(no subject)

[vyvyanx]

Poor razornet has been unwell recently - asthma-type wheeziness and coughing, keeping him (and me!) awake half the night. cam.misc today suggests many people in Cambridge are having similar problems, perhaps due to pollen, low-level ozone, humidity or fungus spores and dust in the atmosphere. In an effort to remove possible dust from his atmosphere, I have cleaned the flat top to bottom this morning. Now I am very dusty :-( I hope it helps.

Partly this is displacement activity - it seems I would actually rather sweep floors and scrub sinks than do the marking I'm supposed to do! Also, there are several other absorbing things that I ought to do, though not so urgently as the marking, which I expect I will allow to take priority over the marking until the last possible moment. The most interesting of these is working through Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar and Martin, Matthiessen and Painter's Working with Functional Grammar - this is the most appealing because it is new linguistic stuff. The other thing is working through the preparatory materials for my forthcoming Maths course - this is interesting, but not quite so interesting as functional grammar, because it's all stuff I once knew, and vaguely remember, so it doesn't have novelty; also, it's possible that I just find linguistic things intrinsically more interesting than mathematical things (although, the levels at which I'm studying them are very different - I might find higher-level Maths much more interesting once I can understand it!). The marking is sort of mid-level very familiar linguistic stuff, however, and having marked half a dozen scripts, I feel I've largely exhausted any excitement or novelty that might be found in answers to this particular question - however, I still have at least twenty more scripts to mark on the same topic.

Comments

[scy11a.livejournal.com]

It's odd really - as a student I always assumed it was only us who were so disorganised as to only complete an assignment minutes before the deadline. Now, living with an academic, I see it's something you never grow out of. Funny really, it's not like it would go away by itself or anything, no matter how hard you try.

On a similar note, I really should have cleaned out the poor fishtank days ago but strangely find washing up more intriguing... : /

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Mm, my dad, in his late 50s, is a part-time academic too, and he could procrastinate for the Olympics :-) He often sits up all night marking engineering projects for the following day, rather than spacing them out sensibly over a couple of weeks...

[owdbetts.livejournal.com]

The scary thing is that the metabolism of many plants really likes CO2, to the extent that quite modest increases in CO2 levels (of the degree we're causing at gound level) can result in some plants producing as much as three times as much pollen.

So whether or not you believe in global warming, we need to cut CO2 emmissions to prevent a major hay fever epidemic... :-)

-roy