hermits and bathrooms

Well, this week seems to have gone by quickly. A few bullets of reflection:

• I finished a book this week. The Stranger in the Woods is a story of Christopher Knight, a man who parked his car and headed into the woods of Maine and allegedly lived alone for 27 years.
  
  

I found the book highly annoying. The author seemed to try to make Christopher Knight out as some sort of enlightened woodland sage. But the fact is that he lived in his so-called camp on someone else's land, all the while frequently stealing everything he used from surrounding recreational cabins and a nearby camp for the disabled. 

Anything and everything he ever possessed was stolen: food, clothing, booze, propane, camping gear, car batteries, device batteries, tools, books, magazines, TVs, radios, video games, and so on. He buried his discards at his "camp" a.k.a. dump. He drank so much stolen booze, he became an alcoholic. He was not at all self sufficient - a premise I assumed when I first picked up the book. 

Turns out, he just can't stand being around people, but he sure likes helping himself to their stuff. It became a story mainly because he was eventually caught and sent to jail because of his ongoing thefts. 

I'm reading something better for me now, to get that bad taste out.  We've thought about purchasing some land - a few acres for recreation. I would be open to letting certain others use it... just please ask first?

• Yesterday, we gave a fond farewell to our old gas-powered lawnmower at the recycling place. From there, we stopped at Lowes and picked up a new battery-powered mower. We don't have a lot of lawn, and have plans to decrease it even further, but I'm ready for the grass to grow now.

• An email went out at work last week from one of the Deans or VPs, - I forget which with all the restructuring and changing of titles going on - one of the "higher ups", anyway. She was alerting us to some vandalism that's been happening on our campus.

A couple months ago, the student government association stocked the bathrooms on campus with baskets of menstrual supplies.  All of the bathrooms. The building where I work, for instance, has two sets of "men's/ women's" bathrooms and one "all gender" single use bathroom. 

I didn't realize it at the time, but the baskets were put in designated "men's" bathrooms as well. We do have a decent population of transgendered students, so the SGA was being inclusive of that. And I'm not sure about staff population, but from my small sampling, I work with one transgendered fellow tutor as well as a transgendered fellow test proctor. 

Apparently somebody or bodies has been trashing and creating nasty graffiti concerning the baskets - no doubt regarding their inclusion in men's bathrooms. We're to be on the lookout.

• This coming week is the last week of this semester. It's going to be chaotic with finals - both from my test proctoring job and my tutoring job. 

It's a good chaos, though. I think?