A study of work habits of 30 academics at Boise State University showed that:

Faculty participants spent 17 percent of their work week in meetings – including those with students – and 13 percent of the day on email (both for research and with students). So combined, he says, 30 percent of faculty time “was spent on activities that are not traditionally thought of as part of the life of an academic.”

About one-third of work-week days – 35 percent – was spent on teaching, including 12 percent for instruction and 11 percent on course administration, such as grading and updating course webpages.

Just 3 percent of the work-week day was spent on primary research and 2 percent was spent on manuscript writing.

As I always say, people will do anything, and I mean anything at all, including attend useless meetings and dawdle with email and “update websites” all day long just to avoid doing research. I used to be one of them but then I took care of this problem.

I will now record everything I do in a week to compare my own productivity numbers to these. Uncharacteristically, I even have a meeting this week, so something will appear under “Service.”

I can never find a pedicurist who’d make me happy because pedicurists tend to be very chatty and their favorite subject to chat about is how my toenails are unreasonably small. I, of course, prefer to think of them as dainty and don’t welcome criticism of them.

Why aren’t there any churlish pedicurists who don’t want to talk and don’t make me feel like a weirdo with freakishly small toenails?

Normally, when I want to make people stop talking I do what I call “channeling my inner Russian”, but in view of recent events that seems unpatriotic.

So I’m blogging instead and pretending I’m writing super important work emails.

Republicans are kind of worked up about Obamacare, about the foreign policy failures, they’d like someone who is either engaged in those fights in Washington or a governor who’s governed successfully in real time, i.e., now. So a Scott Walker or a Mike Pence, or a Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio or a Paul Ryan. And I think all of them, incidentally, would be better candidates probably than Jeb Bush against Hillary Clinton.

I don’t know who Mike Pence is, but God save us from the rest of them.

Whereas Scott Walker and Mike Pence and Marco Rubio and all those guys get to say: generational change, conservative reform agenda, get away from the failures of the Obama years.

Seriously? If these guys (save for the mysterious Mike Pence who might just be different) represent generational change in the Republican party and are supposed to take us away from the recent failures, then hello, President Hillary Clinton.

The seller was offended by our offer and now is getting all snooty.

Or maybe he reads this blog and knows that we already named the house.

A friend on Facebook posted the following:

I responded with, “And that, my friends, is the worst kind of anti-woman statement known to humanity.”

By the way, Facebook suspended the account of a famous journalist in Russia because of an anti-Putin comment he posted. Now we know that Zuckerberg is pro-Putin. That’s quite weird, especially in the view of the recent proposals by the head of the Education Committee of the Russian Parliament that the website of the Parliament mention that Russians are Aryans.

Ceuta and Melilla are tiny enclaves in Africa that belong to Spain. They are all that’s left to Spain of its imperial glory. They are also among the most tragic places in the world.

Every day there are reports of desperate immigrants trying to enter the enclaves. They know that Ceuta and Melilla are part of the EU and that the moment they manage to cross the border they will be protected by Spain’s immigration law and will not be deported.

Ceuta and Melilla are surrounding themselves with fences, border patrols do what they can to prevent the Africans from reaching the fences, the Spanish parliament is debating whether the Spanish border lies right before, right after or right at the fences, and immigrants have started to form crowds and storm the fences, hoping that the border patrols will not manage to stop all of them at once.

Almost nobody outside of the region knows about Ceuta and Melilla. But this tragic place offers us a glimpse of what the future might be like for all of us. Global warming will bring increasing shortages of resources and the scarcity will hit the poorest areas on the planet the hardest.

I read news about Ceuta and Melilla every day and can’t stop imagining the time when we find ourselves locked in small embattled bastions of prosperity among a sea of desperation and poverty.

My favorite Russian blogger (the one who is 89 years old) wrote that Putin is a second-hand Stalin from a flea market.

My own Russian husband has realized that, these days, the phrase to start and end the day is, “Putin is an asshole.” And also, “Crimea is Ukraine.”

Tanya Golash Boza posted the following on Facebook:

According to Robert Boice’s study of faculty, those who were successful engaged in these behaviors:

*spent three hours or more per week on scholarly writing.

This is obviously true.

*integrated their research into their undergraduate classes.

Yeah, I can just imagine that. “Ser” versus “estar” and the memory wars in Spain. Does this guy knowing anything about actual undergrads? The idea that they have the preparation that enables them to understand my research is really bizarre. And it was the same at every school I worked. The worst course of my life was the course I taught at Cornell on the subject of my research. Since then, I swore never to inflict this suffering on myself and keep my research away from students for good.

Our real estate agent is a great guy. Helpful, competent, hard-working. But he spent his life in the deep Midwest and it shows.

In our initial meeting, he creeped out N. by trying to enter into a male bonding process with him. His attempts at male camaraderie through a series of winks and “Well you know how ladies are, we guys can never understand them” comments did not produce the desired effect. N. gets alarmed and starts looking longingly at the door when these things happen.

Yesterday, the agent tried pulling this Midwestern macho trick again. As I was talking about things I needed to appear in the offer, he interrupted me and addressed N. with, “Well, you are the boss here, N. You get to decide.”

“No, I’m the boss,” I said. “And as I was saying. . .”

After a while, the agent understood that he was doing something wrong and started looking at me when I spoke. He also had to stop trying to recruit N over to his side.

“Oh,” he said to me. “When I prepared the offer, I put his name first and your second. I will redo it immediately. I also have to ask, are you two legally married?”