Today I visited another campus of the university for various things: primarily for the proposal presentation of my PhD student, which went very well. She's a joy to work with, and her area of research, food and gender, is pretty aligned to my own interests.

Another good thing that happened is that I met the director of the Centre for Research to ask permission to appoint a research assistant for my post-doctoral project. The girl who applied for the position is another delightful person, and I've known her as a student for three years; she recently graduated from our BA English Honours programme. We hit a snag along the way when a nasty colleague, who is unfortunately pretty high up on the academic food chain, told the student that she wouldn't be hired for my project because she doesn't have an MA. I was pretty pissed off (although I managed not to show it; I've learnt my lesson about being transparent about my thoughts), because... how dare you? How dare you crush a girl's hopes about doing research work, when you aren't even the one in charge of the project? I knew the Centre for Research is really happy with my work so far and was unlikely to deny my request, and yay, it came through. So much glee. It's childish, I know, but I can't wait to see the look on Nasty Colleague's face when I tell her I'm hiring the kid.

Thirdly, I had a very enjoyable meeting with a group of students from the other campus. They found out that I was offering Fandom Studies and wanted to meet me since they're doing a research project on K-pop. My fandom heart is still with LJ and you guys, but it's so gratifying to be able to share the fandom love with students and encourage them to work on stuff that they love.

Speaking of fandom things, I've got two lovely gift fics to rec. My Everywoman gift fic is a quietly lovely character study of Scully from Karen Kosseff's point of view, including awesome backstory for Karen. My spn_summergen gift fic is equally lovely, based on one of my favourite fic possibilities: Sam at the beginning of S8. Saving Him From Hell also does justice to Amelia, and I love that; I love seeing her and Sam drawn to each other because he's lost Dean and she's lost Don, and I don't need to tell you guys how much I love that parallel between them.

Re books: I recently finished Lauren Graham's Someday, Someday, Maybe, which was pretty nice, and have just started on Felicia Day's You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost). It's awesome so far: I can absolutely relate to her anecdotes about growing up in an internet-less world (the horror).