Category: work

$300,383,642

I love that I played a (small) part in this:

Carleton College Announces Completion of $300 Million Fundraising Campaign (July 1, 2010)

Northfield, Minn. — Carleton College has announced the successful completion of its largest-ever fundraising campaign. Breaking Barriers, Creating Connections: The Campaign for Carleton has exceeded its goal, raising more than $300 million from alumni, parents, friends, corporations and foundations. One-third of all campaign dollars were given by members of the Carleton Board of Trustees and 76 percent of all alumni contributed to the campaign…

Carleton began the campaign in 2004 with an ambitious goal of raising $300 million by June 30, 2010. As of today, the College has received a total of $300,383,642 in gifts and pledges from 23,148 donors toward three strategic initiatives: enriching the teaching and learning environment by creating better ways for students to learn broadly and deeply; broadening access for students from increasingly diverse backgrounds; and enhancing the College’s physical facilities in ways that effectively support a leading liberal arts college in the 21st century.

New View

The lovely view out my office window of a tree and passersby on the sidewalk was been lost for the summer by this view, of the scaffolding necessary to do some loud and smelly repairs on our building. As one of my coworkers said when we were sharing mild complaints about the noise and stench, “I’m just glad the College has the money to fix the buildings!” Hear, hear – but I can’t wait till I don’t have hammer drills going outside my window again.
The View from My Office

Goodsell Death Ray

All the construction outside Goodsell Observatory at Carleton means that the College has finally begun the construction of our long-awaited death ray.

Goodsell Projects

Once installed, sometime next month, we will conduct preliminary tests on people who’ve let their dogs off leash in the Arb. When the instrument is properly calibrated, we’ll burn a clown nose on the head of the rampant lion on the west wall of St. Olaf’s slightly-too-fancy student center, Buntrock Commons. Finally, with the ray fully operational, we’ll zap our competitors where we know it’ll hurt: in their endowment managers’ offices.

No (Competition for) Parking

Today was one of those days on which all the undergrads take themselves – along with their odd clothes, their work ethics, and their unusual hairstyles – away from campus on the big white Northfield Lines buses.

Sad.

On the plus side, though, there’s no competition for space at the bike rack now. I think my bike’s a little lonely.
Bike Rack at the End of the Year

Leash Law

This sign, on a trail in Carleton’s Arb near the Rec Center, has borne this bit of editorializing about Carleton’s now-retiring president, Rob Oden, for as long as I’ve been working at Carleton. I wonder if the author of this graffito will return to modify it for the new president, Steve Poskanzer? (Click through for a more legible full-sized image.)

Oden Sign

Time to Look at Modern Fatherhood

Like a lot of people, my weekends usually end with a feeling of being pretty much totalled.

Many of the reasons are predictable: the pulls of any weekend’s errands and miscellaneous activities, the demands of being an involved parent to the girls, the need to stay current with work. The end result, though, is that a weekend is not in any way restful or relaxing, nor very “productive” (unless, like a good feminist, I consider childcare to be a form of production). And given that each weekend leads directly, of course, to a new work week, there’s pretty much no time to rest, much less recuperate.

I finally sat down today to crunch some numbers about all this. (Fittingly, I’m writing this post against the backdrop of Genevieve crying and Julia whining from their beds after the angst-inducing Sunday-night bedtime routine went totally off the rails. Memo to offspring: “Ten minutes till bedtime” really does mean “Ten minutes till bedtime.”)

By my calculations, I figure that on each week day, I spend about 8.5 hours at work and another 4.5 hours or so doing direct childcare – 6:30 to 7:45 each morning, 4:30 to 8:00 each evening. (Each morning, I handle breakfast and several other chores; each evening I do everything except prepare dinner.)

On the weekends, I’m “on the clock” for about twelve hours – from 6:30 in the morning to 8:00 at night, minus the girls’ 90 minute naps. Over those hours, I do pretty much everything with and for the girls, and it’s unusual for Shannon to be part of anything we’re doing except for making and serving lunch, dinner, and snacks and a stray playdate or such. This means that I handle the girls’ breakfasts (as well as increasingly many lunches and snacks), take care of their naptimes and baths, undertake various indoor and outdoor activities with them, bring them along on errands, et cetera.

Put another way, I spend virtually no daylight weekend time doing anything that’s not centered on the girls – no watching sports on TV, no hanging out with friends, no long workouts, no trips to the Northfield Target (much less the nearest mall), no time in the office, etc. The only serious exception to this occurs during their naps, when I usually sneak in an hour’s run or bike ride.

However hard it is to remember at 8:09 on Sunday night, many of our weekend activities are fun: our Saturday-morning breakfasts at the coffeeshop, riding bikes on campus, walking in the Arb, going to the playground. Just the same, many are either rote, must-do activities (lunch, baths, nap and bed time) or actively unpleasant ones (wiping bottoms [eleven times today, fourteen times yesterday!], dealing with fussing over the must-do activities and/or the fun ones).

These hours of childcare amount to a time commitment of about 46 hours each week – hours spent in addition to regular work hours, and, starting this week, my fairly intensive online teaching job. I will no longer wonder why I feel physically and psychologically wrecked on Sunday (or Tuesday, or Thursday) nights.

Presidential Timber

Today, Carleton named its eleventh president: Steven Poskanzer, J.D., the current president of the State University of New York at New Paltz. The College’s search for the new president was fast, but very effective, and everyone seems to be immediately pleased with the choice.

At a short event this afternoon – one which was attended by a majority of faculty and staff and a good chunk of the student population –  Poskanzer gave a nice speech that (of course) hit all the right notes. I was struck by the number of emotional references he made – “bottom of my heart,” “very inspiring,” “moving,” and so forth – and by the careful way he mentioned staff as well as faculty and students. Both were nice touches.

This set of video clips offers a good sense of Poskanzer as a speaker and shows that he assembled a very accurate sense of the College through the search process. I’m sad to see our current, retiring president leave, but I think Poskanzer looks like the right guy for the job.

Deadline Day Office

I usually keep my office moderately tidy, neither at the “clean desk = sick mind” end of the continuum or the (in)famous “Geologist’s Office” end of the continuum.* But on deadline days like today (especially like today, with two big federal proposals going out), all bets are off. Click through for notes.

Deadline Day Office

*This photo by Alec Soth is part of a stunning 2002 exhibit of photographs of locales around the Carleton campus, “Vantage Points.”

Crashing at Carleton

I dunno if it’s the longer days or what, but I’ve noticed a lot of Carleton students sleeping all around campus lately:

  • on the sofas in the student center – sitting up, lying down; one and two to a couch
  • face-down at a table in the library
  • reclining in an Adirondack chair on the Bald Spot
  • leaning against a tree in front of one of the academic buildings
  • on a bench in front of the library
  • sitting in a chair outside the president’s office
  • lying in a spot of sun under an oak tree

I’m halfway amused by the kids’ abilities to sleep almost anywhere, but halfway inclined to shake them awake and shout, “You’ll never feel more energetic than you do in college! Get moving!”

Birthday Eating Report

A list of things that I didn’t feel bad about consuming today…

Morning

  • a blackberry danish
  • a large cold-press coffee

Noon

  • a big meat-and-potatoes(-and-salad-and-soup) lunch
  • a flourless chocolate torte
  • another flourless chocolate torte

Night

  • a big homemade burger-and-fries(-and-salad) dinner
  • a birthday cupcake [4/14 addition: “my wife’s homemade specialty dark chocolate cake with her homemade specialty buttercream icing”]
  • another birthday cupcake
  • a “milk chocolate peanut butter pretzel cluster” from Target (125% better than it sounds)
  • a Leinenkugel’s 1888 Bock beer

Cows, Colleges, and Confines

Last week, I realized that – except for a short work meeting in the next town (a nice enough place, but hardly a destination) I’ve been outside Northfield only once since October 2009. No wonder I’m going stir crazy.

July 2009
July 8-10: took business trip to upstate New York
July 20: attended morning workshop in St. Paul, afternoon visit with friends in Minneapolis

August 2009
August 13-15: took family trip to Moorhead
August 26: biked to Faribault

September 2009
September 5: saw friends in Minneapolis
September 15: went to work meeting in St. Paul
September 18: biked to Kenyon, Minnesota

October 2009
October 4: saw friends in Rochester, Minnesota

November 2009
no trips outside Northfield

December 2009
no trips outside Northfield

January 2010
no trips outside Northfield

February 2010
February 7: raced the City of Lakes Loppet in Minneapolis
February 22: attended work meeting in Faribault

March 2010
no trips outside Northfield

April 2010
two work-related trips scheduled, to St. Paul and Collegeville, Minnesota

Against this backdrop, that possible business trip to Grinnell, Iowa, in July is looking awfully tempting.

Typos That Should Be Words

Cribbing from and adding to my own status update from this morning, a list typos which should be actual words, since I type them ten times a minute:

  • fitler
  • colelge
  • facutly
  • foundatino
  • coruse
  • doign
  • fellowshiop
  • questino
  • storng
  • inforation
  • besauce
  • Northfiled
  • sking
  • proposal
  • nartative
  • mesasage
  • pelase
  • tahnks
  • intsrument
  • curficulum
  • becasue (für Elise)

New Digs

I was very exciting when I arrived on campus this morning to see that Carleton is immediately starting to put up a new building, the William H. Sallmon Administrative Building. As President Oden says in the video announcement of the project, the building will be devoted to offices for Carleton’s large and growing administrative staff. In other words, me! Thank god. I need a new office, with room for a sofa and, I hope, a nice view.

Note the heavy machinery in place to start construction right away this morning.
Sallmon Administrative Building

A more legible close up of the sign.
Sallmon Administrative Building

A-Okay Oakebeiner

Turnaround Trees

I know that for really fit and fast skiers, the men and women who win citizens’ races and better, 50 kilometers is a serious but not frighteningly tough distance to ski, either as training or in a race.

On the other hand, this middle-of-the-pack racer found 50 kilometers to be an awfully long way to ski – and simultaneously a fun way to spend the better part of an afternoon. Conditions were fantastic, for starters: the weather was ideal – beautifully sunny, pretty much windless, just about 20°F – and the trails were in very good shape – good classic tracks everywhere (solid and glazing over the course of the afternoon).

Prairie Trail

More than all that, I had juuust enough fitness to do the full 50 kilometers. I decided to try to double pole the whole thing, and happily the first 30km were pretty easy. I was consciously keeping my speed down and letting the slippery tracks do a lot of the work. The next 10km were substantially tougher, since my core muscles were weakening rapidly. Eating and drinking regularly helped slow down the onset of real fatigue.

The last 10km – even though I downed about 20oz of flat Coke and a caffeinated gel – were positively brutal. Every double pole made my shoulders feel like they were being squeezed in a vise. I climbed the last hill – a steep 200m ramp near the start of the last lap – at the slowest possible speed, just one missed pole-plant away from actually going backwards. But knowing the trails (and seeing the data on my watch) helped me break that last lap up into manageable segments, which steadily ticked by. I was pretty happy to hit 50km, at 3:33 into the ski – and even happier to glide into the “finish” a little bit later.*

In sum, though, my little Oakebeiner experiment was a great way to enjoy a beautiful winter’s day, and – I hope – valuable preparation for an actual marathon ski race. We’re only 352 days away from the 42km Mora Vasaloppet marathon in northern Minnesota!

Right now, though, I’m sitting on the sofa, soaking up the really incredible soreness of pretty much every muscle group above the waist (even my jaw is sore – wha?) and wondering just how I’ll feel tomorrow. I’d better keep the bottle of ibuprofen handy.

the final tallies
time: 3:34:47
distance: 50.21 km (31.1 miles)
pace: 4:17/kilometer (thanks to marginally better fitness and much faster tracks, this is actually almost exactly the same pace at which I skied the 24km City of Lakes Loppet earlier in the month!)
average heart rate: 145 beats per minute
nominal calories burned: 3,703 kcal