Governing values for a dean (well, for me)

So, there's this mindset I'm discovering in my new job.   Administrators hear a lot of complaints, and in particular, they hear a lot of complaints about the stuff that they themselves are doing or about their own personalities or whatever.   And the way that people deal with the criticism can sometimes be a kind of bunker mentality, to play defense, and to presume that no matter what they do, it's just never going to make people happy.  

This mentality is not me.  But I've been realizing that if I'm going to be working shoulder-to-shoulder with people in bunker mode, or even if I'm working on my own and have to talk with irate faculty/students/parents, I'm going to need a strategy that keeps me sane (optimistic, even) while still being able to work with people who are upset.  

I've decided to use a page from the book of Annie Grace, who runs the 30-day Alcohol Experiment:  to go with "curiosity".   I think (hope?) that I can respond mentally to a rant with a kind of "this emotion/information is not what I expected.  I wonder if there is information I am missing?  Can I figure out the source of the fear/anger?  What about this situation is really the key point to address?"   I've found that going for curiosity keeps me from taking a conversation personally, and it helps me to focus on the topic at hand rather than about my own feelings or my own righteousness.   Ironically, when I'm not trying to make myself feel better or justify my actions, I often end the conversation with both of us feeling better about a path forward.

All that is a lead-in to describing a set of "Governing Values" I've written for myself as a new Associate Dean.  I have a personal set of such Governing Values; I keep this list in my planner and try to re-read them about once a week.  I've been doing that for years.  The dean list is new to me, and we'll see how well it stands up to the experiment of my first year in this position.   At any rate, here goes:

Governing Values for Deputy Deaning

I am curious. This role is a fantastic opportunity for me to learn about myself, the college, and the many people here.

I am actively optimistic.   I bring positive energy that helps all others do their best.  I encourage the people I interact with, and cheer for their accomplishments. 

I am respectful.   I assume, as a default, that people are sincere and that they are capable.  I respond in a timely way to concerns.  I do not gossip or bad-mouth people.

I am consultative, and I use my position to be the voice of those who are not as easily heard.  

These statements are not perfect reflections of the truth --- in particular, when I re-read the sentence "I do not gossip or bad-mouth people" I feel all guilty because actually, I do gossip and bad-mouth people.   But I think they're good aspirations to have, and I hope that by keeping this list close by I can live more and more up to it.  

Will this work?  I dunno.  I guess we'll all have to be curious about how well these values steer me through the year to come.

mailbox construction

A while back, my daughter told me that she missed having a mailbox with a flag -- the kind of flag you raise to let the mail carrier you have outgoing mail in the box, and that the mail carrier lowers to let you know that they've passed by and maybe you have new mail.  Semaphore communication, with time lag.  

I myself was missing having a mail box.  Our new house came equipped with a tiny little mail slot, very low in the front door, which I can only imagine is a total pain for the mail carrier:  open the screen door, squoosh and fold the magazines so they can fit through the tiny slot, bend over low, lift the flap with one hand and push the mail through with the other . . . ugh.

So, I set about making  a pair of mailboxes, one for my kiddo and one for me.  Fortunately, I happened to have exactly the right material.  That is, I had some old wooden doors, the kind that come in various thicknesses because they had thick frames and skinny panels.  I'd disassembled these doors to use the long parts for some other lumber project, and I still had the short parts.  Clearly, clearly, these short parts want to become mailboxes in their next life.  

Et voila!  Here is an unpainted version.  Note the cool pointy-beveled front edge that used to be where the door went from thick to thin.  The flag is made from . . . I think a rod from some old blinds we no longer own and a spare piece of fabric.

I didn't have hinges lying around, so I improvised.  The bottom part of the box has two eye bolts, and the lid has two long screws that stick out through the eye bolts --- kind of like the bolts on the neck of Frankenstein's monster.   This system works well!

My daughter is going to have her front porch repaired and then painted her favorite color, and when that happens I'll use some of the paint to match the mailbox to the porch.  But since I've given her star-wars-themed presents for many of her birthdays, I stuck a Yoda sticker on the unpainted version when I gave it to her.  

Lovely!!!  (???)

Here's the second mailbox, now in service on my own porch.  Our mail carrier seems very happy to use this.  Yay!  And it's nice for us, too, that we no longer have to step on our mail as we walk into the house. 

 

Making a Mud Kitchen

In our latest installment of "Stuff Made Out of Other Stuff", the Miser Maker Conglomerate is pleased to present . . . the Mud Kitchen.

The main materials that went into the Mud Kitchen consist of

• a paint-spattered, plastic dishpan left in a dusty corner of the basement, by the previous owner of my daughter's home;
• four trash-picked garden(?) posts, rescued during a morning run from the fate of landfill burial a few years back, and
• a black wooden desk, put out at the curb by some of my neighbors, and disassembled by me and Prewash with help from my handy cordless drill.   (Actually, Prewash didn't really help very much in the disassembly, but she was very happy to keep me company).  

Oh, and apparently I also used a pair of 2x4's I'd gotten from somewhere.  Why the heck did I have those lying around?  No idea anymore.  

The two aspects that are the most fun of any project like this, as far as I'm concerned, are (1) making everything up as I go along, and (2) power tools.  

The making-everything-up part is an interesting puzzle.  Once I've got everything together, it's kind of obvious how it should work, but when I start, I've just got a pile of odd-sized pieces of wood and a vague idea of what the final product might look like.   I ended up using 12 different scraps of wood, most of which I had to trim down in some way.  

But the power tools, that is just playing -- so much fun.  I got to use my circular saw a bunch for the above-described trimming.   The jigsaw, for making a hole for the dishpan to sit in.  My heat gun, for removing the black paint (also works for frying bedbugs!)  A brand new orbital sander, used here for the first time.   (Where have you been all my life, orbital sander?   I own an inherited belt sander, gifted me by my dad, but as much as I love my dad I'm now a convert to the new tool).  And of course, extensive use of my cordless drill and its many fabulous attachments.  

It took me a month or so to figure out which pieces of scrap wood to use and how to bring them together, but I did successfully solve those puzzles and came up with a configuration I liked.  Last weekend I trundled down into the basement, disassembled the Mud Kitchen, loaded the pieces into the car, drove over to my granddaughter's home, and had her help me reassemble them for use in her back yard.   

Then I got to have fabulous meals:  mud soup, mulch waffles, chocolate cake . . . 

We've got another little maker in the making!

Playing it safe

It turns out, the buried treasure in the walls of my home amounted to 5 pennies and a soggy Jolly Rancher.

Two years ago, we had put in an offer on this house, and the old owners had accepted, and we were all super excited about making the move.  One of the questions I'd asked the owners was, "there's a wall safe in the dining room; what's the combination?"   

The sellers, they didn't know.   One of them told us that her sister-in-law had figured it out once, by listening carefully while spinning the dial.  They found a penny from 1973 inside; they wrote the combination on a scrap of paper, which they subsequently lost.  

Man, I can't imagine tossing the combination to a wall safe in the dining room.  It's such a cool conversation piece!

At any rate, we moved into the home, added a gazillion family photos to the wall around the safe, and then got busy with the school year.  Figuring out the combination has been on my to-do list for two years now, but of course it took a back seat to about 85 million other things that became more urgent once the pandemic struck.  My own efforts to play safe cracker never got me far; I guess I'm just not destined for a life of crime.  (Or I need to scavenge a good stethoscope?)

With vaccinations spreading in my social circles, a few friends of mine eventually took a crack at cracking the combination, but no luck.  So last week, I splurged and called a locksmith.  Because, really, what fun is an antique wall safe if you can't open it up?

The safe dial, hinged out, on its [patented!] three-arm hinge.

Fun facts: my safe was made a hundred years ago, based on a design that (the hinge proudly proclaims) was patented in 1909.   Because the company has been sold during the intervening years, we couldn't just look up the combination in company records, but the locksmith managed to unlock the mysteries of the Dining Room Wall Safe, using sensitive fingers and a bit of luck.  

The back of the [patented!] three-arm hinge had come off the safe, so the locksmith reattached it for me while regaling me with tales of army service in years gone by.  

A hole in the wall,
before we reattached the hinge to the safe.

We checked together that I could reopen the safe on my own (it's a funky sequence of numbers, truly), and I made sure I noted the combination in a few different places.   I paid the locksmith $100.70, although because of the sticky set of five pennies we recovered from inside the safe, the whole process came in at a bargain $100.65.  

Surprisingly enough, there were no pennies from 1973; the most recent one was 2017.  The soggy Jolly Rancher was undated (not to mention, very melty).   (Ew).  

Another image of the hole. 
It looks better with the door back in place.

The sol sticks around . . .

 5:36 to 8:37, that's sunrise to sunset today.  

If you include "civil twilight", it's 5:03 to 9:10.   I love the sunshine of solstice.

Behold, the view from my front porch at 9 p.m., still light out.   

It'll be light at 5 a.m. tomorrow, too, long before the road crews show up to do that work that their sandwich-board signs indicate they're revving the jack-hammers up for.

How my life is coming apart, but on purpose

I'm slowly and methodically cleaning out my math office, getting ready to move to our big old administrative building.  And as part of this cleaning, I'm going through my 5-drawer filing cabinet, trying to think about what papers I might realistically actually ever look at again.

The answer seems to be, if I do think about it, "not a lot".   I've been teaching math here for almost three decades.  I've saved syllabi, grade sheets, exams, worksheets, . . . will I ever look at any of these again?  Probably not.   I've been on committees that wrote reports.  I've led workshops for other mathematicians.  So much paper from my past, paper that's not realistically likely to be a part of my future. 

So I've been cleaning out my file drawers, bit by bit.  Because it's me, I can't just chuck it all: the idea of creating so much trash would wig me out.  Instead, I've been pulling apart my life, little by little, separating things into piles.

Here's the main sorting center. 

Going clockwise-ish around the photo from the bottom left corner I see:

• a chair for sitting in,
• now-empty hanging folders,
• now-empty manilla folders, in good enough shape to reuse,
• colored printer paper with one side blank for reuse in other projects
• a six-inch stack of white printer paper with one side blank for reuse in other projects (ah, "precyled" paper!)
• an amazing collection of paper clips and binder clips, 
• a box of to-be-recycled printer paper (both sides already used)
• a small bankers box of paper that I might actually want to look at again, so I'll move it with me.

Not pictured is another box of mixed paper to recycle, and another giant box of to-be-recycled printer paper that already filled up, so that the photo above shows the second, not first, such box.  

Also not pictured is a pile of my past calculus exams, which I'll gift to our new visiting faculty members, which they can use (or not) to come up with exams of their own, or to offer to students as study guides.  I feel like that might actually be a helpful gift.  

I've finished about half of the filing cabinet now, maybe a tad more.  I'm about to get to the section with papers I've written, which will be a little bit harder to pare down, but still has vast potential for winnowing.  (I really, really, do not need draft copies of papers that I have final, formal versions of.  I probably don't even need paper copies of the final versions, but I bet I'll keep a copy of each paper anyway because . . . well, not sure, but I probably will).

This sorting, not surprisingly, takes a bunch of time.  But it feels good to do it.  It reminds me of what I've heard about something called "Swedish Death Cleaning", which I admit I don't actually know very well so I might have the description wrong, but what I seem to have heard is that this is the cleaning that elderly parents do of their own homes so the kids don't have to go through so much stuff after the parents die.  For me, this paper sorting feels like I'm saving some as-yet-unknown person (a family member, a colleague, who knows?) a bunch of headache of having to wonder which of these papers might be relevant to anyone else.  

money well spent . . . ceiling fan fixture

 Here's the view from my bed this morning, looking up.  

The ceiling fixture used to be a dim little light fixture whose power cord was threaded through a little pencil hole in the plaster, and that was screwed directly into the plaster.  Last summer, I kept my room cool (?) with a window fan, which was noisy, and promised myself I'd install that ceiling fan soon.   But that was before I realized there was no fixture box up there.

At any rate, I hired my favorite team of household do-everything guys, Nate and Todd.  They sliced holes in the plaster, installed a solid fixture box that wouldn't come crashing down on my head, ran a few modern wires through the ceiling, installed a new switched outlet and switch in another part of the room so we could add reading lamps, and repaired the plaster.  Oh, and then they hung the fan because even though I could do that part, they were already there.  

It was a bit pricey (almost, but not quite, $1000).  But I love my ceiling fan; it's beautiful and quiet and makes sleeping in hot weather so much nicer.