Still busy ...

I have a ton to grade, so have been trying to focus exclusively on that, but unfortunately the world is conspiring against me. First, the committee I'm the chair of has decided that we need to send an informative letter to most of the campus administration by the end of the semester. <whine> Yours truly got to write most of the letter, collect most of the data contained in it, and then coordinate revisions, all in the last week.</whine>

Then I got a very short note from our tech department saying that the server hosting my faculty web page was going to be shut down, and thus they were going to remove my FTP access entirely and force me to use an ancient template-based site to rebuild my page on (I'm simplifying this a bit, but you get the point). To give you some history here, only a handful of faculty members at my college even have FTP access to our sites, and we all had to fight for it (apparently we used to have a website committee that reviewed every single page of a site before the committee chair personally uploaded it to the server). The few of us who actually have FTP access have gotten all riled up over this change, and have fired off a few dozen e-mails and had a few meetings; all, of course, within the last week. Whether or not I retain FTP access to a campus server to host my faculty webpage is still in doubt right now (though it's looking like they'll cave in, at least for a few of us). That our entire faculty doesn't have easy access to web space is ridiculous.

Topping things off, we're having a number of retirements this fall across the campus, and thus I'm going to a number of obligatory retirement and other social gatherings. Today I have both a potluck lunch and a retirement dinner on the schedule, yesterday there was another retirement gathering, and there are rumors of yet another event coming up soon.

My last class meeting is tomorrow, so I need to get all my grading done if my students are ever going to be able to see their graded papers and talk to me about their final grades. I still have two large stacks to plow through (the final exam's essay portion and a lab report), and a ton of data entry to do, before things will be ready for them.

Well, off to bed, and then back to work.