Here are my holiday plans: I’m staying home, alone, with an evil cat, while my wife is off gallivanting with the distant family. I’ll probably say “humbug” a lot. Maybe Christmas dinner will be a microwaved bean & cheese burrito washed down with whisky. This is my life for a while.

You might be wondering why I would willingly choose to live the life of a lonely misanthrope. It’s because I’ve got to finish developing this new course I’ll be teaching in January, and while I’ve got the skeleton done, I’ve also got to get ahead of the game, because I’ll be teaching genetics again at the same time, so Spring term is going to hit me like a truck.

I was thinking, though, that while I’m occupied with work, I might try logging all the stuff I’m doing to create a new course sort of from scratch (I do have a good textbook that does quite a bit of the heavy lifting for me). Would that be at all interesting to readers here? It’s the gruntwork of teaching, so it’s a bit different from my usual raging.

It would also be interesting to me to hear from other teachers who have to go through this process.

There is a Donald Trump dating site, and this is the first I’ve heard of it?

I mean, it’s nothing new — it’s a barren wasteland of spam-bots, porn purveyors, and a few lonely journalists wondering what to make of it — so it’s just like his presidency-elect, but still, it would be nice to have advance warning of these comedic opportunities.

I get to spend a day in New York City on Monday. Where should I go for a nice classy New York dinner?

The Trump Tower Grill, maybe?The reviews aren’t exactly stellar.

I reflexively want to be generous in my assessment of what the post-election Trump Grill says about the Trump presidency. Perhaps it’s a sign that Trump is in over his head, and a shallow, mediocre man who runs a shallow, mediocre business empire (and restaurant) would sink and implode, crushing the expectations of millions of his hopeful supporters. But watching Trump parade his enemies through the nearby lobby, taunting them with prestigious appointments only to cruelly humiliate them, I had to look over at the human cattle herd at the Trump Grill, overwhelming a well-meaning staff with their dreams of a meal fit for a president, and wonder if he cared about any of them, either.

Nah. I can probably find a food truck run by immigrants that will get the job done.

Oh, no, I had a horrible thought flit through my head: does this mean Guy Fieri will be the next president of the US?

Franklin Graham thinks all you technical people, you computer programmers and IT managers and such, have nothing to be proud of in your work.

“This is terrible. I live in North Carolina where so much of our manufacturing base has gone to other countries,” he insisted. “And people are out of jobs, are out of work. And they say, ‘But we’ll retrain you, we’ll let you be a computer programmer.’”

“They don’t want to be a computer programmer!” Graham continued. “They want to do the same job as their fathers and their grandfathers. There was pride in the manufacturing and the building. And we’ve taken all that away and it’s sad.”

Gosh. I wonder what he thinks of college professor. We don’t build nothin’.

Well, I guess I could go back to my roots. My father pumped gas for a good long while, and then worked as a diesel mechanic. I can’t honestly say that I ever dreamed of doing that for a living, but he was good at his job and worked hard.

His father before him was basically a seasonal farm worker, I think. I could aspire to apple-picking in Yakima during the fall, and working in the canneries in the winter, I suppose.

His father before him was also, I think, a migrant worker. His father before that was a farmer in Iowa who lost the farm in the aftermath of the Civil War. I suppose I could join the army and get malaria and lose everything I own. There has to be some pride in being host to millions of Plasmodium.

Before that, I don’t know many of the details, but I get the impression my family comes from a long line of scalawags and ruffians, which certainly does sound like something I could aspire to.

I wonder what Graham manufactures? At least I know there were no worthless, no-account, shameful, lying preachers in my ancestry.

I have heroically completed a small mountain of grading today. It is DONE. Only an optional final exam remains next Thursday (of course it is on a Thursday), but otherwise, I can stand atop this awesome pile of exams and lab reports and thump my chest and howl.

Except…and oh, how this rankles…five (5!) students forgot to write their names on the lab final exam — they must have been stressed out. Which means there are 5 gaping holes in my grade book, which means that, although these papers have been officially graded, I am unable to make the final step of actually entering them into the spreadsheet. There are holes in the grid. They pain me. Maybe I could randomly assign an unclaimed exam score to each student? Or average them together and give each one the average? Or just insert zeroes in there! Or (RAND*MaxScore)! Or (RAND*-MaxScore)! Anything to heal these wounds!

And the papers…they just squat there on my desk, frustrating ciphers demonstrating some knowledge of laboratory techniques, but unattached to any useful human. Maybe I should put my cat’s name there.

A cat that could carry out unit conversions and make up lab solutions and analyze spectrophotometer readings would be kind of useful.

The good news: it’s the last Horrible Thursday of the semester!

The bad news: it’s particularly horrible. On top of the usual day-long load, add 5 hours of phone interview work.

The worse news: looking ahead to next semester, it seems I’ll get another Horrible Thursday, with a Horrible Tuesday, too.

So that you share my mood, here is the 2016 Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog.

Students get to suffer through final exams next week. This week piles of work come due and get handed to me, and I am committing to getting them all graded as they come in. I’ve got different classes handing in stuff on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, so that means every day has a fresh bolus of essays and lab reports pouring in, and if I don’t get them done that day, I fall farther and farther behind.

We’re also doing phone interviews for our current cell biology search. Eight candidates. One hour each. Do the math.

In the midst of all this, I still have classes to teach.

At least next week looks like paradise in comparison: I’m only giving one final exam on Thursday, and it’s optional, so the whole class won’t be taking it.

Unfortunately, what I’ve got scheduled for next week is to start prepping for spring term classes, since I’m teaching a brand new course in ecological developmental biology. I’ll also have to start raising fly stocks for genetics. And getting my lab in shape for a new project we’re starting.