Coffee date

Peter expressed a strong unwillingness to go to school yesterday, and I had some stuff to do in Hyde Park, so I figured what the heck. We had a nice little coffee date at Starbucks and then I dropped him off with Mike so I could wrangle the microfilm of MLK's dissertation (which I located and read, but was unable to save as PDFs *or* print, despite the intervention of nice library employee kid, who could work the microfilm machine but not any of the fancy options like saving and printing. Still, King's dissertation! It included a page I wasn't required to turn in, an autobiography with a photo, which was both touching and eerie. And this was a microfilm of the actual copy, signed by his advisors, so it was kind of amazing to have it right in front of me.) Then I went to a seminar on one's first year of teaching (one of the science guys, himself childless, predicted that if you're on track to actually *get* tenure, your kids will "forget your name," making me thankful I'm not in the sciences.) The liberal arts folks on the panel seemed horrified, and one of them opined gently that she doesn't get paid enough to work seven days a week, twelve months a year.



The real take-home lesson, though, was Don't Wear Pretty Pretty Death Shoes and expect to be comfortable walking. Break them in first, already! The prettiness of the shoes is somewhat mitigated if your feet are actually *bleeding* from wearing them. Only somewhat: these were really cute shoes. However, lesson more or less learned...