A good excuse for not posting

I've been doing a lot of marking lately, and not much else, it seems. Certainly no blogging for weeks, sadly.

The reason is my experience of one of the less salubrious hazards of cycling to work; about a month ago I came off second-best in a bingle with a car at a roundabout. I like cycling; it keeps me fit, reduces my carbon footprint and saves me money. But a split second of bad timing, and I end up with an AC joint dislocation (see image at right, with my cyborg implant at bottom so the ligaments can grow back together), and four broken ribs. Could have been worse, probably; in a perverse sense, I'm lucky.

The ability to work from home has been a godsend. My indispensable colleagues have had to pick up what lectures remained in the last weeks of semester, and I've been churning away when I can at marking assignments, lab reports and so on. Next stop exam papers, a PhD thesis to examine, and several ARC proposal assessments - all classifiable under 'marking'. It's surprising to think how much time academics spend on assessing others' work. It could go on all year...