Confusions

Spring semester: day fifty-five 

I received this email about an hour ago, and found it...well, sort of confusing. I have edited it slightly, of course, to remove any sort of real details:

I have given your comp exams to your first readers today. 

Expect to receive a letter from me about April 22 with the results of your comprehensive exam and your MFA Final Project committee’s vote.

Once I let you know that your committee has approved your project, bring 2 copies to the library, as I wrote you earlier.

Also, could you please fill out the address label and return it to me?  I only have one from Brandon.

That's right, because I'm on the ball about that stuff.

Ahem. Anyway.

I'm curious as to whether "April 22" is a typo for "April 11," because of several reasons -- the first and major one being that we must have our project copies to the library by April 15th. Again, as I mentioned in my last post, that's a week from today. The 22nd is a full week after that deadline for printing/binding. The second is that it never takes three weeks to get comps results back, ever. Ever ever. Most folks I've known who have graduated in the past three years have gotten their results back very quickly, within a few days. Even if I don't get those results and the approval until the 11th, which would be Thursday, I'll have to print my copies with my acid-free paper and ready them before that; I'm not on campus on the 15th. I may, MAY be able to email the library person in charge of them and ask if I can deliver them on the 16th, a week from tomorrow, when I will take my students over there or their "library day," but that's about the latest I could do it and still keep everything on schedule as pertaining to what the graduate school deadlines are. Honestly, though, I'd like my approval to be before that if at all possible so that I can print them and get them delivered sometime over the course of the next three days. This email MUST have some sort of a typo in that date -- that's way too late for everything to happen. If I see the director tomorrow while I'm in the department, I'll ask her about it -- I really don't want to bug her over email -- but of course, whether I see her or not depends heavily on the weather.

As you folks know, I am a weather nerd -- at least when I have time to be and can focus on it. Tomorrow and tomorrow afternoon/evening, we're supposed to get our first big "strike" of spring storm season. This means strong/severe thunderstorms with possible and/or probable tornadic activity. I've already emailed my students to tell them that while my morning office hours will be in session as usual (because, well, I'll have to be there to teach them), if it gets nasty or is going to get nasty, I am getting my ass back up to Newton in order to be able to get my car in the garage and protect the cats, and advised them to take the same sort of precautionary measures in their own lives as well. No, you can't predict where or when a tornado is going to hit, but you can be damned sure that in Kansas, when the weather people say that they're possible and conditions are ripe for them, at least a few of them will pop up -- especially when words like "outbreak" are being thrown around a lot in their forecasts. Part of it is that I'd rather be home when these storms hit, and part of it is also that in the parking lot on campus, everyone parks out in the wide open -- there's no protection for any of our cars whatsoever. If golf-ball-size hail rolls through because there's a tornado a few miles away, the campus parking lots are like a shooting gallery, and my car's already falling apart; the last thing it needs is hail damage to the body or glass. My car is my livelihood, as you know, and I need it on a pretty daily basis for at least another month. I'd rather not put another several hundred dollars into it to replace the windshield and back glass if I can avoid it. Wichita will have tornadoes roll through the city and its suburbs once in a while -- there were a few last spring that did some crazy damage a few miles from campus -- but Newton, even though it's flatter and more spread out, hasn't had anything substantial up here since several years before I moved here. And here, I have a garage. That's a definite plus. Two definite pluses, actually.

Now that I've said that, of course...

Anyway.

Today I am incredibly tired. I don't know why. I slept until almost 2PM, which means I will more than likely have trouble getting back to sleep tonight. I told Daisy last night before she went to work that I think my body and stress levels from before comps are catching up with me, and not in all the good ways -- my body is super-tired; I'm frequently exhausted both mentally and physically, and I am always at least a little bit hungry when I'm at home. I'm going to cook dinner in a little while, and then if I'm tired enough, I'll go back to bed. I didn't even think of looking at my taxes today until a little while ago, mainly because of that whole "being exhausted" factor. Wednesday, I suppose. Wednesday I'll take care of everything I can, everything I have to do. Mind you, I don't want to wait that long, but I'm just tired.