Sadly, we are not in the museum business

I know it’s been a while, but I also know that the blog police are taking the summer off. With classes over, you’d think I’d have all kinds of time on my hands, but I’ve actually been super busy lately. My seminar went extremely well. I was worried. I knew that my material was good and that I was prepared, but the 1^st years’ advisors (especially mine) made a huge deal about it. In the end, we decided that they each just wanted to show the others how much more brilliant their student is than the rest. In the end, we all proved ourselves to be exceptionally but equally brilliant, and all of the advisors went home happy. The jellyfish are here, and once again they are doing things that I don’t understand. At yesterday’s faculty meeting I was asked to give a forecast of when there will be a very low tide around noon on a cool day with no jellyfish so that they can take buckets and shovels to dredge out the boat basin by hand (the Army Corps of Engineers are dragging their feet on the permit, but no permits are needed if you do it by hand). I laughed at them. The tides, I can predict, but the rest is asking way too much. My forecast is for many many sea nettles straight through August.

Have decided that I don’t like going to the faculty meetings. Last month, I was asked to pick a side in an argument that I really don’t want to have any part of. This month, they managed to decrease my faith in humanity. Apparently, everybody and his brother wants to give us their “museum collections”. Seems like such a nice gesture, but as soon as we say thanks but we really don’t have the facilities, experience, or money to maintain it the way it should be done, they turn all bitchy and call us bad members of this community. The lab even offered to provide the space for a building if they could come up with the money to build one, take care of it, and staff it. That turned into a fight about the owners not wanting the three collections to touch, even though none of them have even a fraction of the money or the means to get it.