Missouri Life

Greetings from Missouri!

Life here hasn't been too bad—we're mostly moved into the house and have settled into a routine. We live on the far north side of Columbia. That means away from all the college students, but unfortunately away from all the social-y stuff as well. Columbia's a nice town though, and if we do go out, there's lots of exploring to get done (it's ~110,000 people). We have a couple sets of friends in the area as well, including one with kittens, so we tend to end up all over.

Four of us are living together (myself, Andrew R McHugh, Andrew Robertson, and Sam), two of whom I've lived with before so there's not a lot of adjusting to be done on that front. The house is nothing special, a four bed, three bath duplex that we keep at 77F when we do turn on the A/C (which is usually just when we have guests).

View of the living room
(Sam brews beer. That's all that stuff by the door)

A mostly clean view of my room. McHugh's is the messy one
you can see through my door.

I've been keeping a fairly normal schedule recently, commuting 5 days a week to school for my job (it's about ~45m to Fulton, but they don't expect me there right at 8 so it's been easy enough). So far I've mostly been managing login problems and other basic IT work for students, but I've spent a lot of my down time designing advising toolkits so academic advisors and alumni advisors will know what to do with the data coming out of students' e-portfolios. I don't see my supervisor very often (I think it's been a week), and I have a lot of freedom because the non-techy faculty basically assume I'm working magic. I have an "office" though!

My "desk art." It's a paper model I made of the USS Voyager,
from the TV Series Star Trek: Voyager. The quotes are from
Captain Janeway, my favorite character, on how to lead

My office at least has a good view. The silver
board to the right of my desk is my other personal
touch. It was one of my birthday gifts last year
and has a diagram of Derek Parfit's
"The Practical Problem and its Solutions,"
which I use almost daily.

I say "office," because two afternoons a week, it's former resident shows up and shares it with me (because he doesn't like sharing his current office? I'm not entirely sure why he's there). Then of course there's all the HR materials that people are always coming in and getting, plus the two printers student workers are always using...really I just have a space and the room is a common area.*

*Granted, it's still all a bit frustrating because one of the complaints about the Sustainability Fellow campaign (My position is equivalent but for the e-portfolios) was that we hadn't specified where such a person would be housed. So we did some research and learned that that was the job of the Space Allocation Committee—except, apparently, when it's not. My "office" was found and set up for me in less than two days. When the school actually wants something, the school gets it. They just didn't want the Sustainability Fellow.

I don't think much else is happening here really worth noting (I'm finishing books, riding my bike, etc). Hope everyone else is doing well!