Speaking of gifts, I am currently baking birthday brownies for TCG and then I am going to wrap his gifts. The poor guy has a late meeting on his birthday.

I know we struggled with hospital meals for my mom.

They kept sending my mom chocolate desserts, despite the big sign in her chart that said "allergic to chocolate". And mom, being by that time totally out of it, would eat it and... oh dear.

scrappy, that story cracks me up too!

Skipping 600ish posts and jumping to new thread. ...

Um. In a strange twist of WTF?/only when you work for the state-news. You may recall over the summer, minor anxiety that I might get downsized, due to CA budgetary woes, and thinking cutting education is a good idea. Thankfully I survived the first round of cuts.

That's not the wtf part. So, we are in huge budgetary woes state wide, so what they do? Give a modest, system wide, 3%ish merit raise. Huh? Um. Ok. I'll happily take it, since they just raised our parking and health insurance. But paint me confused.

I've said it before. State jobs do not involve logic.

That's not the wtf part. So, we are in huge budgetary woes state wide, so what they do? Give a modest, system wide, 3%ish merit raise. Huh? Um. Ok. I'll happily take it, since they just raised our parking and health insurance. But paint me confused.

yeah, it's kind of like the way that 222 people were fired from my old job, and part of the reason was to give the faculty a promised 3% raise.

My university has a pay freeze and a hiring freeze this year. We ended up with more calculus classes than there were instructors contracted to teach, and with the department not being allowed to hire anyone new, they were offering extra pay to anyone willing to take on some extra classes. (Which I think is part of the reason why I've been having so much trouble finding someone who can cover my classes on Rosh Hashanah. Last year, when most people were teaching three classes a day, taking on one extra for one day was no big deal. But this year, with a whole lot of people teaching four a day already, taking a fifth really seems like too much, even for just one day.)

Hil, it's a religious holiday. If you can't find someone to cover your classes that day because of the cut, can't you just go to the head and say, everyone's overloaded, I can't find anyone to cover, and I need to observance Rosh Hoshanah. I'm cancelling my classes that day.

I mean, it's a major religious holiday -- what's s/he going to say? Unless you have a big track record of cancelling classes, I think a department head would be REAl hinky about saying "Uh, you can't take time off to observe your faith's major holiday after making a good-faith effort to find coverage."

That's not the wtf part. So, we are in huge budgetary woes state wide, so what they do? Give a modest, system wide, 3%ish merit raise. Huh? Um. Ok. I'll happily take it, since they just raised our parking and health insurance. But paint me confused.

Dang. I think I'm ineligible (anyone who's gotten an increase for any reason since 1/1/11 is excluded, so the job change in August rules me out). But it'll be a huge relief for so many people I know. And thank God they're also excluding all upper management.

Hil, it's a religious holiday. If you can't find someone to cover your classes that day because of the cut, can't you just go to the head and say, everyone's overloaded, I can't find anyone to cover, and I need to observance Rosh Hoshanah. I'm cancelling my classes that day.

I would do that -- in fact I did do that last year -- but the day I'll miss is a Friday, and my students have their first midterm the following Monday, so I want them to be able to ask questions on Friday. (Well, the non-Jewish ones, anyway. Whoever scheduled this midterm didn't think too much about when the holidays were.)

Andi, all kinds of ~ma to you and Daniel.