I spent part of the day on the Cal campus trying to get on payroll for my swimming job. I met with a modicum of success, although I'm not done yet. In fact tomorrow I need to spend all day in training. It's not a great use of my time, but the upside is that I'll get paid! (Interestingly, I'll get paid more for the swim teaching than I do for the law job...) It's quite a novel thing these days, getting paid for the work I do. I might not mind it so much when I go to my zillions of Huey Lewis and the News concerts this summer and they inevitably close the show with "Workin' for a Livin'," because for a change I'll actually relate...
Visiting the Cal campus was an interesting experience. There was a moment when I flashed back to my first days here as a freshman, walking around with an increasingly crumpled campus map as I found my way around. It's easy for me being here now because I don't need the map anymore. I pretty much know where everything is, though there are some exceptions. I was joking afterwards that the buildings are all in the same place, but they all have different names... Actually, this isn't quite true: there are a lot of new buildings too... And of course, many are exactly as I left them, in terms of location and appellation. But there is a lot of construction on campus; an engineering survey a few years ago determined that most buildings were not seismically safe, and so there has been a drive to retrofit as much as possible. That effort appears to have led to new building names to reflect the contributions to the capital campaigns.
I also observed some systemic changes to the running of the campus, some good and some less so. In certain ways there's more bureaucracy, but on the other hand, the bureaucracy seems to be a bit more effective.
But by and large this is a much easier summer for me than last year. Last year I moved to Washington, near the Maryland border. And everything was new. Even the simplest of errands required learning new neighborhoods, new driving directions, etc. I got done what I needed to, but it took some effort and I still spent the summer feeling like a stranger who didn't really belong. It's a much different experience this year, when I know where everything is and feel like I'm home.