This photo pretty well sums up my semester. I've gotten by, but it's taken some pretty clever, last second inspirations to make it (note the ziplock bag around my sock to prevent my foot from getting wet in the deep snow).

I teach a Thursday night Geology 101 lab. There are something like 11 girls and 3 guys in the class, so it has an interesting dynamic. Anyway, for about the 10th time this semester, I locked myself out of my office. The problem was it was 7:00 pm at night, I was on my way down to the lab room to open the door and begin class, and nobody was left in the department to let me into my office. So I get down to the lab room, and all the students are standing around the door, waiting to get in. I check the door and sure enough it's locked. "Ok" I thought. "Stay calm." The smartest thing I could think of was to mill around with the students for a minute or so, making dumb jokes and pretending to act like I had the situation under control. Then suddenly inspiration strikes and I decide to hold class in the graduate student computer lab. After a few minutes it seemed to be working out well enough, but then I realized that we needed calculators and rulers. This forced me to dig into my bag of magic tricks for a second time that night, and I decided to log myself into the computers so they could use the windows calculator. Rulers turned out to be a bit trickier, but after some searching I found a few protracters and told the students to use them. After about 45 minutes of this organized chaos, Caleb walks in, and is pretty surprised to see 14 people in the lab. I stride over confidently and say, "Caleb, boy am I glad to see you. As you can see I locked myself out of my office again."

Anyway, long story short, I've been awarded the department's travelling award, the "Brunetto Award" which is given to the individual who displays the most brilliance in the department (ok, actually the person who does something really stupid). The actual trophy is the gravestone of a guy named Brunetto. Photos will come when I actually get my hands on the trophy. And one more thing, I won the award for a completely different incident. Sweet huh. I love it here in Idaho.

Ed