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Musings on a Friday morning:

• I am dangerously low on coffee right now - good thing I have nothing to do at work and will have nothing to do for the remainder of the day.
• One of my very favorite songs is playing right now - What's been going on by Amos Lee. I have it at a decently high decibel, so I just closed the door to the cave.
• I am so SO sick of Twilight. I do not read the books, I have not seen the movies and I do not think Robert Pattinson is attractive. Is this craze over yet? This is worse than when a new Harry Potter movie comes out.
• Mike and I are having an extended test drive of the Cube today. I am hoping it convinces him that this is, indeed, the car for us and I won't have to test drive a bunch of grandma cars to appease him. He actually said the word 'Buick' to me and meant it!
• I am headed up to Minn this Sunday and will spend the week helping my sister and brother-in-law get their house ready to be sold. I'm excited to spend some time in the motherland, though Rock said she had to scrape her windshield today, and I am not so excited for that. Turns out I've acclimated to the slightly warmer temperatures IL has to offer and have subsequently turned into a pansy.
  
• We had a "Friendship Thanksgiving" hosted by Jon and Janet this week and it was fantastic! I can't wait for Jon to prepare many more turkeys, because as he put it, "turkeys are dirt cheap."
  
• If you do not already, you should be watching MadMen. It is fantastic. I have watched it out of sequential order and I still enjoy it. It is amazing (for better and for worse) how far we've come in the last 50 years. I suppose 50 years is a significant amount of time, and yet, seems not so long ago considering the way women were treated. Joan, the head secretary, said this when training one of the new secretaries, "And here is your typewriter. The men who designed it made it so easy, even a woman can use it." Sitting in my own office, typing this on my own computer, it is not lost on me the sacrifices and accomplishments of generations of women.
  

and now that all the men reading this have rolled their eyes a couple times, I will end my thoughts and bid you all a Happy Thanksgiving.

cheers!

keep the change, you filthy animal

Tonight, I had to fire my first student worker. In my tenure at AU, 37 work days, this student had 9 last minute absences including 3 no shows/no notice. Keep in mind, this student only works 3 days a week, so in my tenure here, he amassed 23 total possible work days, giving him an absence percentage of 39%.

One would wonder why I waited this long to fire him. I wonder this myself, but stating the obvious, I'm a softie and I fall for the sob story...until today. Last night after he called and left me a message for his 8th absence, I called him back (and of course he didn't answer) and left him a message asking him to come into my office today so we could talk (read: so I could fire him). The kid did not show up TO BE FIRED. So I thought, well, I'll wait until he comes into work tonight at 6 and then fire him...but HE DID NOT SHOW UP. So I was forced to fire him over the phone/view facebook message (because the e-mail address he gave me is unreliable - see, I fall for the sob story).

I was nervous about firing this kid all day, but now that it's done, I feel totally unsatisfied that I didn't get to fire him to his face.

Damn kids.