Back to work update

So things got back to normal this week. The fires are still burning of course, they are simply contained. That's always been one of those things that just kind of surprises me. With a forest fire you don't even try to put the whole thing out, just let it burn and make sure it doesn't spread. But then again I guess it really isn't practical, or even feasible, to put out a fire that's hundreds of thousands of hectares. Incidentally, a single hectare is 10,000 square meters, though that sounds big, that's really only about the size of two football fields placed side by side. So, I guess several hundred thousand football fields worth of land being on fire is a pretty big fire, but it's really just hard to grasp the magnitude of the area.

So this past week classes got back to normal and it seems like just about everyone that I know of at the university didn't lose their homes or anything like that. It was kind of odd getting into San Diego again, I somewhat expected it to be still very smoky or at least smelling of smoke, yet there really didn't seem to be any evidence of the fire anywhere along my route to work. For all I could tell there never had been a situation in the area in the first place.

The other thing that happened of course was that everyone lost a week worth of classes. I remember when this happened to me as an undergrad, we really didn't care at all. That is until the university decided to cancel spring break so that the profs could have enough time to teach their material. Of course I was pissed with that. Now as I prof I've learned that we won't be extending the semester or changing the schedules at all. We just have to suck up the lost time and cram more teaching into the little time left. So yet again I'm screwed by the administration, I really don't think I'm ever going to get what I want from them anytime soon.