Intersection Logs

Today the campus did not -- quite -- get rained on, but it stayed cloudy and relatively cool all day, most unlike your usual Tucson summer day. Unfortunately, my body seems to have taken this as its cue to curl up and go to sleep, which is not exactly feasible right now. I came home a bit early and lay down for a while, but I should pack tonight, and arrange my transportation to the Phoenix airport for Friday, at the very least.

I'm still considering the possibility of not taking my laptop on vacation, instead relying on my mother's, which is not very fast and only has OpenOffice, and the PDA for my internet and word-processing needs. Butterfly is relatively light, but it's still six or seven delicate pounds that for once I don't absolutely have to totehave sitting on my toes all the way across the Atlantic.


I got two Idaho quarters in my change for this afternoon's lemonade, rather to my surprise.

I found a Montana quarter at the coffee cart today! That probably means that the next one in the series will be out any day now; they always take a while to filter down here, for some reason. I haven't seen a George Washington dollar yet, but since they took away the stamp machine in the Union my chances of meeting a dollar coin at all are pretty low.


(Is it just me being clumsy, or is LJ mangling my HTML today? It took me three goes to get the cut right in the last entry, and I don't usually have any trouble with that.)

... including Bibles. I was browsing the Bible section in Barnes&Noble this lunchtime, and noticed a rather tacky little CEV with an elaborate gilt cross design on the cover. Printed in China. The mind boggles.

Also, I got a North Dakota quarter in my change for lunch. So there are now two non-nickel coins in circulation with buffalo designs!

Not making any headway at all on getting back in synch, as far as I can tell. Nine hours of eastbound jetlag do not mix well with trying to work; the fact that I dozed a bit on the plane just seems to mean that I'm not quite exhausted enough to sleep properly. When my brain is functioning at all it's working overtime on processing the China experience.

Tonight I'm going to see if I can catch the downswing and get to sleep at a decent hour.

I did finally get a Nebraska quarter today.

106-degree high, for the second day running. Sometime after 5pm, the air conditioning in our part of the building ceased to do anything very useful. We bailed out around 6, when the temperature in the office hit 84. (It's usually around 76-78 in the summer).

I found my first Minnesota quarter in my pocket this afternoon; it must have been in my change when I bought coffee this morning.


I might get an Amazon package tomorrow. Or not, Airborne Home's tracking being what it is. I'm also being tempted by Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. Anyone have any opinions on that one?

The temperature dropped by about ten degrees overnight, but the storms plaguing California seem to have rained themselves out before getting this far. The stars were very bright this evening, and the slender crescent moon was very sharp.

The students are back. Their imminent arrival has been foreshadowed in the last couple of days by the sudden appearance of greeters in the bookstore, and a noticeably higher people-density around campus, but today they're really back. This means that it is once more hard to find a table in the Student Union eateries; on the other hand, there's a student newspaper to read. At least the new, expanded bookstore is capable of absorbing the beginning-of-semester rush without becoming unusable for lunchtime browsing. I have nightmarish memories of ribbon barriers snaking in among the general books, rendering the SF section nearly inaccessible, in the cramped old premises.

Several of us at work collect State Quarters. We're not terribly serious coin-geeks, but it's always fun to get one's first instance of a new one. We've noticed, though, that Arizona seems to be very late to get each new issue; we still don't know anyone who's seen a Wisconsin one, though the local paper was very excited yesterday about some apparent mis-strikes that have been sighted around town. Now we have evidence: one of my colleagues discovered a site that lists 'first sightings' of each quarter, and indeed, they've been turning up late in Arizona. It's also evidence, one suspects, that some people have far too much time on their hands.