Bleah. Have some sort of Bug O'Doom. I fell into bed last night after a pleasingly strenuous evening conducting our traditional Boxing Day braai (20 people plus a thundering herd of 5 small girl-children - happy image of the evening, Evil Landlord being enthusiastically embraced around the knees by Alexandra, aged 2). Then I lay awake for hours in the more or less foetal position while my head pounded and great waves of nausea ran up and down my hapless form. (No, not the booze: I never get to drink much while I'm hosting, owing to the mad frantic. Which, I hasten to add, I rather enjoy. Also, my yearbook photo should be captioned Most Likely To Lose Her Gin At Parties).

This morning isn't much better - nausea still present, can't eat, head pounds, feeling shivery despite balmy day. Evil Landlord laughing at me a lot, but on the upside he did finish the washing up, which I stopped doing owing to the way my head fell off every time I bent over to put things into the dishwasher. Also, have been crashed on my bed for the last hour and a half, where I was unexpectedly joined by the Hobbit, who doesn't usually do beds. Odd cat: can't work out if he senses I'm ill and is trying to help, or if he senses my weakness and is waiting for me to pass out so he can gnaw on me.

Quite the most irritating part of having a recurring sinus problem is the fact that if you're feeling too sick to eat, you can't eat anything which means you can't really take anti-inflammatories for the sinus headache without them making you feel sick. Sicker. Whatever. This circle vicious, do not prod with sticks. Have managed an Advil after half a slice of dry toast, so the pain is receding a tad.

Am going back to bed now. Hope your day is better than mine.

This week I have faced the following potential melt-downs, not including my own elevated angst levels:

1. A student who will not accept the transfer credits I've awarded her; after a FOURTH round of arguments with me, she's taken it to the Dean. (Who will refer it straight back to me for comment, but that's another couple of hours of double-checking and justification).
   
2. A company sponsoring a student who has had several discussions with me about the student's curriculum and best interests, and then used a broad misinterpretation of the info I gave them to turn around and slap the poor sod with disciplinary action for misinformation.
   
3. An annoyed parent-of-student once more on my case threatening to get angry on me because the admin process I warned him would grind out the answer he needs sometime in early December, still hasn't ground it out. (Yes, it's still November).
   
4. The need to order exactly the right distribution of T-shirt sizes for my orientation leaders, now, immediately, despite the fact that I can only select the actual OLs in December when results are out. Apparently I'm supposed to count up all the sizes and then proportionally reduce the order to get to the correct number. I shudder to think of the chaos this is going to cause. OLs get extremely plaintive if you put them into the wrong-sized T-shirt.
   
5. Ongoing and completely unnecessary venue conflicts created by an administrator in another faculty getting the wrong end of the stick, repeatedly and hard, after not actually reading any of my emails properly.
   
6. Three students in crisis and tears because the Summer Term has at the last minute cancelled the courses they need to do to graduate. One of these is partially my fault, I missed a point when counting her courses early in the term, and she withdrew from a course she actually needed. Other than feeling futile remorse there is not a bloody thing I can do about this.
   

Under these circumstances the only possible response is to contemplate the lot of those more unhappy than I am, namely Not Always Right. This made me laugh until I choked. Tech support humour ftw.

The mad social whirl continues unabated. Fed raclette to jo&stv and d_hofryn on Sunday night, mmmm, cheese. Fed lasagne to waynne&jean last night, on the grounds that renovatory sods have dug up the entire floor of their house (except the bedroom) and they can't cook, sit, shower, or eat or breathe without excessive intrusion by dust. (I am all braced for our own renovations, starting in a week or two following the unexpectedly efficient approving of the plans by Council, go figure. Also go dragonroost, Man with Plan). Tonight, game. Tomorrow night, ballet. Friday night, the grad ceremony for all my orientation leaders. Weekend, collapse in the horizontal position and sleep for more hours than the weekend actually contains. Not a social butterfly, me. Require recharge time. Like a dodgy battery. Particularly since I'm once again feeling as though someone socked me in the throat several times before wantonly unplugging me from the wall socket and sticking me into the Duracell bunny to run pink fluffy marathons, or whatever. Body, she is scratched.

It's not helping that my Favourite Masters Student, TM, dropped by my office this morning in order to enthuse about all the fascinating reading she's doing, the which I have no time to do. Phooey. The problem with the glory days of postgrad lounging, free of 9-5 commitments and defined by drifting in a becomingly dilettante fashion between the computer screen, the tea supplies and the pile of new sf and toothsome, weighty critical tomes, is that one doesn't bloody appreciate them when they're happening. Mostly, of course, because one is too busy whinging about the total shortage of money, but hey, money isn't everything. By Freudian slippage I originally wrote "money isn't anything". Word.

Waaah! I wanna be a grad student again. Or, at the very least, an academic. I'm losing the lingo, because administration and student advice do not, alas, allow one to exercise the muscles of nuanced, insightful sophistication of thought - not even over the weekends, because I'm too bloody tired. If I stick around much longer I'm going to become an administrator, and heaven forfend.

Right, well, that was the second weekend in a row I haven't had internet, and frankly I'm surprised I'm as sane as I am. Two and a half hours on various helplines over two days, half of it with Telkom, ritual ptooey. Imaginet opines that there is nothing wrong with my ADSL setup, the line itself must be faulty. Telkom denies this and attempts to fob me off by insisting I report a technical fault to Imaginet, not them. The Imaginet tech guy has become my absolute hero by admitting that he quite enjoys shouting at Telkom technicians and will be delighted to do so on my behalf. I wonder if he's married?

The ginger tomcat seems to have moved in, taking full advantage of the deep psychological trauma it's caused me to cause Ounce deep psychological trauma by initially shouting at him a lot when he tried to move in. The Evil Landlord is of the opinion that Ginger is actually a hobbit, which I have to admit makes perfect sense: he seems unduly fixated on food, besides the obligatory hairiness, large feet and what appears to be an unhealthy fondness for weed. If he sticks around he's going to have to be Pippin, if only so I can shout "Fool of a Took!" irascibly every time I fall over him for the nine millionth time because he's entwined affectionately around my ankles in the hopes I'm about to offer him second breakfast. In an attempt to forestall this apparently inevitable fate I must still undertake a quick trot around the neighbourhood, possibly with Ginger in a cat box, to see if any nearby household is bewilderedly mourning his loss. Do You Recognise This Cat?:



He's actually very beautiful, and uncommonly teddy-bearish.

The internet debacle was, of course, mitigated somewhat by the usual retreat into The Middleman, panacea to all ills. Goofy Middleman Exclamations Du Jour include "What the monkey?!" "Holy jumping bananas!" "Mutual of Omaha!" "Sweet mother of Preston Tucker!" and "Hot flaming pork buns!". Dagnabbit Count, tragically, at 0 for Episode 3. Interesting time-zone unlikelinesses: Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time, Foxtrot Time, Heure Normale Du Yukon, Coordinated Universal Time, Charlie Time, Zulu Time. Bonus points for unusually delirious silliness: the Hruck Bugbear, the Wu-Han Thumb of Death, O2STK, the Clan of the Pointed Stick, gratuitous quantities of evil Lucha Libre wrestlers and the Dread Pyramid of Itzilichlitlichlitzl. I love this show.

In the Department of Extemporanea The "I Just Get These Headaches", I gave up codeine a few years back, owing to a rueful awareness that I was retreating from tension headaches into a drugged-out haze all too frequently. My life post-drugs has been surprisingly the same, and generally free of cravings; anti-inflammatories fulfil all my pain-deadening needs (except the recent rampages of Sid), while incidentally supplying a happy excuse to start the day with a chocolate doughnut occasionally. To cushion the stomach, you know.

Of course, this does mean that when I apparently spend the night sleeping in a semi-levitated state with my feet in the air and my neck at a 45^o angle and subsequently can't move properly for the back and neck pain, I greet the codeine haze like an old, dear, slightly dodgy friend. You know, the kind that arrives unexpectedly to get you involuntarily plastered the night before your life-hinging interview. Or your wedding. On the upside, codeine does tend to make me beam vaguely at students, which seems to be freaking them out a little. Heh.

Since I'm generally far too happily doped to think intelligently about Torchwood, herewith the two links I inadvertently left off the last random linkery.

• Courtesy of pumeza, who mentioned them at book club, feral houses. Weirdly beautiful. Also pleasingly reminiscent of The Family Tree, which is possibly my favourite Sheri Tepper ever.
• Twilight sex toys. (NS at all FW). You can chill the damned thing to get that authentic vampire sex experience of cold, dead flesh. Also, it sparkles in sunlight. Words fail me.

I'd say the techno-jinx is back, but actually it's Iburst's fault. Their Dashboard, the little utility that connects the wireless modem, does an auto-update when they release a new version. Monday's new version was buggy - it auto-downloaded, auto-installed and promptly crashed, meeping plaintively about missing vital components. So their clients can't connect to the internet in order to download the unbuggy version, which they released very hastily on Tuesday, presumably after a frenetic night spent flogging their engineers with scorpions. I find the whole thing rather amusing, it's one of those beautifully inevitable Catch-22 screw-ups over which some hapless developer has probably committed ritual suicide, and it's reassuring to think that I'm not the only person who achieves those. It also means, of course, that I haven't had internet at home all week, which is strangely restful.

I am very, very, very stressed. Vibrating like an over-tuned guitar string stressed. Flick me with a finger and I go "twanggggggggg!" and then bite your hand off before bursting into tears. This means that I went to book club last night having not read a single one of my book club books, because I've been obsessively-compulsively re-reading my Sookie Stackhouse collection. When under stress I seem to revert to repetitive comfort reading, something deeply undemanding which I know very well. Besides, hawt vampire sex is pleasantly distracting.

It's been a mad week of socialising, too, in between packing up my dad's flat and moving him out of the hospice and into the frail care place, which my mother and I managed this morning. Tuesday evening was extremely pleasant dinner with mac1235, tngr_spacecadet and strawberryfrog - thanks, guys. (tngr_spacecadet, please don't forget to give me the link to that academic blog!) Wednesday was game (we continue to be mean to the DM), last night was book club (until midnight, so I'm a tad frayed this morning). Tonight the Salty Cracker Club hits Masala Dosa for hipster Indian. Saturday night is d_hofryn's birthday. Sunday we give jo&stv supper. I figure I may approximately survive next week if I crowbar about an extra three days of doing absolutely nothing into the weekend. Actually, you know what? I'm going to knit. A lot. I still only have about fifty rows of a Ravenclaw scarf, but 2x2-ribbed bamboo is very soothing.

Sudden random thought: I shall attempt to harness the power of Teh Internets for good, not evil. Does anyone in my approximate vicinity happen to have a small/old TV set they're not using? Watching TV is one of the few things my papa can do in his current weakened state, and his room isn't large.

Bleah. Also gah, and phooey. My mother dashed out of the house at 9am this morning to take Da Niece to a birthday party as a proxy for my sick sister, only to discover that some thrice-accursed child of a mangy jackal, or possibly children of same, had removed the front passenger side and back driver's side wheels of her car at some stage during the night. New South Africa Strikes Again, causing the usual response (mild nausea, and a tendency to say "Well, at least no-one died" in tones of forced cheer.)

As a result I'm only now having my first proper cup of tea of the day, since the cup I'd just made when mother dashed back into the house went cold while I (a) consoled mother, (b) lent her my car to do the necessary niece-wrangling, (c) mobilised the Evil Landlord to manually shut the gate which mother forgot to do as she left, owing to a completely understandable state of fluster, (d) phoned the security company, (e) tried to phone the police, which didn't work owing to them not actually picking up the phone at any stage, (f) chatted to the security company guys, who arrived commendably quickly but didn't do much more than metaphorically kick the remaining tyres and say, "Well, yup, definitely gone, then", (g) filled in a security company incident report (5 mins), (h) chatted to the police, who arrived five minutes later after having been routinely phoned by the security company, score one for ADT, and (i) sat around for twenty-five minutes by the clock on the piano, as the nice constable man painstakingly filled in three paragraphs describing the incident. Now I am finally drinking tea and dealing with the situation, viz. by blogging it.

I'm intrigued by the choice of wheels, it seems curiously random. Alternatively, it's some form of particularly lateral ritual magic designed to bring balance to the universe. Probably not, though. I think the chanting would have woken someone up.

I was all prepared to blog about John Hughes, too, but now I'm too annoyed. Maybe tomorrow. If this pox-raddled Iburst consents to give me anything above a 30% signal, that is. Cosmic Wossnames 3, me 0. Tchah.

One of the most difficult parts of this job for me is having to tell students that they've been excluded from the faculty on academic grounds - i.e. they're not passing enough courses to be allowed to continue. This week I've seen several students who were excluded at the end of last year, have successfully appealed for readmission, but have had a disastrous first semester and have thus fallen foul of the provisional re-admission probation period. They are now outy out out, no further appeals; two of them hadn't seen the letter which informed them of this fact, and enlivened the day by bursting into tears at my desk when I enlightened them.

I hate this. My fundamental impulse, and the fundamental rationale behind this job, is to make students happy. But we run into the problem where undergrads have a wistful, naive, utopian belief, in blatant disregard of the evidence, that they can pass these courses, because it's so important for them to do so. They can't believe that it might be in their own best interests for the faculty to step in and prevent them from repeatedly beating their heads against an academic brick wall that they have only the most fractional chance of scaling. You tell a student "You're extremely likely to fail, we're saving you the time and money", and s/he retaliates with "But I know I can pass" and "You won't even give me the chance!" Um, no, you won't, and we won't. Statistics say we're not doing you any favours by doing so.

Statistics, unfortunately, are distant and unreal compared to the urgent emotional demands of the individual case. And while to many of them a university degree is talismanic, the magical bit of paper which will miraculously elevate them from, in many cases, considerable poverty and disadvantage, there's a grain of truth to the symbol. Their lives would be immeasurably better if they could pull off a degree - in many cases, they would be ratcheting themselves into the middle class more or less with their bare hands. This is their last chance at this high-status institution, and a particular door is closing in their face, leaving them confronting the notice that says, bleakly, in subtext, "YOU WEREN'T GOOD ENOUGH". However legitimate the exclusion, I hate to feel as though I'm the one closing it.

This kind of thing adds a certain emotional drain to Hellweek, which is exhausting enough that I'm a bit miffed to discover the new update on the swine 'flu scare. The infected student wasn't actually one of the ones I saw, she saw another advisor, who has been booked off work for the rest of the week as a result. Frankly, I'm jealous, a few days in bed sounds heavenly. I'm exhausted. Additionally so because I spent a slightly demented night climbing through the windows of a giant castle-like structure which was owned either by Neil Gaiman or Stephen King, while dodging (for some reason) pirates, and what I think may have been a possessed tea-chest, while also trying to entertain hordes of LARPers who kept wandering in to visit. As a symbolic dream-encapsulation of my life this week it ain't far wrong.

P.S. and if anyone actually works out the labyrinthine connections in my subject line, first go and without recourse to google, mad props. Occasionally intertextuality gets the better of me.

One of these days I might actually get my ducks in a row¹, life-wise, and afford things like, oh, I dunno, a new car. Or at least a newish car. Or at least a car under 15 years old, and one which doesn't react to the increased mileage of my dad being in Hout Bay (my fuel costs have exactly doubled since he's been here) by breaking down cheerily every week or so. In the last few weeks I have had to take it in for a leaking oil pressure gauge, a passenger window cowering in the bottom of the door and refusing to come out, and a slow puncture resulting in a new tyre. Today: on the way to Hout Bay, reaching the traffic light on the freeway intersection with the Kirstenbosch road, a sudden leap in the temperature gauge to maximum, and a madly flashing oil light.

Since I'm paranoid in the extreme about these things, I promptly turned left and coasted down the handy hill to the handy garage, where I ascertained that both the oil and the water levels were fine and the fanbelt was whole and apparently functional. Theories: (a) a kink in the cooling system so the water's not circulating; (2) a buggered fan, or (3) paranoid delusions in the temperature warning wossnames. Oh, or (4), see subject line. The invisible Diana Wynne Jones ones.

Either way, I managed to resolve the crisis by hitting my insurance company for a tow (they were polite, pleasant and efficient, provided a tow truck within 25 minutes and phoned me back three times to make sure it had arrived, so go A&G, apparently the anti-Telkom) and hitting jo&stv for a lift home (they were completely coincidentally on their way back from Hout Bay at the time). All in all, as breakdown crises go it could have been a lot worse. I definitely have to get a new cellphone, though, five calls and two SMSes and the battery is well nigh flat, from full.

After several months of wild pendulum swings for and against, I've eventually decided to have a gosh-darned birthday party, on the grounds that one doesn't leap madly and involuntarily off the precipice of one's thirties every birthday, or in fact every decade. I've sent out a bunch of invitationary sort of emails for the 27th June: if you're reading this, are in Cape Town at the time and are miffed that you didn't get an invite, please feel free to send me a motivation in triplicate as to why you should. The most likely explaination is that I had a moment of complete mental aberration.

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¹ Am I strangely alone in that this expression always makes me imagine them forming ranks and goose-stepping? Yes? Thought so.

Right, well, allow me to say that Café Viva in Claremont are, for purposes of computer repairs, rather worse than useless. They have just taken a week to look at my dad's computer, which is simultaneously screwed by a dodgy hard drive and an overdose of viruses. They have told me something different every time I've phoned them, including that the hard drive has been physically damaged by the viruses, which is to the best of my knowledge technically bollocks; they have been unable to install a new hard drive because the motherboard uses the old connections and they have no idea of when their shipment of old-style hard drives will arrive. This evening they crowned their achievements by informing me that the machine would boot up but wouldn't load XP, which is the reason I brought it to them in the first place, at which point I distinguished myself by having a hysterical crying bout in the middle of their shop floor. I then reclaimed the computer and stalked out, weeping gustily. At least they didn't have the gall to charge me anything.

I haven't been able to research computer repair facilities because the campus internet has been down all afternoon, score yet another one for the techno-jinx. I would be grateful if Capetonian technogeeks could recommend me a computer repair place within my approximate vicinity which won't actually drive me to homicidal despair.