Yes, I am alive

I haven't posted in what seems like a dog's age---not for the last week and a half, I think. Thankfully, Rob and the LMC have been keeping the hijinx up to snuff in my absence.

Things have been a bit crazy as of late: everything at home is hunky-dory, but work has gone to hell. My departmental colleague across the hall's dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and so we've been scrambling to arrange her leave of absence for the semester, figuring out how to cover her classes, dealing with bookstore bureaucracy etc. etc. etc. I'm dropping one of my courses to an adjunct and picking up one of hers, a class which should be fun but that I haven't taught in 9 years. And of course the petty and venal administrators have chosen this exact moment to be, well, petty and venal. I can't tell you the number of times the past week and a half I've just wanted to scream at these people and go all De Niro in the Untouchables flaunting the virtues of baseball ("It's a team sport! Yeah, team!)

On the fun side, I've been cranking out an article on the Kelo v. New London emminent domain case from last June. I grew up near New London, and as it turned out doing interviews with the lawyers and people from the city that I had gone to high school with Ms. Kelo's lawyer, and the project manager for the project had had my dad as an instructor at the Coast Guard Academy. Small world. The article, if I do say so myself, totally rocks. When it's done I'll upload it if any of youse wants to take a gander.

Tomorrow is the nine year old's birthday party: 13 girls at a local athletic club's "kid fun zone." Should be great. Last Saturday was the little man's 7th birthday, at the same place, and a good time was had by all (except I caught a very wicked buzz from eating a piece of sheet cake: damn if that thing didn't have me bouncing around like a En-Why-Cee bike messenger with pupils the size of subatomic particles (yes, that's a Dave Barry line, or maybe PJ ORourke: sue me). I paid for it the next morning, though: I guess your an official suburban dad when you're fighting off a Sunday morning hangover from scarfing a piece of sheetcake at a kid's birthday party the day before.

The other thing I've been up to lately is finishing Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. Short review: pretty darn good. The first 300 pages completely rocked; the second 300 were pretty good; the last 300 should have been edited out. Stephenson is the author today who has wrested the laurels from philosopher John Rawls of "the brilliant author most desperately in need of an editor with an Exacto for a red pen." That said, I'm looking forward to the rest of the series, but I'm not even going to start until Spring Break.

This semester I did something different: I created an Amazon list for each of my classes, and sent it to the kiddies so they could order direct and cut out the middleman. Boy, was our bookstore director pissed off! I can sense a dressing down from our Dean for this: I'll be the guy standing there, in a dirty sweatshirt, with a No. 2 pencil hanging from each nostril.

SOOPER SEKRIT MESSAGE TO CHAI-RISTA: Liz, we're going to have a reeeeeeel fun semester! Sit back and enjoy the fireworks: Steve the LLamabutcher has entered the building, and this time he just doesn't give a crap!

So what have I missed, exactly? I mean, other than Melissa getting hitched, Marion Barry smokin' the glass pipe, and Ted Kennedy making a horse's ass of himself....