Thursday, July 24, 2008

colorado: day 16 (thur 7/24)

Tomorrow afternoon I give my final lecture to the entire group. I spent a couple hours updating it tonight. Deleting some things, adding some graphics, simplifying and so on. Tomorrow's topic for me is Cumulative Motion Injury; something which impacts a significant number of interpreters. The last research I heard put sign language interpreters at about ten times the risk for CMI in four hours that OSHA says is high risk in eight hours. Just a couple days ago I heard that several of these interpreters already have a CMIs. Sigh. Educational interpreters tend to be an at even higher risk because of the working conditions; I haven't read much about VRIs, yet, but I'm sure they are at the top end of the scale as well. But my powerpoint is cleaned up and it will be fine.

Still no mail. A new RA at the desk today - but she did immediately contact her supervisor who called while I was taping students and left me a message. Grrr. Then it was after 5:00 when I was done, so she was already out of the office. Tomorrow I don't have to be over at the staff room until our noon meeting (yay - the first time since I've been here that I actually get to sleep in), so maybe I will be able to talk to the mail person in the morning.

My roommate had dental surgery early this morning and is doing quite well, it seems, tonight. We went out for a short walk to pick up dinner (about a mile round trip). We made it back to the dorm just in time. The wind had picked up sharply and it was just starting to rain as we approached the dorm. Within minutes we were treated to a Greeley thunderstorm, complete with lightning which looked like it was just outside our 16th floor window.

We commented that we have grown used to ignoring weather warnings at home. There were several times last winter we had "severe hazardous weather" warnings which never materialized. So, although we had seen the little extreme weather warning rolling across the bottom of the TV screen, we didn't think a lot about it, except that we did take our lightweight rain coats when we walked to Qdoba. We ended up not really needing the coats - but would of if it had taken even two minutes longer to make our meals.