snacks and advisors

So the rolo-pretzel sandwiches were a huge success.  Kinda figures, you know?  I guess the deal is kind of that people like things that are familiar.  People seemed impressed, and I guess I will admit that I am pretty good at matching the pretzel edges up to make a very aesthetically pleasing sandwich.

Denise seemed especially pleased.  That’s fair, since she did supply me with the candies.  Honestly, the worst part was probably the bit where I had to unwrap 50 little foil covered rolos.  The rest was pretty fun.  Tedious, but fun.  There’s a kind of satisfaction to be had in squishing melty rolos with a pretzel and watching the chocolate ooze up inside the spaces.

I arrived at school at probably 8:55 this morning, which explains why Denise was surprised to see me.  Andy wasn’t in his office at 9:15, but I caught him around 9:30 by practicing constant vigilance and checking his office every five minutes or so.  When he had returned, I knocked softly on his door and he told me to come in.

He had to finish writing an email to Karen – the department secretary – about printing notes for his class.  “Can you please print 21-“ he looked up from pecking away at the keys during this dictation to look at me and asked if I was going to come to class today.  I said yes.  “Twenty-TWO copies…”

Eventually we talked about science, and this time I think we actually covered some ground, which left me feeling fairly optimistic.  It’s nice to feel like you have a little traction.  I have some goals, and hopefully I will be able to work toward some of them without feeling very lost and confused.

At one point, he was talking about how he wanted to meet with me and Steve, a post-doc who works out at West Campus.  We like Steve a lot.  He is South African but did his PhD at Oxford, I believe, and has a great accent.  Andy wrote his own initials, AJP, and then S for Shannon, paused, and asked, “What’s your middle initial?”

“R,” I said, immediately, but then remembered an instance where I’d been teased about not having a middle name that begins with J (Andy does, Steve does, Kate does, Diane does, etc.) and said, “Wait, I’m just kidding, it’s J.”

He looked up at me.

“Nah, it’s R.  I just feel left out of the J middle name club.”

“You can’t joke like that, Shannon,” Andy said, very seriously.  “When I started dating Gill, she told me that her birthday was May 13.  It’s May 11, but it’s taken me 20 years and this-“ he indicated his phone, “to figure out that it’s not May 13.  And I can’t use my phone to tell me your middle initial.”

Andy is a character.  His class was pretty good, although it seems more and more to be a kind of redux of his Natural Products course that I took in spring 2012.  Not a bad thing, it’s good material, but it is what it is.