After we moved here, but before I officially started as a faculty member, there was a period where I occasionally showed up on campus and talked to people, got set up, did some work, and so on. During that period, the senior faculty members in my lab decided that some of the lab's budget could be shunted to me in the form of a new computer for my office (a wise bureaucratic move on their part -- naturally, you want to spend every penny of your grant to justify its size). I gleefully went with the lab manager to the on-campus computer store and ordered a beefy machine with a beautiful 18" flat-panel monitor. I have always dreamed of having a flat-panel screen. Because of poor eyesight and a sensitivity to flicker, I tend to have problems with CRTs.

In the words of the lab manager, the computer store then proceeded to completely and utterly "butcher my order". Now, the computer store claims that their usual fulfillment time for orders is three days. We placed the order about six weeks ago. The order was written down incorrectly and had to be started from scratch about a month later. The CPU showed up shortly thereafter; the wait for the monitor continued.

Last week we got a message saying that the monitor we ordered was discontinued and that they had changed the order to a similar model that was 19". Hey, no problem, I figured; the new order must be for a model that was in stock, so I'd have it in three days.

Today I visited the store to inquire. They didn't have it, but would find out how long it would be. They called the lab manager back and told him "two more weeks". That was enough. We canceled the order and are now acquiring it from a different store. That store has it in stock and will ship it as soon as they get the order (which will take a couple more days, as we have to fill out a purchase order for it). I expect it in about a week. With fewer hassles. And for less money. Yeesh. The clincher is that apparently the employees of the store thought that I was the lab manager's assistant, because I kept going there and asking where my hardware was. Jerks.

Really, it's not that hard to sell computers (though apparently it can be difficult -- at the Bell store, I tried to buy a firewall that they had on display, and the clerk didn't know how to sell it. Seriously. He tried for twenty minutes to make it ring up, and never made it work. It would seem that the hardware at the Bell store is just a demonstration of things you might want to buy elsewhere). The computer store on campus has achieved a level of incompetence that I wouldn't have thought possible in the retail hardware world, the kind of incompetence that can only be attributed to special effort.

What's too bad is that I made the choice to keep thingo relatively anonymous. Ordinarily, I'd end this story by telling you to never buy anything from this store again. However, I can't tell you which store we're talking about. I take comfort in the fact that most of my readers know where I am, and can deduce which store I'm talking about.

I spent the last couple of days sick. It started earlier in the week with the faintest sense of being a little off. A soupçon of malaise, if I may hunt for the bon mot. Friday I called in sick (for what it's worth -- I don't think anyone noticed). My fever peaked early Saturday morning somewhere over 102°. Things began to settle down during the day on Saturday, and by this morning I felt mostly better.

When I'm sick I have a pretty well-established routine, as Nath would certainly testify. I tend to mope around all disheveled and sorrowful, soaking up pity. Actually, I think I did a pretty good job of avoiding such a deplorable attitude this time around, remaining cheerful for the most part. I bundle up in pyjamas and sweaters, wrap myself in a blanket, and drape myself over the couch. And very importantly, I take my temperature roughly every half hour. I have no idea why I do this, or why it should make me feel better, but I do it and you can stop laughing at me already. Maybe it's the scientist in me; I've never actually tracked my temperature by creating a graph, but I wouldn't put it past me. I'll do that next time and post the graph here.

I've developed one important habit over the past few years. When I'm feeling sick, particularly when it's preventing me from sleeping, I plunk down on the couch and watch Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. You know: the Shakespeare one, where Christopher Plummer keeps spouting off lines as Klingon General Chang. Now I truly enjoy this movie, though I tend to put it on so that its comfortable familiarity can create an environment in which sleep may eventually come.

Star Trek VI might have been the prescription for this past weekend as well, except that we had something even better handy. We still had seasons four and five of The Next Generation on loan from Chris. Each season has twenty-six episodes on seven DVDs. It's the Star Trek motherlode! So instead of watching Kirk and Bones escape from the Klingon penal asteroid Rura Penthe (known throughout the galaxy as The Aliens' Graveyard), I ODed on TNG. Specifically, I watched eleven episodes on Friday and six more on Saturday. The best of the lot (comprising the second half of season five) were probably "Cause and Effect" (the Groundhog Day episode) and "The Inner Light" (in which Picard lives out a whole lifetime on a planet whose sun went nova a thousand years before). Ah, the fond memories.

Now, this is more Star Trek than any reasonable (or at least healthy) person ought to watch. I truly did OD on it, in the sense that my brain was stuck in Star Trek mode the rest of the night. Then again, I was feeling much better by Sunday, so who's to say? Everyone likes to go on about how Gene Roddenberry had an overwhelmingly optimistic view of the future and the potential of humankind. Perhaps some of that translates into subliminal emanations of health and wellness from the show. Okay, that doesn't make much sense, but I'm sure the writers of the show could find some bogus technical explanation for how it could work.

Greetings from the thingo annex! I'm coming to you from the auxiliary offices of thingo central, located on a large university campus in Ontario. More precisely, I'm in my office, which is mine and belongs to me. Nobody else shares this office with me, which might allow me to actually get work done in my office for the first time in many years. You see, as much as I enjoyed sharing office space with seven other graduate students, I eventually discovered that I simply couldn't work in that environment. I could socialize with the best of them, but I couldn't focus. In the end, I think I'm simply too picky about the space in which I work. It has to be just so.

Today is the last day of my first full, official week on campus. It has been a busy and occasionally productive week. My office is finally becoming usable, which will hopefully help increase my productivity. Wednesday, the old grad student furniture was hauled out of my office. Yesterday, proper professor furniture was installed (and promptly reconfigured by me). I don't have a computer or a network connection in my office yet. But I've found a temporary solution. I've brought my laptop in from home, and connected to the building's wireless network using a loaner wireless PC adapter. The laptop's slow, but I get more work done in here than on a faster computer in a distracting environment.

By all accounts, my new computer should already have been delivered (and it's a screamer, too). We went to check on it today, and discovered that the order was botched. It will be available in a couple more days, though the monitor is on back order and will take longer.

Over the weekend, I'll get a car and bring all the toys, books, and other sundry items that will make this office a home away from home. Then I'll be ready for the intensive push leading up to the major deadlines in my research area. Just in time, too.

And now, I must depart. My research lab has a weekly social gathering at this time (yay!), and then I've got to get home and be Dad while Nath heads out for a choir audition (also yay!). Good luck to Nath!

The great progress bar nears its end, and so it is time to wrap up the thrilling roller-coaster that was the Stuff Cycle.

It's fair to say that we're pretty much moved in. Yesterday, I took the last big batch of cardboard to the transfer station to be recycled. Only a few boxes remain scattered around the apartment. I tried to take one more load of junk to the second-hand store to be reused, but they're closed until Monday. There are a few things that need to go to my office. A few other things await new pieces of furniture to hold them. But the apartment is livable, eminently so.

We're still working on becoming legit. We have temporary health coverage through the University. We become eligible for OHIP three months from our arrival in Ontario. Little Zebula will also be covered, though her situation is somewhat more complicated as she is not Canadian, at least not yet. Ontario grants her a year of coverage under OHIP as the child of Canadian parents. During that year, we must obtain her citizenship papers, a straightforward but apparently extremely slow process. In any event, she is coming up on another round of inoculations, and we'd like to find her some pediatric care in time for that.

This is the weekend before the first day of the rest of my life. Monday is the first day of classes at the University, and therefore the first full day where I can claim no other title than that of Professor. Well, Assistant Professor anyway. It's straight into hard work, with important paper submission deadlines fast approaching. All at once I will become much more of a day-job kind of guy, who comes home to his family in the evenings. Hopefully the culture shock won't be too great. And hopefully I'll be able to weasel my way out of that lifestyle to some small extent. The books for new faculty members tell you to set aside time for your own work, and that this is often accomplished by spending a day every week off campus. I can definitely see myself establishing such a pattern.

No doubt other miscellaneous duties await me on campus. The department chair said that some departments shield new faculty from committee work, and that he didn't like that approach. I expect to be thrown into a number of service positions. Overall, I'm very excited and a little bit anxious about this other side of academia. I just hope academia is excited about me.

Since the period of transition is more or less over, I can now put an end to the Stuff Cycle. I'll try to return you now to the more typical vapid, pithy mutterings you've come to expect from thingo. The good news is that I have a short list of topics for inclusion here. Let's hope I get to them before I begin to wonder why I thought they would be even remotely interesting.

A very happy new year to one and all. Here's to 2003, the year of the thingo.