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I'm in the right lane, headed for work

By pharyngula on August 15, 2006.
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Less than two weeks until classes begin again, and it's time to juggle syllabi, attend meetings and workshops, and scoot the kids off to school. I'm making another airport run tomorrow to pick up Skatje, whose vacation is ending. Next week, I get to deposit Connlann back in Madison (I didn't do the traditional knife fight last year, but I like Bérubé's idea of just booting him out the car door during a rolling stop—could I catch up on tradition if I then throw a bunch of knives after him?) This week I've got a division meeting, various campus-wide events, and next week it's the faculty retreat.

And then, classes. I'm teaching part of our introductory biology course again (syllabus is done, my lectures are all ready to go for that one, and developmental biology…which would be ready to go, except that I added a new supplemental book to the course this year, and need to work up how that's going to be integrated into the lectures. It's Endless Forms Most Beautiful (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by the way—I think it's going to fit in perfectly.

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I wish Endless Forms Most Beautiful would be set as supplementary reading on one of my modules.
Unfortunately the Developmental Biology module at my institute was cancelled last year...
(wanders off to moan incessantly about the state of my degree course)

I've never heard of this traditional knife fight and I was kind of wondering if I'm missing some kind of in-joke.

I haven't had a summer vacation since 2000. And I went straight from my masters writing to my newly acquired real engineering job back to doing my masters defense, back to work, and back to hand in my corrected final copy. No vacation what so freaken ever.

Maybe I should go back to school and become a biologist like PZ.

This is sort of off topic, but seems like a good place to ask. I'm looking for a good book on invertebrates with emphasis on evolution and development. Something along the lines of Dawkins' Ancestor's Tale (but with a focus on protostomes and co.) would be brilliant. Any recomendations?