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What to Write?

I am in the midst of my tri-yearly gutting and cleaning of all work spaces in my life. My lab, my inner and outer offices, my den at home, and even all of my various computers. The one challenge I have as a professor is in the handling of all the paper I receive. The obvious pieces are easy enough to deal with... tests and papers that come in on time are all systematically graded and returned to students. But over the course of a semester, a surprisingly huge amount of paper accumulates from a myriad of sources... newspapers, journals, reprints of journal articles, University "junk mail" from various sources, papers and exams never retrieved by students, and on and on.

I do my best to keep these papers tamed and in line every day, but over the course of a semester, they infiltrate virtually every nook, cranny, bookshelf and area in my work spaces (the oddest thing I found so far is a small oragami sculpture someone made out of a piece of bright orange paper and inserted into the bowl of one of my pipes that were rarely used and were sitting in the pipe rack that sits on the far end of one of the windowsills in my lab. I cannot imagine which student put it there.

So, this past day and likely all of Wednesday as well are being spent on the mind-numbing, no-thought-allowed tasks of cleaning and organizing my work areas to again begin another beautiful semester of thought, teaching, learning, and research. I wish I had more interesting things to report to you today, but my "cleaning mood" mind is about as creative and exciting as room temperature decaffeinated coffee.

I suspect I will have more creative juices flowing tomorrow night.

However, I must note that I am very pleased that Hillary Clinton won the Democratic Primary in New Hampshire. I think she would be an excellent president, and I feel that she is our best hope on many issues... especially in our acquiring universal health care. Obama is a decent fellow, but in my opinion, not as outstanding as Senator Clinton. I think Obama would be an excellent vice presidential candidate for Hillary Clinton to select.

PipeTobacco