who needs corptime?

when I was working on my annual report for UVA, I opened up CorpTime for the first time since January. CorpTime is our electronic calendaring system. There was a whole mess of meetings in my inbox. Not sure how I can be scheduled for so many meetings when I'm not even there?? Might anybody care to explain?

No CorpTime here, but still much too much going on all at once. Last night, as mentioned, was the crew talent show. Tonight was a charity auction. Every moment is planned. At first, I was enjoying the meeting-less culture (so different from UVA), but it’s just a different kind of perpetual scheduling here. After working all day, tonight at 5:00 we had a life-boat drill, at 6:00 we had a faculty-dinner-meeting where a group of faculty are discussing the various challenges of teaching in this kind of environment and where I was to address some research issues, at 6:30 (for which I was 1/2 hour late), was a birthday party for one of Mary & Michael’s adopted kids (my nephew, as we’re calling these weird extended relationships), at 8:00 was Community College where Robin was presenting on Japonisme & Impressionism, at 9:00 was the charity auction. I left about 10:30 and should have just gone to sleep, but decided to check email … and then blog … first. I’m not sure precisely when students get any studying done … Although, of course, they are also willing to stay up all night long …

I left the auction just after Dr. Matt paid $175 to throw a pie in the face of Dean Mike. I bid on navigational maps earlier in the silent auction -- the printed maps the crew use to mark our route and position, signed by the crew. I stopped at $160, which already seemed frighteningly high, and they finally went for $300. All sorts of things were getting auctioned off, folks who have vacation homes and condos put weekends up for people to bid on, folks with season sports tickets put up various sets, there were handmade necklaces and such, and purchases that people have made along the way but have decided they no longer want to lug home. I imagine they’ll tell us the final tally tomorrow. Students were paying *a lot* of money for all sorts of things. It was a little bit astonishing.

We lose another hour of sleep tonight. Tomorrow, we are at GMT +11 and then the following day, we cross the international date line. We’re going to get back the 24 hours that we’re losing on the course of this voyage. May 2^nd will happen twice. Tomorrow will be Wednesday, May 2^nd and the following day will also be Wednesday, May 2^nd. Isn’t that the weirdest thing? Hard to wrap my brain around. Everybody has been complaining that it is unfair that we have lost all the time in sleep and we are gaining it back as a regular work/class day … it is indeed most unfortunate ...