Always Look On The Bright Side of Life

I like to think of myself as a fairly organized person with a relatively high level of attention-to-detail. OK, let's be honest, some would call this "anal," but I'll cut myself some slack and go with "organized."

This is why I was surprised to learn today that the first day of summer session one started on Tuesday and not Thurdsay like I originally thought.

After several moments of "Ha!, you must be mistaken..." and "No, I'm sure I read the calendar right" I realized I better ask around: "Are you sure the semester starts tomorrow?" and "I knew there wasn't much of a break between graduation and the start of the summer term, but three days, really?". I was sure I read the university calendar correctly but after going back again I saw that it said Tuesday, May 9th, in black and white. I finally acquiesced to the fact that I missed this minor detail, leaving a blemish on my organized, A-T-D sense of self. And oh yeah, I had less than 24 hours before my first class.

Fortunately I am anal, er, organized, and so most of the class was ready to go anyway. But it was a frantic afternoon nonetheless. Fortunately my research assistant, Jenn, helped out tremendously. We revised the syllabus, updated Blackboard, the online course management system, and a thousand other minor things to get ready for class. And now we're good to go!

The upside of all this is that we have two more days to learn about a topic near and dear to my heart. If I hadn't messed up the date I'm sure I would have tried to add in that extra topic into an already jam-packed syllabus, so serendipitously discovering these extra two days will actually give us some much needed breathing room at the beginning of the class.

So, in honor of that great Broadway musical, Spamalot, the lesson learned here is: always look on the bright side of life (don't forget to whistle!)