The Venting Thread

[Harlow2]

This is the last day campus is open before the winter break — many folks have left already — and there's a major storm on our doorstep. So why do I have a strategic planning meeting this afternoon? How strategic does the meeting organizer think people will be??

Hope you were able to exit strategically before the storm hit.  Yikes.

[AmLitHist]

Kid #1 spent last night in her farmhouse without heat--nimrod landlord never put heat tape around the propane lines, so the regulators froze up.  She and the GSD spent the night in the bathroom with a space heater; it was cold enough that the water in the dog dish in the kitchen was frozen this morning. (The roads were a solid sheet of ice, covered by drifted snow, by 4 yesterday afternoon already.) 

The electrician/heating guys left about an hour ago, after thawing the lines, adding heat tape, and making sure the furnace was working OK. She said it's starting to warm up some. There's another sub-zero night, with -35 wind chills, ahead yet tonight; it's supposed to moderate to the 20s by tomorrow, and 30s on Monday, with 50s by Thursday.  It's just getting from here to there that's the problem--and her anxiety has been in overdrive for about 24 hours. 

I wish I could get out to her, but ALHS had foot surgery Monday and is immobile and can't be left alone; besides, I don't need to be out on those roads, either. Not to mention that there's not a lot I could do if I were there.

So much for a restful month off. FML. Sigh. It will all be fine. It just sucks at the moment.

[clean]

I need some help from someone who can Fox-splain something for me?

How is it the Biden Administration's fault that Southwest airlines has cancelled so many flights?
It seems that Southwest used the Covid Money to pay their employees during the Covid Shutdown Days and NOW they have old computer software that is considerably contributing to the flight cancellations.

Somehow I have not been able to get my head around how this is connected to the Biden Administration OR the Covid funds.  Clearly I am missing something obvious because the fox friendly family members seem to think that the connection is clear!   

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

I need some help from someone who can Fox-splain something for me?

How is it the Biden Administration's fault that Southwest airlines has cancelled so many flights?
It seems that Southwest used the Covid Money to pay their employees during the Covid Shutdown Days and NOW they have old computer software that is considerably contributing to the flight cancellations.

Somehow I have not been able to get my head around how this is connected to the Biden Administration OR the Covid funds.  Clearly I am missing something obvious because the fox friendly family members seem to think that the connection is clear!

Clean:

If I had an answer, and understood some of it myself, I would tell you! My family was pretty well behaved for Xmas and didn't dive down the rabbit hole (except for the occasional slap on Biden for being 'old' and 'on drugs.'). Color me surprised.

[apl68]

If we had a Republican President currently in office, I can pretty much guarantee that there would be people blaming him for the airline mess.  Anything that's sufficiently disruptive and annoying on a large scale in this country will be blamed in some way on the incumbent President.  How exactly the connection will be made will vary according to circumstances, but those of a mind to blame a President for something can always find a way.

[apl68]

My own vent for today:  There's evidently a certain amount of year-end housecleaning going on around town.  Today we've received two quite substantial used book donations.  We accept all comers, since we want to encourage people to keep donating.  Some of it is sold in our ongoing Friends of the Library book sale.  Some goes out on the free table outside.  Now and then we have something that we can pass on to schoolteachers or others who might be able to use them. 

Most of it goes (discreetly) into the trash.  It's just too old, worn, outdated, or otherwise of no real use to anybody.  And there's nowhere locally that we can take it to be recycled, although we do recycle not-ancient library discards through our main book wholesaler where possible.  There's just not much we can do with ancient sets of encyclopedias--many of them in any case missing volumes; it's amazing how many have exactly one missing--heaps of old fad diet and money-making books, piles of jacket-less or mutilated popular fiction by authors that few people now living would recognize, outdated news magazines and Sunday school lesson quarterlies, ancient text and reference books, and Readers' Digest Condensed Books. 

So we're used to sorting through lots of chaff to find the occasional grains of wheat.  Now and then, though, we get something that's just incredibly awful.  Today's two big donations included two sets of fifty-year-old encyclopedias, complete with decades' worth of yearbooks, and four boxes filled mostly with forty-year-old magazines.  The boxes were musty and damp and smelly, and the encyclopedias were mostly covered with what I hope was only decades' worth of dust.  Donations that junky feel almost like insults.  I've spent a substantial part of the morning sorting through the junk to see if there was anything in there worth salvaging--there was a tiny bit--and conveying the rest out to the dumpster in between bouts of rainfall.

[apl68]

Well if that doesn't beat everything!  Another book donation just arrived!  It was only a small and manageable batch.  More dirty (in a literal sense), useless old books.  They ran heavily to Tom Clancy books so old they were actually written by him.  Also a couple of quacky-looking books on health, a couple of bits of badly worn nonfiction, and a couple of items that look like we might actually be able to sell them in the book sale.  Still a poor donation overall, but not spectacularly so like the wheelbarrow-loads of junk we got this morning.

[OneMoreYear]

Looks like our furnace is broken. We were without heat for most of the day, thought we had fixed it with minor repair, only for it to shut off again a couple hours later. I feel lucky that it is relatively warm winter weather here (highs in the lower 50s) for the next week, but it's going to be a bit nippy in here, even with a space heater. Really hope the entire furnace does not need to be replaced. Cats have clearly noticed the change in temperature--one has decided it's clearly lap-sitting time, for which I am grateful. The squirrelly one is wondering around the house pitifully in an apparent search for warmer digs. This old house never gets all that warm in the winter (or cool in the summer) but it's gonna be worse for a bit. Not a problem I'm looking forward to as I'm trying to prep for an overload class. Could be worse I realize--could have happened last week during the blizzard.

AmLitHist, I hope Kid #1 got her heat fixed fully and she and the animals are warm now. Shame on their idiot landlord for skipping the basics.

[AmLitHist]

Thanks, OneMoreYear--they did get the heat back on, after more drama (the heat went out AGAIN, shortly after I posted, but she threw a fit sufficient that the landlord actually came himself and fixed it, finally).  Hope yours is a relatively quick and easy fix.

It was a pretty warm fall here, and with costs, I avoided turning on the furnace as long as possible, but like your Squirrelly, Little Cat took up residence in the kitchen alongside the register already back in September!

[poiuy]

Hope the furnace gets fixed soon OneMoreYear, and glad for you that the weather is not too cold where you are.
Also glad that AmLitHist's daughter was able to (ahem) effectively self-advocate so the landlord fixed the heat.

apl1: I am sorry you got so much junk books donation, lends a new meaning to the idea of dirty books. But I am astonished that paper recycling (isn't that the easiest kind?) is unavailable in your area. I wish there was a small business that would come with a truck, load up donated tons of the old paper, and cart it off for actual shredding, pulping, recycling.

[apl68]

Hope the furnace gets fixed soon OneMoreYear, and glad for you that the weather is not too cold where you are.
Also glad that AmLitHist's daughter was able to (ahem) effectively self-advocate so the landlord fixed the heat.

apl1: I am sorry you got so much junk books donation, lends a new meaning to the idea of dirty books. But I am astonished that paper recycling (isn't that the easiest kind?) is unavailable in your area. I wish there was a small business that would come with a truck, load up donated tons of the old paper, and cart it off for actual shredding, pulping, recycling.

We can get newspapers and cardboard recycled locally, and that's about it for paper products.  Interestingly enough, our local economy is based on the manufacture of paper products.  But it's mostly tissue paper, which is not typically recycled.

Believe it or not, in 2020 even with a toilet paper factory in town we had supply chain issues with that particular commodity.  It was being made, but not landing on local store shelves.  I think that households in dire need could get some for personal use, if they knew the right people to call.  Then supply caught up with demand, and normalcy returned.

[paultuttle]

Looks like our furnace is broken. We were without heat for most of the day, thought we had fixed it with minor repair, only for it to shut off again a couple hours later. I feel lucky that it is relatively warm winter weather here (highs in the lower 50s) for the next week, but it's going to be a bit nippy in here, even with a space heater. Really hope the entire furnace does not need to be replaced. Cats have clearly noticed the change in temperature--one has decided it's clearly lap-sitting time, for which I am grateful. The squirrelly one is wondering around the house pitifully in an apparent search for warmer digs. This old house never gets all that warm in the winter (or cool in the summer) but it's gonna be worse for a bit. Not a problem I'm looking forward to as I'm trying to prep for an overload class. Could be worse I realize--could have happened last week during the blizzard.

AmLitHist, I hope Kid #1 got her heat fixed fully and she and the animals are warm now. Shame on their idiot landlord for skipping the basics.

The sentence I bolded above reminds me of the protagonist's cat "Pete" (a.k.a. "Petronius the Arbiter") in Robert Heinlein's novel The Door Into Summer, who thought the protagonist should be in charge of the weather and refused to go outside to use the bathroom whenever it was really cold/snowy. Wikipedia has a rather good summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_into_Summer.

____

My own vent: It seems as though I've been away from my desk for months, not just a week and a half. What's a computer? What's my password? What am I supposed to be doing? What's the rhythm of my work day supposed to be?

[Parasaurolophus]

Wow, an internal funding competition that aims to promote research by offering... a maximum of one section release! (Our load is 8 a year, although July/August courses count for half, so sometimes it's a fair bit more than that.)

I'm definitely going to write up a detailed application that includes plans for securing external funds. Because teaching a mere 7 courses will definitely allow me to boost my productivity sufficiently to allow me to meet whatever additional research outputs will be required by the external funding agency (whose funds we apparently can't use to fund further releases).

:rolleyes:


This is right up there with internally advertising work-intensive jobs that come with a fraction of a section's release (e.g. they recently advertised for two Indigenous people to put together plans for an Indigenous Studies department and program--in return for .5 of a section release each!). Get with the program. WTF?

[apl68]

How would a .5 section release even work?  You teach the class only an hour and a half a week?  You give (or grade) only half as many assignments?  You teach the class for only half the semester?  Maybe it's usually a lab course, but this time you don't do the labs?

[Parasaurolophus]

How would a .5 section release even work?  You teach the class only an hour and a half a week?  You give (or grade) only half as many assignments?  You teach the class for only half the semester?  Maybe it's usually a lab course, but this time you don't do the labs?

It means you don't teach a class--so unless you find another admin task worth .5 (or two at .25, which is more common), you've accepted a salary reduction to 7.5 (we're all paid by thte course...). You're also not allowed to overload except in emergencies...

In practice, it means you teach 7 from September-June, then teach one in July-Aust (since, inexplicably, those count as half a section). So, in tthe end, you just end up not having actually been released from anything.


Incidentally, any honours student you supervise (which is rare, since we offer virttually no majors) counts for 0.025 of a section. But again, you can't overload. So even a single student means a pay cut of between one and half a section, depending on your July/August assignments.