Done!

I've submitted final grades for all my classes. As of now, I have no further formal responsibilities as a faculty member in Claremont. (I've still got to eventually clean out my office and deal with some administrative stuff, but that doesn't count.)

This feels weird.

I still have plenty to do, of course. I've got some research I hope to mostly wrap up before I leave, I already have some decisions to make for next fall's classes, and there's a bunch of house hunting/moving related stuff that I've avoided thinking about thus far. But I feel amazingly free of deadlines and responsibilities for the moment.

Arachnophobia

I don't think I'm excessively nervous around spiders. Sure, I tend to react poorly if they're actually on my body, and I'm not eager to share my living space with big ones. But in general I think spiders and their webs are pretty cool. Relatively few are dangerous, so there's no reason to be paranoid about them. In fact, I've never been near a dangerous spider that wasn't in a cage.

Or so I'd assumed. A student mentioned last week that some Scripps dorms have black widow spiders in their basements. Still, I've never spent much time in the Scripps dorms: no worries. But then another student commented that you could sometimes see them around the steps of our science building. So, ok, they're around, but it's not as if they're a visible presence.

But no. Coming back from lunch today, another faculty member pointed out a big web made by a black widow. Three feet from where I park my bike. This suddenly casts the small webs I've found on my bike itself from time to time in a whole new light.