Friday went by in a blur, sending out welcome letters to international delegates signed up for the STLHE conference, a lovely idea dreamed up by the conference team here; doing a few more edits for the book chapter on our NZ Teaching and Learning Research Initiative project and sending it off for comment to the editor (glad that the email received an "out of office" reply so there won't be anything more to do there for a little while); going for lunch at the local Chinese with Jeanne, Bev and Michael (where there was very interesting conversation on interesting books that we had all read which connected closely or not to academic development but I do need to get a record of the titles); organising my travel and meetings in Ottawa and Hamilton for next week and the week after. Suddenly time is getting very short. But some sense of achievement at the end of the day.
My next door neighbours came for dinner on Friday evening, Luke is a new post-doc in the University. We had an illuminating conversation sparked by the fact that he said he deleted the Windsor Daily News email without even thinking of opening it. I asked him about his sense of belonging to the Windsor University community. He said he had no space for that, he was focused on things that would promote his route into a faculty position and was being very self-centred about that. He didn't even identify any loyalty to his department or discipline, this he justified by saying he was in an inter-disciplinary position now. The conversation reminded me that I need to be very careful about judging people or actions from my world view as it may well be very different from someone else's.
Saturday was a lovely day and Alan and Marie-Jeanne took me off to Pointe Pelee National Park as it was International Migratory Bird day (or something of the kind). What a fabulous spot despite the label it applies to itself (see photo below). We saw numerous brightly coloured birds, some butterflies, fish and turtles. Alan and Marie-Jeanne were struck by seeing cacti growing outside. That makes me think they are used to much colder climes - you will note that the first phot was at teh beginning of the day, but later on the top layers had been removed, thank you sun. I'm glad to say that Alan and I managed to avoid shop talk most of the day ( he needs a break from time to time.)
Canadian photos for today taken at Pointe Pelee.
You will note Alan's precision in setting up this photo(the footboard!)
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