Panera

Sitting at Panera for office hours without my glasses. They're out in the car, but I parked pretty far away and I don't want to pack in my computer and drag my backpack out and back again, with my dinner sitting here on the table. So I'm managing without glasses. Seems I had pretty good eyesight until 5-10 years ago. Now I need to squint to read anything at all when I'm not in direct sunlight. I can read fine in sunlight, but that's about it.

Tried working on my photo-a-day site and updating Flickr, but something seems to be wrong with Flickr.com today. Maybe it's time to find another photo blog site. Recommendations? Maybe Picasa is the way to go. It's pretty cheap.

Well, I had a productive day, preparing for my three classes and two labs, finishing the grading for a course that ended a few weeks ago (finally), and going to a senior recital performed by one of my chemistry students. She's a wonderful singer and her recital was one of the best I've attended.

Sometimes I wonder why students so rarely come to these office hours that I hold at Panera. I'm here every Sunday night for two hours. Last week one student showed up. The week before, zero. The week before that there were three or four of them. Maybe that was the week of the exam. Their next exam is in a few weeks. One student showed up today. She said that she was taking time off work and losing a lot of money to be here with me. She asked one question, then left. I hope it was worth it. She could have asked that one by email. I just pointed her to a page in the lab manual that she hadn't read yet. It took less than 15 seconds.

Without my glasses, this has been a rather unproductive couple of hours. I had a nice meal here for a change. Usually, I just get coffee and a bagel, or maybe bowl of french onion soup. Today I splurged for a cuban chicken panini with black bean soup. Pretty good. The food is always pretty good here, but it seems too pricey and the portions are small. They play nice jazz music and don't mind me sitting here surfing the web or talking with students for two hours on a Sunday night, so I'll keep coming back.