It has been an extraordinarily eventful couple of months, beginning on a horrible note and ending with great promise. On April 16, Rich had a mild heart attack: we’d had one last, hideous 8" snow (the heavy nasty kind), and he foolishly decided that he absolutely had to snowblow our driveway (where I’d stupidly gotten my car stuck) with our behemoth of a snow-blower, despite fighting a bad case of shingles! Fortunately, I was there at the time, and the ambulance arrived within minutes. Cat... read more

This is a story about my new job and my immediate superior and his sudden demise last week, leaving me utterly flabbergasted and *really* saddened. I'm putting it in writing both to come to grips with it better myself and to raise the question that I posed in the title: how is it that people (ourselves included?) can be so wise about everyone else's behaviors but their own?

So this guy got hired as the Chair of the Division of Social Sciences right before I came on; in fact, the reason ... read more