Why I love my job

1. Because I get to write a chapter for a popular press book about Harry Potter. How fun! (Nothing better than having to reread some of the books and having it count as "work"!)

2. We were taking a new group photo for the department website last week. (The azaleas are in bloom now, and the campus is just amazingly gorgeous. The arboretum path next to our building is draped with honeysuckle vines, so it even smells like spring now.) We were trying to arrange ourselves properly, and I made the old photographer's joke: "Pretend you like each other." The photographer (our department technician) corrected me: "Not to seem, but to be. That's the Carolina motto." And in fact, he's right -- we really do like each other!

There's a (sort of) funny story about the old department photo. Our area has had several people leave in the past few years, and as it happened, each of those people were standing on the edge of the group...so they just kept cropping it tighter, and tighter...

So, this time they made sure the junior faculty were in the middle. :)