Well, not more than the usual COL and merit raises.

I'm thinking that the more experience you have with more difficult/obscure languages, the more marketable your skills are, so they should pay you more to keep you.

But I'm not sure if that's true now like it was back in the IT boom times....

I have waffles! I forgot.

And I'm trying to decide if I really want to spend $100 ordering absinthe.

I'm in pseudo-academia. Doesn't work that way here. Besides, it's not so much the programming as it is my familiarity with the databases and whatnot. (I'd be porting it to another language for my convenience, because his stuff is dense and I don't want to be maintaining it.)

And I'm trying to decide if I really want to spend $100 ordering absinthe.

If it's good stuff. (Actually, I don't know if that's a good price.) I have some stuff that has lots o' wormwood but it tastes rather crappy....

Jilli is probably our resident absinthe tasting expert.

Why not? They seemed so occult and fascinating to me when I was in high school. I can't imagine not needing a place to escape from students.

Well, we don't have a lot of free time, honestly. When I'm not teaching, I'm generally working in my classroom either planning or grading. We tend to visit each other in our classrooms when we need to vent, but I've never worked somewhere where the faculty room was located conveniently enough to be a practical place to spend much down time. Plus, if lots of teachers are hanging out in the faculty room at any given time, most administrators I've had assume we don't have enough work or don't have a very good work ethic. t shrug

For the record, though the nicotine odor may be gone, the only way we actually use the faculty room regularly is to achieve coffee. Teachers: fueled on caffeine and dry erase fumes.

Jilli gave me a great tip about where to order absinthe a while back. The top-of-the-line Jade absinthes run about $110, but there are more economical options.

I hope they also screen for, e.g., genetic diseases? And ruthlessly interrogate participants over whether they have had braces. In the modern era, beauty has a limited relationship with genes.

They should have to show pictures of their parents to prove they came by their looks naturally--or have a section for "I owe my looks to Dr. Cutsalotta, on Sunset Blvd.!"

It looks like half of the cost is shipping, which vexes, but I don't see any way around that part.

We had a little at Kelly's birthday party last weekend, but 1) I suspect it wasn't very good stuff, and 2) I trusted Kelly to know what she was doing, and it turns out she didn't, so it was all a bit of a muddle. She lacks mad research skillz. So now I'm just feeling like we need to do this right.

Oo, thanks for the link, Matt!

I'm generally working in my classroom either planning or grading

Aha. Teachers didn't have classrooms in the schools I went to. Students had classrooms (not that we were allowed to hang out in them all the time). But, aside from the science labs, there was one classroom to a class, so you'd only 'have' a classroom if you were a form mistress. And then you'd not have it to yourself that often, since other teachers would be leading classes in it, and your kids coming in and out to get their stuff.

That makes a lot more sense, then. (Says the teacher currently hiding in her classroom with all of her lights off and her doors locked. I'm kinda pretending not to be here right now.)