I usually don’t post work stuff to this blog, but I’m not sure I want to broadcast this anymore than it already has been. Let’s just say, I’m beginning to learn some of the oddities of working for the State of New York.

I returned from almost two weeks out of the office (our trip to Utah, and then a conference in NYC) to find our Union newsletter in my mailbox. I leafed through it to find a few pages of what I thought was a telephone directory. As I usually do, I looked for my own name to make sure they got it right. Wait, that’s not my phone number…. That’s my salary! Yes, in order to be above reproach when it comes to spending tax monies, the union publishes annually a list of all faculty and staff salaries.

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When we were shopping for a car, we knew we wanted a hatchback or wagon. My first thought was a VW Golf, but Brooke didn’t like the way they looked, and she had a bad experience with an old VW Rabbit when she was a teen. Eventually, we bought a Pontiac Vibe, and we couldn’t be happier with it.

However, on our recent epic road trip, we rented a car because putting that much mileage on ours would require an oil change and expire our extended warrantee (we’re waiting for a new CD player to arrive at our local dealership since ours started skipping a few months ago). We ordered a “mid-sized” car from Alamo, which the website said was a “Pontiac G6 or similar.” Apparently, that would include a VW Rabbit, which is more than two feet shorter. We didn’t have time to argue, since we were burning valuable daylight, so we wound up taking an extended test drive in the Gehrrmahn small car.

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I wasn’t sure how I should deflate after spending 67 hours in the car over five days. I decided reviewing what I liked (and didn’t like) about the states we crossed might be therapeutic.

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My grandfather passed away just over a week ago. We thought about going to the funeral, but flying at the last minute (even with the bereavement fare) would mean only one of us could go, so we decided not to go.

Then my mother called late Thursday night reminding Brooke that my grandmother wanted her to sing Irvin Berlin’s “Always” at their funerals. She told us to get to Utah by any means possible. It would have been indicative of my relationship with my family for my wife to fly to my grandfather’s funeral while I stayed home with the boys, but instead we rented a car and headed out after work on Friday. (BTW, last week was Spring Break here, so I didn’t miss much on campus.)

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Question: Why would a nationally-ranked college basketball team televise their games to 1.4 million households, while the nationally-ranked volleyball team at the same university would broadcast to 44 million, plus everyone else with broadband Internet?

For those of you who don’t know, the Mountain West Conference of the NCAA got snookered into a really bad TV deal a few years ago. They initially signed with CSTV, rather than ESPN. This would mean that more of their conference football and basketball games would get broadcast, but to fewer homes than ESPN.

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I remember being a precocious five-year-old who drove his parents crazy with questions like, “Why do we have to go to church during summer vacation?” It seemed to me that church was just another school (something you went to without knowing why), so they should break at the same time.

Well, it’s not quite the same thing, but my children now know that, like school, church can be “snowed-out.” I was shoveling our driveway so we could back out when the call came that church was canceled. I’m still trying to get that through my mind, because if there has been one constant in my life, it’s been weekly church.

I just noticed my first post was about five years ago. Wow.

What’s scary about that is I can vividly remember sitting at my desk in my old lab messing with the CSS on a page I called “Abu Benyamin” (Ben’s dad). Since then, I’ve worked in Egypt, dropped Arabic, taken my family to France,  had another child, started teaching, worked for the National Research Council, presented over a dozen research papers, finished my PhD, moved my family 2,000 miles, and started a professorship. That’s a lot, even for five years.

By the way, we’re averaging one post every four days (or so) over the last five years.