Clean Up, Clean Up, Everybody Do Their Share…

Today I think I can FINALLY say that TEACHING IS OVER!!!  Let us all breathe a sigh of relief as I may now start picking up the pieces of my sanity, and hopefully restore them to one working brain.

Sadly, the end of teaching coincided with me telling a student to his face that, yes he had indeed failed the make-up exam, even though it was by a somewhat slim margin.  Which sucked.  But heck, there’s a line in the sand, and he just didn’t cross it, so there’s not much I can do that doesn’t stink to high heaven.  I have standards people!  They’ve been lowered significantly in recent years, but still!  Standards!

Anyway.

Once that was all over and done with, the marketing guy for the School of Natural Sciences and Engineering popped in to ask if he could interview me about my department?  Just this short little bit?  Yeah, sure…   Well, little did I know I’d end up outside squinting in the sun trying to explain on camera what electrical engineering is (it’s such a crazy huge field at this point that this is a pretty impossible task), what the undergraduate program is like (uhhh… I’ve only taught three courses, and they’re all late in the game), to give examples of current research (also vast!) and finally what electrical engineers end up doing after their studies (lots?  I myself would really like to know though!).

Oh, and did I mention that I had almost zero make-up on (sigh) and the sun was directly overhead, and oh dear, the squinting!

After lunch I began cleaning up my office, since yes, I’m leaving my job.

A good hour was spent on ripping plastic cover-bags off of old weekly EOS mini-newspapers so that I could recycle them.  My next recycling targets were all my old undergraduate notes, because, really, I haven’t looked at them for over a decade, and I don’t ever remember what’s in all those folders any more.

I must say that throwing these notes away was pretty liberating, mainly because now I don’t have to find a spot for them in our house where they can sit untouched for another decade (what about the folders though?).  The next headache will be to decide if I’m throwing away my Stanford study notes, because, lets face it, I’ve only referred to those when trying to find exam questions.  My current thinking is that if I’m going to be picking up some new skill, I’ll probably just be buying a new book, or going online, so all these paper notes will probably never ever be touched ever again…  (Famous last words? hrrrmmm…)  Oh, and then there’s the question of what to do with those free textbooks I got when deciding which textbook to use.  I’m pretty sure I won’t be reading most of them ever…

So yeah, decisions, decisions.  (Aka: First World Problems!)

I ended the day by picking up a couple of my images that I got printed on canvases (40×60 cm, 16×24 inches) that we’re thinking of putting on the ‘office’ wall upstairs.

It’s only taken my about 4 months to work up the courage to actually get them printed because, ouch, they’re pretty expensive!  But I think I like the outcome. 🙂