busy in a good way

• Sent Halloween treats (candy and teeny bit of mad $) to MP2--should arrive today via UPS. Enjoy!
• Handed back midterms that ranged in scores from 108 (10 pts. worth of xtra credit offered during the 1st unit--my alternative to the security blanket of a study guide--a FURLOUGH work reduction strategy) down to 44 (and that's with a few xc points). I have mostly excellent students in this class, for which I am eternally grateful.
• Got a really good night's sleep Wednesday night. That was clearly a prelude to next bullet.
• Went to the library yesterday to investigate two African art auction catalogs that were recently entered into my university library's collection--and which might have been turned in to the library accidentally by my hapless high school intern. Full story here. Yippee! They were, complete with the library's name stamped over mine. They are not among the most expensive of the books that Hapless Intern "gave" to them, but I use them a lot in class and in the museum, so I will take what I can get. The associate dean of the library has been helping me like nobody's business. I am impressed, even though we haven't found the more expensive books. I figure someone in the library donations office sold them on amazon--or something along those lines. Maybe not, but the Friends of Library people claim they never came to them. So, ???
• Left library for the campus j*mba juice, which I had not yet patronized. Ordered and paid for a small drink, but they accidently gave me a large. Doesn't make up for the furlough pay cuts, but they were very pleased to do their part.
• Yesterday morning, I had to drag a Maori cloak down from the repository loft (by myself!) so that I could have it ready prior to class, when I would need to get my students rotated through the repository in small groups (we are reading a museum ethnography about New Zealand/Scotland connections) and I must say, I was really pleased to see that the new storage technique another student and I improvised a year ago seems to be working for this artifact--flax is sturdy and all, but this is more than 140 years old. After class, a student actually volunteered to help me put it back into loft storage; so no lives were lost this week making "the climb" with a 10 foot long tube in hand.
• Created and uploaded a way-overdue webpage to the Museum site. 10 more to come (student projects). Stay tuned...off to lunch with BFF who is freaking out over new spring FTEs requirements in his (and I suspect, all) departments.