A million things, but evidently I’ve gotten out of the habit of blogging them. I’ll put a large part of it all down to the malignant influence of Facebook; I’m in more immediate touch with more people there than here, so although Mark “Man of the Year, Ho Ho” Zuckerberg controls everything in their databases, it’s vastly easier for me to drop a couple of sentences into Facebook than to sit down and compose a coherent link-filled blog entry.
My secondment to the Uni’s Learning and Teaching unit has amounted to an overtime commitment all year, and I still have not heard back about how this will be sorted out. I’m working on a poster for the Enhancement Themes conference in Edinburgh in March as my colleagues put together a questionnaire relative to the role of teaching assistants in inculcating the University’s newly-minted Graduate Attributes programme. Meanwhile, I’m trying to set up a couple of meetings to introduce the Attributes to the College of Arts staff.
And my colleague Mahdavi and I have received a grant to assemble a handbook to the main plot lines of the Bible, which we’re cobbling together from public-domain sources. And there are numerous occasions to celebrate, from colleagues’ birthdays to Burns Night to Thursdays (in general) or any other occasion for merriment.
Margaret is head-down, full-speed-ahead working on her dissertation. She’s an unstoppable force once she shifts into “determination” mode (it’s as though she has an Accomplishment Buff that starts her radiating productivity). All this, despite her pre-Christmas ear infection’s unwelcome recurrence, and now a sharp pain one of in her feet!
I have two or three grant ideas to begin rustling into submittable shape. Maybe four. This is vitally important here, because it turns out that the main function of staff in a British University is attracting grants; students, sadly, come in a poor third to grant-attracting and technical-research publishing. So my grant-applying and reasearch-writing claim another proportion of my time. Then there’s also my responsibilities as Clerk of Trinity College, and I’ll be preaching on the next three Sundays.
There’s more, but that’s a taste of current events. And, perhaps, to help restart the habit of leaving things in the blog now ad then.