1/20/02

It might be hard to believe, but if anything, I'll be posting even less than usual in the upcoming months. Work is busier than ever, and now I have the additional privilege/burden of being head of the JournalCon host committee. So, I'm spending a lot of my time playing lawyer/accountant/travel agent these days. I had my first JournalCon anxiety dream this weekend--I dreamt that JournalCon was being bumped up to March and nothing was ready and everyone blamed me for ruining JournalCon. But, of course, that's not going to happen for real. There are many intelligent, diligent and resourceful people on the host committee. We have 9 months to prepare. It will all be fine. Yes, it will.

I have lots of other stuff to worry about, too. I was at a conference at a ski resort in Colorado last week, and this week I have to give a 2-hour talk on a week's worth of information. I'm taking a class this quarter, and I have three papers to read for discussion on Wednesday night. Oh, and the U.S. Postal Service stopped delivering my mail for a period of two weeks, and I'm having to figure out everything I missed. I'm not sure why this happened--it may have been the extensive sidewalk excavation and reconstruction going on right outside my window. Still, you'd think that even if the mail couldn't get through, they'd at least save it for when the construction was finished, as it is now. But no.

Actually, I have a really bad track record with the U.S. Postal Service. The first time I tried to vote (in the 1992 presidential election), I was in college, and since I was registered in Massachusetts and living in Illinois, I applied for an absentee ballot. The ballot came about three weeks before election day, and I filled it in the same day I received it to make sure it got in in time. I got the ballot back three months later--with the words "Addressee Unknown" stamped on the front. Since the envelope was pre-printed, I know it had the right address--apparently it just took almost four months for the ballot to get from Chicago to Massachusetts, and the Board of Elections wasn't accepting ballots anymore, obviously.

Anyway, that's just one of the various postal woes I've faced over the years. The mail at my present address has been particularly bad, though, even by my standards. Mail usually only comes to my building maybe 5 days a week instead of the 6 it's supposed to. I think they may have trouble finding people to cover all the shifts, because every couple of months or so, there are little cards in the mail saying that the post office is hiring.

So, much of the time I was not getting mail was while I was away in Colorado. The conference I went to was really good, but I was very glad to get home. For one thing, it was really unpleasantly cold, especially at night. For another thing, the resort was nearly 10,000 feet above sea level, and I had altitude-sickness headaches continuously for the first five days I was there. And for a third thing, the woman I was rooming with went skiing on the first day and fell and tore ligaments in her knee and was on crutches, making her dependent on me for practically everything. I did not go skiing. It really wasn't all bad, though--I got to see some old friends who I used to work with in Boston, and I learned an amazing amount. I even got a job offer for after I finish my Ph.D. Unfortunately, though, the job is in England, which doesn't appeal to me at all, even despite the fact that he said he'd find me a boyfriend if I came and worked for him (yeah, this was from another one of those old friends). I'd rather just stay here in San Francisco and go work at the post office.

In the forum: Cheap Housing Options for JournalCon and England: yea or nay?