Working on a Sunday

AUS employees came back to work today (Sunday) after the three-day weekend.  This work week is their (our) final week before classes resume.  Funny to head to the office on Sunday morning (I didn't get to church this weekend, but am going to try to find a Catholic church in nearby Dubai soon, hopefully one that has Mass on Saturday night), but there were a department chair and administrative assistant to meet, keys and an id card to procure, an office to find, a technology orientation, and various other little tasks that ended up occupying much of the day.  Happily, everyone I met was friendly.  I think I have a pretty good sense of day-to-day details.

AUS takes security seriously.  Apparently a few years back a student hacked into a professor's account and changed grades, so now all faculty have something called a UBKEY to protect against future breeches.  To log into email or banner (where we post grades) or anything else on the school's network, we have to plug these 007-like gadgets into a USB port and then, after typing our password we tap a little button on the gadget which then fills in the rest of our passwords, a long string of characters that, apparently, is impossible to hack.  So I got my UBKEY.  And resisted the urge to say "Q, whatever happened to the days of exploding pens?"

I won't say it was "too hot" making the fifteen-minute walk from my apartment to office, but I wouldn't have minded wearing shorts instead of the khakis and polo short.  Oy, what's may going to be like?  After my partial day at the office, I worked out at the "athletic center," made peppery chickpeas for dinner, and managed to pump out about 600 words.  Must. Write. Every. Day.  [Otherwise, it's not a real s(h)abbatical.]