanography, so I decided that was just as good as any other, and hiked over there. At this point I was still a few minutes early, but as soon as I realized how big the building was, and that it was really unlikely to have a basement, I looked around for a 204 or a 2004 or something like that, and finally found the room. And I found it! But there was a note on the door that the class was in BAL 7009. Which is to say, the conference room about ten feet from my office in Batten.
So I walked over there and finally got up to the seventh floor about 15 minutes after class started. The door was closed, so I was going to have to bust in the middle of class ever-so-inappropriately. But, as I’m walking in the room, Dr Earnest introduces me! “So, this is Ben Lamb, he’s a second-year doctoral student in the program.” My response was “Uh, Oceanography?!” Apparently Dr Earnest had sent out an email to every one in the class telling of the room change, but he did it two days before I signed up for the class, so I didn’t get it. Oh well.
My Thursday class (Int’l History) is taught by a professor who was on sabbatical last year. He essentially looks like Steve Martin. I find this hilarious. It might be a good class, it might not be. I’m holding off on making a judgement for a couple weeks.
I’ve started to get back into cooking and taking care of the house. Fixed the running toilet downstairs, I hope. I’m letting the seals sit for a few days before I fill the tank in hopes that they will harden and be water-tight for once. My next project is my driveway, which is being taken over by lawn when it isn’t being taken over by idiots who park in front of it. I got some Agent Orange Roundup and sprayed the crap out of it today, tomorrow I’ll pull out what’s left and dump a few bags of gravel on the apron. Hopefully that will take care of things in the short term.
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