Slow blogging day around here yesterday, because UD was busy with her first day of classes.
She returned to her office after months away and found a number of fun things there.
Remember her great victory (well, first runner-up) in the 2010 Washington DC Bloomsday reading? Her award – a fine, framed Joycean map of Ireland – was on her door, with a congratulatory note from one of her colleagues.
On UD‘s desk sat a grand new computer she couldn’t use because she didn’t know its password.
Hearing her old friend Connie’s voice down the hall — Connie, department office manager, will fix this! — UD bawled out her name, and Connie came running and figured out the password.
As if this weren’t enough goodies, there was this congratulatory note on her desk (something about how UD‘s been teaching at GW for a long time) with a gift next to it: A glass apple paperweight.
UD wrote a thank you email for it, and then put it to work holding down a stack of syllabi.
In her pile of mail, she was particularly happy to see an invitation to an event of some kind at the National Press Club sponsored by Oxford University Press (the event had already happened). She was happy because it was addressed to
MARGARET SOLTAN
UNIVERSITY DIARIES
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT …
They’re addressing me by my blog now!