A Crazy Cat's Life

I was about to sit down and write this great post about how horrible New Jersey drivers are. I still want to do it but it is difficult with the gut-wrenching pain going through my right knee. You see, I have grade four chondromalacia patella. What does that mean? I have no cartilage left in my knee, which is not a good thing. Usually more common in older people, I have some lovely knees for someone my age. The kind when walking sound like Rice Krispies after you pour milk in them: snap, crackle, pop . The doc is not sure the cause but thinks it may just be simple genetics. Either way, the one bastard has been causing some big issues with me. I had x-rays and an MRI done which confirmed the diagnosis. A smidge over a month ago, I had a cortisone shot in it hoping that it would do the trick. Well, last week I could barely walk more than 100 feet without being in excruciating pain. Even sitting still for extended periods of time hurt like a bitch. So, I went to see the knee d...

A friend of mine sent me this quote in regards to the Tea Party's fanaticism and conspiracy theories. "At times these fanatics have achieved a temporary success among those who lack the will or the vision to face unpleasant tasks or unsolved problems" - JFK Conspiracy Theories Speech November 18, 1961 I recommend reading the whole speech if you have the opportunity. It's quite fitting even today.

Just working on my preps for the fall and I was going through the Spanish Inquisition. There are only two things going through my mind while doing that: Monty Python's infamous sketch and Mel Brooks singing "The Inquisition, what a show..." Here's a great illustration of the Python boys doing their thing:

Even though I'm technically on vacation, I'm still getting myself ready for the next semester. For the fall, I was originally going to scrap my whole heavy assignment workload for my students and just give them four exams to base their grades on. There were two reasons for this. One, I was tired of all the whining from the students about the "insane amount of work" I gave them. Mind you this was just five small writing assignments on top of weekly quizzes. They are history classes. Only English classes give more papers. Two, and this was the main reason, I don't want to grade all of them. This has nothing to do with laziness on my part. If I could, I would give ten papers a semester. However, the quality of my students' writing has seriously declined over the years and sometimes these papers are very painful to read (see some of my earlier posts). On top of that, I have a heavy grad school load in the fall. As it has been made clear to me that I...

Today was the last day of the summer session which means I am finally on vacation. A long, well deserved vacation. People seem to think that educators have it easy in that we get all this time off to casually lay around in the sun and do fun things. I guess if you're lucky enough to have that cushy well-paid tenure line then it's possible, but I even see those guys working their asses off with multiple courses over the summer. Me? I haven't had a "real" vacation since January. Yes, I had spring break off but that was spent digging myself from out of the huge mound of papers to be graded so it wasn't technically a vacation. I guess the week off in-between semesters could be a vacation but that was spent recuperating from the spring and prepping for the summer. Now though, I have three weeks off. I still have work to do in getting ready for the fall but I promised myself some fun. What I plan on doing my summer vacation: Catch up on some serious sleep. ...

As I sit here grading final exams, here are a few random thoughts going through my head: How is it that, even though I've given the same exact final for years on end, students still amaze me by doing worse on it as each year goes by? And these are take home exams now. Geeze. No, I'm not surprise that you are having problems uploading the assignment to Blackboard from your phone. Why are you writing your paper on your phone? No, I don't want to know. Spell check. Is that such a difficult thing to grasp? Please don't call Alexander the Great your "homey." Christianity did not exist in Classical Greece. Heck, it didn't even start before the Roman Empire. Sorry to cause that disillusion. While I agree that "nothing important happened in the Middle Ages" please don't write that in your essay. Same thing goes for calling Henry VIII a "man-whore." The Enlightenment comes after the Scientific Revolution and not before. And no, Kepl...

I consider myself a technophile but there are days when I get frustrated beyond all words. For my students, I have taken the guilty pleasure of creating a website full of XTML and CSS coding to humor the nerdier side of myself. However, there are times when I make a mistake in coding and can't figure out what the fuck I have done except render the webpage as useless as an old 386 PC. I spent the better part of the afternoon figuring out what I did and to the life of me I cannot. Logic would have it that I am in possession of a backup. Oh nay nay. Silly me just thought I would be making some minor changes and adding pretty pictures. What does this mean? I've got a temporary page with all the basics there but once my summer vacation begins it means doing some original coding from scratch again. sigh I cannot win.

Recently I have decided to take up some new crafts as a way of keeping my hands busy. I had one of my office mates teach me how to knit and crochet over this past week. Just simple stitches as my coordination leaves something to be desired but just enough to keep my hands busy while watching TV or waiting at the doctor's office. There is one thing, though, that I forgot to take into consideration: kitten. The Stig--our illustrious new member of the household--has decided to attack the yarn while mommy is trying to crochet. Now most of you are probably going "duh." To be honest, I never had kitty problems before when doing any form of needlework. One of my favorite hobbies of all time is counted cross-stitch. Never had kitty issues with that one even though I've had many of housemates of the feline variety over the years. But Stiggie? He's a little terror. He attacks not only the yarn but my hands, and the crochet hook, and then he goes after the piece I...

I know this may be "old" news, but kudos to the California supreme court for stating that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional . It's about frickin' time. I had been so happy when San Francisco first started performing gay marriages and then was furious when religious organizations like the Mormon Church forced the state to take away natural rights to gay couples with their Proposition 8. Many people in the GLBT community were hoping that it would be overturned but even I know the end is not near. This will ultimately head up to the Ninth Circuit Court and then eventually the Supreme Court. In that regard with a legal precedence being set, there is a good chance that gay marriage will finally become legal on a federal level. It cannot come soon enough if you ask me. I have quite a few gay friends who have been in relationships with their partners for many more years than even I have been married. While I know New Jersey is more progressive by allowing civil union...

I've been doing a lot of research on PhD programs so I can apply at the end of the year. I thought I had it all figured out: find a program strong in terrorism which is what I would like to study and apply there. Honestly, where the program was did not matter as long as I was able to secure full funding. Bear has the sort of job where he could live practically anywhere in the country and we could always rent our house out if we could not sell it. Sounds easy, right? Ha. After a few weeks of research I noticed that criminal justice does not seem to embrace anything other than homeland security at the moment. That would be fine if that's what I wanted, but it isn't. I'm more interested in international terrorism, especially religious terrorism. So I send a few inquires out to some scholars in the field asking "what should I do?" The universal response: don't do criminal justice but instead international relations with a focus on international securit...