What a week!

It's been such a zoo at work--we've had two position applicants for on-campus visits, plus 4 people who are applying for promotion/tenure and have tons of paperwork to do, some of which involves me, plus it's the last week for program changes by permission only, which means handing out forms, directing students to professors, and putting them into the classes when the come back with the forms, plus the campus bookstore has been yelling at us about a book that apparently only 2 out of 29 people ordered and trying to get 29 people in this department to respond to e-mails is like pulling teeth and even then I have to tackle some of them in the hall, sit on their chests, grab them by the hair, and demand loudly, "DID YOU ORDER THIS BOOK OR NOT?", on top of chasing around the last dozen recalcitrants who haven't turned in their course syllabi for the files and their office hours. I'm still short a couple, but I'm going to go ahead and sort the ones I have and do the late-comers whenever the heck they show up.

To top it off, I've been counting calories, and darn it, I'M HUNGRY. But I have to get this 25 pounds off, because my knees are screaming at me.

So I come home and do nothing. Well, the past two nights I read a book I "saved" from a box of books going down for the library sale, Something Rotten by John Fford. It's a completely bizarre but fun book--sort of a fantasy/scifi/literary satire/detective/Douglas Adams kind of thing, and turns out it's book 4 in a series of 5, so I think I need to get the other four,, because I really enjoyed it. Besides the heroine, whose name is Thursday Next, it features Hamlet, Emma Hamilton, and a genetically-engineered Neanderthal named Stig--to name just a few. It bogged down a bit in the middle, but he somehow managed to pull it all together for a very satisfying ending. But I've done no knitting and no training. I'm seriously looking forward to the weekend.

I keep meaning to take a picture of my new sock (half a new pair), but I'd have to take off my leg-warmers, and it's too cold! The sun's been out, though, which is like a miracle after all those days of dreary fog and icy drizzle.

I came home to find the city tree guys cutting down a tree to the west of my house--presumably, since it was between the sidewalk and the street, it was a city tree, not a private one. I'm sorry to say I was quite pleased--my roses and clematis in that little corner garden in the front yard will get a lot more sun this year! I'm hoping for great things from them in 2010, if they survive the winter.