The World Cup has started, and everyone seems swept up by the mania of it. Every ad on TV is World Cup-themed and tons of people are walking around wearing England football (soccer) jerseys. Things have started off well for England, because they won their first game, and the other two teams tied, so they are ahead of everyone in the group. If they win the second game, they will be guaranteed to advance. Hopefully Trinidad and Tobego won't prove to be too much of an obstacle.

The lecturer's pay dispute has finally been resolved, paving the way for exams to be finished, and grading of coursework to be done. It's a good thing it has ended, because I think the students were going to start really suffering in some cases. They wanted a 23% pay rise over three years (typically it has been 3% each year to counter inflation). They ended up settling for much less than they wanted, 13.1% over three years, with 3% a year each fall as usual, plus 1% in February, and 2.5% in fall 2008. So I will have to wait a long time to feel any added benefit from it.

Bill and Strange Panda's blog has been updated from December 2005. It's gotten more up to date than mine, so you may want to look at it. Those nanimals are so good at keeping their blog up to date!

Last night we had a bit of unwelcome excitement. Victoria heard someone sawing something outside. She looked out the window and saw a man next to our fire escape door sawing at it. She showed me than went and called the police. They arrived pretty quickly, but the guy ran off before they could come. He disappeared while we were calling the police and we didn't have a very good description of him, mostly since we were staring straight down at him from four stories up. We could describe the top of his head mostly.

In the end, he never got into the building, but he did seem to cut about 3 feet of metal off the bottom of our lightning rod. We had about three police cars, including police dogs on the scene. I imagine the guy was looking for an office building to break into after hours, and didn't realize that people lived in our building. In the end, nothing really happened, but it was a bit scary for a moment or two.