I’m a big wuss now, but as a child I, like most children, had no problem with getting hurt. I rode my bike pretty much constantly and was always trying to do tricks and stuff, and subsequently I fell a lot.  And of course knee pads and helmets are lame, and this was the early 90s, so I had perpetually scraped knees from ages 5-12 or so.  My mom would lament their poor condition and tell me that when I got older I would regret my carelessness because my knees would be covered in scars and I would be embarrassed and wish I had pretty, flawless knees.  And elbows.  And right shoulder.  And forehead just below my hairline from where my neighbor hit me with a chunk of ice.  

My mom was right about a whole lot of things, but I’m happy to report that I am a grown woman, and I have never been self-conscious about my knees.  Bring on the shorts and dresses.  

My students have a week and a half left of class.  Their second exam is on Friday.  I just sent out an email reminding them that if they needed to reschedule their exam (we’re more or less required to accomodate students so they don’t have more than 3 exams in one day, for example) they needed to let me know ASAP, because they could not take it late.  

I got an email from one student asking to take the exam on Monday or Tuesday, rather than Friday, because he would be out of town.  I told him to let me check and see if we could have the exam written that early.  

He emailed me back to say “Oh.  I thought the exam was tomorrow, not next Friday.  Nevermind.”

Which means that he:

1) Tried to reschedule an EXAM only two days beforehand.  

2) Ignored the part where I said they could not take the exam after the scheduled time, no exceptions, and asked to take the exam late.  

3) Completely missed all the references in my message to the actual date of the exam, including the fact that I was trying to schedule a review session for a time that was, according to his understanding of the situation, after the exam for which it was reviewing.  

Dude’s a winner.  

1.  Clean, reliable public transportation.  I wanted to take the CanadaLine everywhere, just because I could.  

2.  Super-friendly people.  Seriously.

3.  TIM FREAKING HORTONS.  Tim Hortons kicks Dunkin Donuts’ ass any day.  Sour cream glazed doughnuts and Iced Capps for.  the.  win.  Also their coffee is not terrible.  

4.  Starbucks and Subways EVERYWHERE.  Okay, this isn’t necessarily a plus, I was just astonished by how many there were.  

5.  Aboot.

6.  Bike lanes.

7.  Pedestrian crossings with consistent pedestrian schedules.  Pedestrians don’t jaywalk and cars don’t try to run them over (also see #2).

I feel bad for the guy who came begging for better grades on his assignments today, because I haven’t had any coffee since I had food poisoning a few days ago.  He wouldn’t have gotten points back either way, but I might not have seemed so annoyed by the interaction if I had some caffeine in me.  

1.  Since my office is in a locked wing and super-hard and confusing to get to I decided to hold my office hours this semester in the TA office, which is tiny and dirty and shared by all the undergrad TAs but at least my students can find me.  The downside of this is students will come by not during my office hours and get annoyed that I’m not there, or slip their homework under the door and expect me to find it.  Unfortunately, the people who drop by unannounced are the people who don’t come to class, so I can’t tell them to knock if off.  

2.  The professor I’m TAing for either wants to reward the people who come to class regularly or is really bad at writing instructions.  For their homework my students were supposed to make a map of loci- a famous memory-boosting device that involves making a mental (or in this case physical) map of a familiar location and making a route with a series of significant places and using imagery to associate those places with the objects you have to remember.  One student (who slid his homework under the TA office door and was unaware that class today had been cancelled and the deadline for the homework was pushed back to Friday) for some reason thought the assignment was to draw 20 pictures of stuff related to his hometown.  FOR SCIENCE.

3.  There are two cognitive psychology sections, which has been a major point of confusion, because a handful of people were registered for Section B when they were attending Section A, and were confused when the homework they turned in was different (they get the assignments from the Blackboard page) or when the syllabus didn’t list the quiz they took today.  Eventually we got it all figured out, and people either switched to be registered in our class (A) or started attending the other section (B).  A few people were on top of things and emailed me to ask me to give their assignments to the Section B TAs so they could receive a grade, but one person emailed the professor of Section B and was very upset that he had not received a grade on an assignment he had turned in.  To me, in Section A.  Not the course he was registered for.  

4.  I don’t grade most of their assignments, but I do check over the gradings and enter the grades into the gradebook, and then I bring them to class so they can pick them up.  I bring them in all nice and alphabetized and set them in multiple piles on the table.  They apparently root through the piles, picking up assignments from one pile and putting them down in another pile, without actually taking anything with them.  And I keep on getting more assignments so I keep on re-alphabetizing, adding more and more assignments to a stack that never gets smaller because no one ever picks up their work.  

Thor kinda likes being brushed but has short hair and doesn’t really need it. Loki has long hair and gets mats all the time but really doesn’t like the brush. However, he loves anything that Thor loves. My plan is to brush Thor all the time and see if eventually Loki starts liking it too.

Along with my husband came a large network of cousins, siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts, and uncles for whom I should limit my swearing, passionate outbursts about political issues, and discussion of drinking habits.  

And seriously.  This network is large enough that most of them were not entirely aware of my existence until they attended our wedding.