Return of the civic spirit (somewhat) and beginning of the fall.

Why, hello.

Out of the loop for a while, there. No reasons, really: no vacations, no house projects, nothing much other than staying out of the heat. I admire those of you out there who update every day; I wish I could, but I feel compelled to update only when there's something to update.

And now, frickin' fall semester is upon us like a loan shark. Lots of bustle today and yesterday. Yesterday was the annual college-wide "convocation" at our campus, a joyous occasion in which we all convocate and presumably share tales of the summer, but in which we mostly listen to administrators justify their jobs. Lots of razzle-dazzle, lots of encomiums, lots of abstractions and buzzwords. In the morning session, In a gym filled with, I don't know, 1000 people, such exhortations rang hollow. I got so dithered up about the level of hot air in there that I left at break and went back to my office to get work done. Which I did, lots of it.

Today, another meeting at our campus, this time just for our campus faculty (we have multiple campuses), and it wasn't so much a meeting as a facilities update and a brief intro of most of the department heads and visible folks in registration and such Not even a welcoming of the new faculty hires, because the dean didn't have the full list available. (This place is infuriating sometimes for how much faculty are shoved aside, but that's another post.) In short, I could have slept for another hour.

The upside is that I then had 3.5 hours between the end of that meeting and the beginning of our department meeting, during which I knocked out part of my evaluation portfolio due next Friday and made sure I had all the needed copies. (I'm up for promotion to associate professor, so I don't want to wait until last minute.) And I crossed off a few more items on my to-do list for the college success course, and emailed a couple of people about a couple of things.

Then the department meeting at 2:00. We are an enormous department now. I counted 31 people there including the chair. We lost one of our campuses this spring due to UGA usurpation (though we opened a new one way out east), so several faculty in the diaspora transferred to our campus. Plus, we have six new tenure-trackers. Of course, the campus has barely enough space to house everyone, and this fall, major renovations will begin on one building, soon to include two buildings, thereby creating more displacement.

It's kind of wild and fun, actually. This meeting today may also mark the only time most of the full-timers and term-to-termers are gathered in the same room. Now it's off to our disparate schedules and preps.

I'll elaborate on the first half of the title in the next post.