This morning was fun. There is a wonderful little restaurant named Kelly's that Lucy and I go to on the mornings when we exercise. It doesn't have much atmosphere: it's in a strip mall with just simple tables and chairs plus a counter. But the service is excellent and the prices extremely reasonable -- the breakfast special (two eggs, toast, and home fries with bacon or sausage and coffee) is under $5. You just can't beat it. Our favorite waitress, H, loves 
Plato. She always waves to him when he's waiting in the car for us to finish eating. A couple of weeks ago we noticed she was wearing a T-shirt from a local business and she mentioned a couple that has a white boxer had given it to her. So Lucy and I decided to give her a T-shirt with Plato on it. So we ordered it, and it finally arrived last night. This morning we presented it to her as "a token of Plato's affection". She was charmed and delighted. It was fun to see her turn all red and take it around for other people to see. As a child, I was always told it was better to give than to receive, and as an adult, I finally am able to appreciate the truth of that in a way that I never could as a child.
A frantic day with students running around frantically trying to get projects finished (in my class and every other class). The most depressing thing I hear is when students, who can't arrange to meet as a group, seem to flounder, saying (as three students have said within the past week), "I just don't know how to communicate with the other students in my group." I've gently suggested that there's this thing called a "wiki" and that they can write what they're working on in it and then the other students can read it when they have time. On the plus side, the groups that are functioning the best are the ones that have been most successful in using the wiki. More than one student has thanked me profusely for the wiki.
We needed to spend down an account before Dec, so we sat down and figured out how to spend it, and then spent it. But after we were done, the bookkeeper told me there was still just a little bit more. So I bought an iSight. It's a bit silly, I suppose. I'm not even sure what I'll do with it. But it's very slick little piece of hardware. Beautifully styled and impeccably appointed, it started iChatAV as soon as I plugged it in. It has a fancy little plexiglass clip to hold onto my powerbook display and there's a little widget at the back so you can tilt it forward, so you can set your display back to a normal position and still have the camera point at my face, and not just at my bald spot. I expect it would make a tasty little webcam -- I'll have to do some googling to see if I can find some free software that will allow one to use it that way.