Yes, the title is a Sarah McLachlan allusion.

Well, it has been a hell of a week. Today is the first day that I haven’t come home and collapsed into a coma on the sofa. The workshop that has been keeping me busy all week is going really well — I don’t think that I’m jinxing it at this point, since we have a half day left. I won’t be able to quantify this until the evaluations are tallied … and I know better than to look at them at any point in the next month … but it seems like it’s going really well. The themes we chose are actually getting addressed and reinforced, and I have a dim memory of doing a competent job when I gave my own speech yesterday. My parents called last night to tell me how much they liked it, but they might be a little bit biased on that point.

I should note that nothing that has happened this week has changed my mind at all about the evilness of PowerPoint.

There has been the occasional slip-up. The Dean’s office commandeered our reserved lunch space at the last minute, forcing us to use a lecture hall for lunch. The tech console has this tendency to, for example, suddenly switch to broadcast TV in the middle of a lecture (fortunately it hasn’t yet chosen the German satellite channel … I’ve seen some weird stuff on there). And my partner did call me on my cell phone in the middle of my presentation to ask if I’d seen the photo of him and George Takei at his company’s PRIDE event that he’d e-mailed me earlier in the day. (I leave my phone on vibrate during the day, so no one noticed except for the lady in the front who could hear the buzzing sound.)

I keep forgetting how exhausting these things can be. It’s rewarding in the end, but I will be happy come the weekend when I can sit back and relax. Especially since the clean up will be finished by then … man those tables are hard to rearrange.

I hope your week has gone well. I’ll be a better blogger next week.

Tags: Austin, weekend, work, workshops