I am a delicate flower.

I had a period of some mild terror yesterday, when we returned from visiting my mother and I discovered in my email inbox an urgent message revealing that I had failed to complete the final step necessary to submit grades. This message went on to note that this failure affected one senior, whose degree eligibility needed to be calculated right away and could I fix it by eleven p.m. tonight at the very latest PLEASE! where "tonight" was... Saturday.

Of course I instantly repaired the situation, and wrote an extremely apologetic email saying so, but by then it was seven in the evening on Sunday and I was on tenterhooks for a reply.

I am rarely away from my computer for more than half a day. Even when I gave birth, I was only out of pocket for about eighteen hours. And now here I had apparently chosen a perfectly ill-timed day and a half to abscond.

Surely, I knew, the administration would not be so insane as to only pursue the question that close to the real cutoff. And surely they would not allow someone's actual graduation to be undermined by my failure to set a little electronic flag to "approved". Still. What an irresponsible idiot I knew I was! How anxious I felt, sitting by the computer waiting for confirmation that I had not sabotaged poor Student M.'s graduation by going out of town for Mother's Day.

It was a great relief to get the all-clear message an hour or two later (thank you, dean in question, for being much quicker to answer my email than I was to answer yours) but I was left with that pathetic queasy feeling you have when you narrowly escape getting into a car accident.

"I'm sorry you're so strung out," Steve said kindly. "The new Doctor Who has downloaded."

"Hooray," said me.

"I'm going to take out the recycling and make us soothing drinks. Then there will be Doctor Who! Doctor Who will not be soothing, though, because there are vampires."

"Soothing vampires?" I suggested.

"Well. Probably not. But it is Doctor Who, which means that it will be nothing a brave eight-year-old can't handle..."

"...so you should be good for the first 20 minutes."

Comments

[Drew]

Well, at least it's just vampires. It could have been some quantum-locked statues.

[redfox]

Yes, don't tell, but the vampires weren't actually very scary at all, especially immediately after all that Weeping Angel action.