When the band packed up and went home

[austin_dern]

Bah. I had been doing so well. I'd gotten up at a more reasonable hour. I used the stairs instead of the elevator -- since the building I'm in has the slowest elevator in the world that's not legally the science library's elevator that's not such a great sacrifice for my health, but it's something -- and I was whipping through writing up my grade key and stood every shot at getting all the homeworks graded before the day was done. Then the power went out.

I took that as cue to take an early lunch. Afterward and with the power on mysterious people I don't know sent a mass e-mail explaining the power failure was caused by contractors digging, and it just struck me that any organization with a sufficiently large physical campus probably keeps a couple of contractors around digging things just so that any big problems that crop up can be plausibly blamed on the contractors digging. They said they were going to have a full report about how it happened by the end of the day.

I got around to taking the various books that I'd left on flat surfaces, mostly chairs I wasn't using, and started piling them up into pretty good-sized piles on a single chair. I live alone, and have to find ways to make my own fun. I can't say there's a whole lot of purpose to it, except that I've now got three more chairs that I could, in principle, use for sitting on, and I have a stronger argument for buying a bookshelf. I haven't yet found Nothing Like It In The World, though, and it's getting to be odd even for these parts.

Trivia: In the 1190s Pope Celestine III ruled that windmills had to pay tithes. Source: A Distant Mirror, Barbara W Tuchman.

Currently Reading: Planets and Perception, William Sheehan.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

I've long seen it posited on sysadmin newsgroups that, if lost in the wilderness, a surefire means of rescue would be to bury some fiber optic cable and wait for the backhoe to dig it up.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You know, I'd have to hunt down references to be sure, but I think they were even telling versions of that joke in telegraph days.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

It probably goes further still - I can just imagine one ant relating to another how it's always the same.. lay down a trail, and bang!, there they are, the line's cut.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

As it happens, there are cases of competing ant species in which one ant colony will deliberately wipe out the other's trails.