RBOC

• After a good class of the survey, I came back to office hours and got a visit from a former student who just wanted to say Hi. That's always nice, when students seem to remember that you're a person, and one they kinda like to be around.
• After the student left, I finished making final edits to the long article that's sort of about Harry Potter, and sent that puppy out. We'll see how it fares, since it is on a single text that isn't in and of itself supremely important. But that makes two articles out right now, so keep your fingers crossed.
  
• My annual evaluation scores are back, with highest marks in all categories from both the chair and the evaluation committee. Some nice comments in there too.
  
• One of my contributors for the collection contacted me after going over her most recent edits and said, "You're a really good editor," which is nice since a) she teaches editing, and b) I've never edited before.
• We're discussing revisions to the major here, which has been an interesting process. I put a proposal on the table, and after having seen the other proposals (which were in many ways similar to mine), I like mine a lot, but see that it might be a bit too big a change at this point for this department. We'll see.
• We've got another candidate in town today, which makes for a busy busy day.
• The elephant in the room is that my mom is back in the hospital. You may or may not remember the episode in the late summer where there was the hope of a diagnosis for the chronic illness that has escalated over the last 15 years. No diagnosis came, and her always-roller-coaster health has generally deteriorated. I am worried on the one hand, but on the other, she is very adamant about my sister and I not getting deeply involved in her health care (She hated how her own mother's health sucked in all of the people around her, and swore that she never wanted that for us). She remains fairly casual about things, even though my dad is torn up over this latest round. There's not much to do right now, and I hesitate to offer too much detail, but amidst all this other good stuff, there's this black cloud...