Apparently it is impossible for the university to provide a chair for me -- there is zero budget for furniture, and they said there aren't any of the stool-height chairs in other rooms that can be moved to that classroom -- so the math department has approved using department funds to get a chair for me. This is completely ridiculous, but at least the department is willing to do it.

Wow, that's pretty bad. I'm glad the department is coming through, but really, somebody seriously messed up.

These classrooms were clearly designed with the intention of having a tall chair (like an adjustable desk chair, but stool-height) at the front of each classroom, and I know that most of the rooms had them as recently as a few years ago. But they seem to keep either breaking or disappearing, and being replaced by regular-height non-adjustable chairs. Most of the professors teach while standing up, so they don't really notice, but I need those chairs. One of my classrooms has an OK chair (no arm rests, and it's kind of finicky about staying at one height, but I can work with it), but the one in the other classroom is so completely broken that I can't even figure out how it could have gotten that way other than people deliberately breaking it. What I really don't understand is why they can't find another chair anywhere on campus that I can use -- like, surely there's some room somewhere that has one of these chairs that they're not using. It's not like it's an incredibly rare special-order item.

At this point you should just set up a GoFundMe that your students can contribute to. (They could Endow a Chair. Maybe put a small tasteful plaque on it?)

I moved some furniture around on the back two-season porch and found a big box of record albums and like 6 boxes of comic books that must have sat there for the past 20 years.

I've gotten to the emotional point where I can let most of it go without even looking at them, but I picked a really bad weekend to start this project, since currently it's Allston Christmas (moving day for literally thousands of student types) so all the charity donation places are incredibly overwhelmed.

Endow a Chair! Genius!

I met with Fiona the Gardener this morning and showed her the house-eating Wisteria, which is aggressively swallowing my neighbor's building.

She seemed to think my plan of pulling the vines down and then training them over an arbor/trellis/tunnel would work. Just have to research what sort of pre-fab stuff we'd have available or needing to make something purpose built.

We spoke of Faustine the neighbor and Remy the Arborist, and talked about training the bougainvillea in the corner along the fence.

By the time I'm done I expect I'll have a miniature gazebo and a hedgehog hospital back there.

West Coast St. Tiggywinkles?

Is there any connection between turnips and catnip?

I have killed the thread with my non sequitur

Did you find out if there's any connection between turnips and catnip?