Well, first day of the semester in-person (third week in actuality) got off to a rousing start; I woke up with a pulled muscle in my back. Not super-painful, thankfully, more twingy when I move the wrong way, but it’s making me clumsy, witness the fact that I spilled my chai all over my desk first thing on arrival. Sigh.
On the plus side, I have now cleaned my desk and it is probably cleaner than it’s been since I started teaching at UIC over a decade ago. So that’s something.
And I was lucky that I teach late enough that the roads were mostly cleared by the time I was driving into campus — we had a lot of snow overnight and this morning, and the poor folks who had to go in early before they’d cleared the roads had hours of extra commute time (and isn’t this exactly the situation where everyone who CAN switch to working remote for the morning, probably SHOULD? Which would also let the snowplows clear the roads a whole lot faster. We need a cultural paradigm shift.)
Anyway, my hair is newly purple, my mask matches my top, I’m wearing a pair of adorable typewriter earrings, so I’m pretty set for English teachering my way through today’s classes.
Now, just crossing my fingers that the lines for PCR testing (all faculty / staff / students are required to do one within 72 hours of first day on campus) aren’t TOO long. I’m hoping to get it done on my lunch break between classes; they have a bunch of free testing sites on campus. We’ll see…
(I bought this top second-hand and hemmed it up to get enough fabric to sew the matching mask. I feel like Susan Lee told me she found the same top at Modcloth, but I’m not seeing it there on a quick search. If you know where it’s from, throw it in comments, please! 
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