I had to go to campus today ... every other Wednesday is house-cleaning day. While it's good not just to be paying our housekeeper, but to have her come to the house and clean, again, it didn't seem quite practical to be giving a talk with a background of vacuuming and washing machine rumbles and beeps. It was great to be back - apart from having to take a Covid test first. Who knew that it would take me over twenty minutes to produce a half test-tube of saliva? This stopped me checking my slides were in the right order (they weren't, quite ...); stopped me doing another couple of last minute tweaks; increased my stress levels - which, for all I know, made my mouth drier still. I've been googling what to do before the next time: thinking about something sour, like a lemon, seems to be a tactic.
Campus, in general, felt far more normal than when I dived back in early October - or maybe that's just because pre-vaccine terror has now worn off. As someone who's always liked working in their office - the ghostly vestiges of teaching in Oxford, I suspect - I'd be down in Taper Hall a couple of times a week, if I could. Certainly, campus was looking good, from a distance, like this - but compared to other years, we're talking unweeded, unplanted flower beds. I rather like the unmanicured look, but wonder what this might say about the fate of the maintenance crew during Covid...
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