October 2012

I've been posting mostly on my private journal.

I visit Mom at least once every week.  This week I have had a spike in my allergies.  I was feeling sick all this past weekend - even had to track down my rescue inhaler for asthma.  So, I missed my visit this week.

A week from today I am leaving for Japan!  I had planned on getting all organized over the weekend but allergies prevented that.  Of course, I am well enough today to go to work.  I was going to stay home if I still felt bad today. 

I hate calling in sick.  Usually, I can ignore my personal problems at work.  It makes me angry, though, that I've been losing days of personal time-off every year.  I only noticed it this year because there was a change in time keeping that coincided with October 1, my 8th year anniversary of working at Rice.

When I started the new program I was able to see that my personal time was readjusted on October 1 so that I only carried over 1 year of personal time.  Guess I should have reviewed Rice policies earlier.  Oh well.  It's too bad I couldn't haven't carried some over for my 2 week trip to Japan.

Even so, Rice is the best place I've ever worked.  I love being in the midst of the beautiful campus and intelligent people.  I like having contact with the students.  Mostly I just deal with graduate students but they still seem like kids to me, even though some are in their 30's.  They have so much energy and enthusiasm.