Holidays with Martha

TPP is staying out of the way.  Cooking is his thing, but our dinner is delayed until Saturday.  So with little to do today, Mrs. Phactor is decorating for the holidays and our impending guests.  Understand, the house will look quite handsome and festive, and she has plenty of black cat help; for them many decorations have the look of toys, and so some shall become. As a small contribution, TPP has made a batch of smoked salmon dip. It's pretty easy and highly addictive.  
SWMBO (she who must be obeyed) has explained that today is the official start of the holiday and that someone must get with the program.  In due time, in due time. 
Otto is still churning slowly toward NE Costa Rica, so my colleagues must be getting quite wet.  Another old friend and colleague from the upstate NY snowbelt reports they got 22 inches of snow that isn't good for x-country skiing, truly annoying.  
Mrs. Phactor and a helper have come upstairs to gather more decorative items, or maybe take a nap, no, just getting in the way right now. However this particular helper usually likes to get in TPP's lap while typing, a huge help.  This is one very cute, very friendly annoyance of a cat.  Not the one featured in the black cat day a few blogs back. As part of the decor, two biggish Schlumbergera cacti, but quite red, are in full bloom and looking quite festive.  They were kept outside well into October this year, and that seems to really prime them to flower for Thanksgiving.  They are really quite easy  houseplants that enjoy being outside hanging in a partially shady area for the summer/early fall. 
TPP is quite thankful for all you readers who allow this mental health program to continue at least until the next administration does something terrible to the internet.  Sorry, for that small vent.  TPP will now go for a walk, bring in some firewood for the weekend, and thus appear to be doing something useful that isn't blogging.  If you are reading this from outside the USA, you may celebrate thanks for whatever by feeding yourself and others a nice dinner. Generally a turkey, our native and very misnamed bird, is served with all the trimmings. 

Black Friday - Who is not with the program?

The daily newspaper on Wednesday must have weighed 10 pounds. News-wise it was a fairly scanty day; it was all the advertising inserts. If you live in the USA, and read a daily newspaper, yours was probably similarly fattened. For reasons that remain mysterious to TPP, the friday after Thanksgiving, which is always on a Thursday for reasons that remain mysterious to TPP, has turned into the biggest shopping day of the year. Part of this is because Christmas is only a month away although it's influence seems to creep into things earlier and earlier every year. Part of this is because almost everyone has Friday off, but since the stock market was open Friday AM, Mrs. Phactor had to woman her office until it closed. What this all means to TPP is big box and mall avoidance like they were handing out free ebola. It was even bad getting petrol for the car! For academics Thanksgiving means now is the headlong rush toward the end of the semester. A week or two (just a week this year) of classes left to cover maybe a third of your syllabus (they are only a promisory document) then final exams followed by reading them all and grading. TPP could just never get into a holiday spirit until all of that was over. And it always took quite a bit of desire to get TPP to go shopping even though he likes getting all the women in his life gifts (the cats are easiest). Mrs. Phactor annoyingly annouced that she was done with holiday shopping! The looks she received were not pretty. Of course in her defense this is a pretty busy time of year in her business and she does a fair amount of volunteer/chaity work as well. Since TPP's academic counterpart has retired, time should be no issue, but decades of habit are hard to change. You can't just listen to Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant one day and switch to Christmas shopping the next. It isn't done in proper circles, but it looks like it is being done on a grand scale by many. 

Thanksgiving in Costa Rica and with young people

Costa Ricans, Ticos, are some of the nicest people in the world.  They prepared a 1st class Thanksgiving dinner for us gringos, a dinner that was good enough and fancy enough and pretty enough to impress almost anyone, especially at a rainforest field station. And everyone had to really work like dogs (the station manager was washing dishes!) to do so because 44 hrs earlier a kitchen fire in a warming oven came very close to putting the kitchen out of commission.  If you didn't know otherwise, you would not have known anything was amiss to see the results. Simply amazing!  What great people! 

Among our students there was much discussion of Thanksgiving traditions and how they differed.  And what foods they liked and dislikes (marshmellows and sweet potatoes - yikes!).  Yes, TPP has a Thanksgiving tradition in answer to their query, he always listens to Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant. A gallery of blank looks. One asked if Arlo was related to Woody because she'd learned something about an inherited degenerative disorder he had in a genetics class.  Yes, they are father and son; both folk singers.  More blank looks.  Folk?  Ah, well. No need trying to explain.  No one had heard of This land is your land either.  Anyone want to listen to the Alice's Restaurant song?  How long is it?  Probably about 25 mins.  No. And no need really because a protest song about a war they probably don't know about would not make much of an impression.  Makes you feel old.  Did TPP mention that they did clean up and dress up nicely for the dinner?  Still TPP was thankful, so he retired to his casa and listened to some Sidney Bechet recordings.  Who?  (Sorry can't provide the link to an earlier blog about Sidney; search function isn't working.)    

Give them an mile, and they'll still take more

TPP likes breaks and days off as much as anybody, but he was instilled with a good old-fashioned work ethic that meant you didn't take days off just because and you only took sick days when you literally couldn't physically get out of bed.  The big bugaboo break has always been Thanksgiving.  In days of yore, students were only given Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving making it a 4-day weekend.  Of course most of our students were in-state and that meant that they were only at most a 4 hour drive away from home.  Still you had so few students in class on Wednesday that it became foolish to try to cover any material, but you still had a few students, probably townies, to whom you owed an obligation.  So the university caved in and included Wednesday into the official Thanksgiving break. This was the first inch.  What happened was that the majority of students thought, "what the heck, if I cut classes on Monday and Tuesday, we get a 9-day break".  So classes on the two days prior to the 5-day Thanksgiving break were really poorly attended, so poorly attended that faculty complained that the extra day off made things worse than ever.  In a fit of creativity, the university then removed a 3-day fall break -weekend from the middle of the semester, took another holiday away, and using the two days off from other places made the Thanksgiving break 9-days long!  Woo hoo!  So the Phactor ends up with an exam scheduled on this coming Friday.  Now before you call me some kind of crank, the day was chosen by the class within a certain set of parameters (exam this week or you come back from break to an exam - yes, a sort of lesser of two evils decision, but with a week's notice; let's have no exam would have won in a landslide if on the ballot (TPP's only control).  And as predictable as eclipses, one student whines, "But I'm leaving this Wednesday."  Yes, give them a mile, and they take another mile.  "It's my parents; they planned this."  Fine, give me their telephone number and I'll explain the situation to them.  This kindly offer always is met with an interesting change in perspective and such that one if given to suspect their parents never heard of such a thing.  Now here TPP must admit that he is responsible for just such a transgression for some students because he figured out that this would be a fantastic time to take students on a rain forest biology field trip to Costa Rica rather than waiting to the end of the semester.  Generally instructors have no problem with students needing time off for good academic reasons, or even athletics.  The real trouble is not matter what the university regulations are, it's up to faculty to be the bad guys if they inforce draconian rules.  So there's your real choice: be a bad guy or a good guy.  Let's see teaching evaluations are being performed the week after break, so let's think about this.  How does TPP maximize his outcome?  Hmmm.