When Office Buildings Attack

 

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but maybe it deserves its own post: I have long been scared of my office building. It's the tallest building on campus, and as I would stand across the street and wait for the bus, I would wonder if it could possibly fall over. It's tall and unwieldy, and it was built in the 1960's in a rather shoddy manner. (I am never scared of the old buildings on campus!) I kept telling myself my fears were unfounded, and that those in charge would do something if the building were unsafe. My astute readers may remember when I freaked out about the crack in my office ceiling, but then that turned out to be nothing. And then yesterday my boss sent an email to the whole department saying don't use the front entrance, because a big chunk of cement fell off of the building and landed right in front of the door. Yikes!! Fortunately it happened on a Sunday (and a holiday!) during the pandemic, and not at, say, 9:55 am on a Tuesday when classes were being held in person. You should see how many undergrads would be pushing their way into that entrance at class change time! Now possibly this will be taken seriously, not for the sake of all us language departments in the building (because who really cares about Humanities people?), but the Board of Regents meet up on the top floor. They probably don't want to be in a building that could come toppling down at any moment any more than the rest of us do, but they have a lot more pull to do something about it. Me, I'll just pray that I can keep working from home until this whole mess is resolved.

Yesterday night at Basque class was like a continuation of Easter, where I had been the only woman at brunch and then at Rich's, because it was just me and the guys. And we did talk about sports a little, but different sports, like Spanish soccer. Our teacher was saying that on St. Patrick's Day he heard a guy doing a special kind of yell the Basques do, and so he asked, "Are you Basque?" and the guy immediately hugged him. My fellow student originally from Argentina said they do a very similar yell down there, and I said don't they have some kind of thing like that in the Canary Islands? Wouldn't you know, the third guy is married to a woman from the Canary Islands, so he knew all about it. It's a language that's all whistles. He said it's a really simple language, but a language nonetheless. Wow! How do I learn that language? Maybe this guy's wife would give lessons? Unfortunately our last Basque lesson is next week, because our teacher has to go plant trees in the North Woods of Canada for the summer. He did give us some places to contact that might be doing Basque lessons, and he said he might resume his own classes in September, if he isn't eaten by a bear. He's very scared of bears up there. I assured him that he was statistically much more likely to be killed by a moose. (So I was told when we were in Alaska.) Hopefully he survives all the wildlife and can teach again in the fall.

Famous Hat