Skyrocketing stress levels on campus

It's a good thing the pollinator gardens on campus are attracting visitors right now, because I needed that flutter of fritillary wings after my morning meetings. 

Classes start two weeks from now and everyone is scrambling to adjust to a new course management system while trying to develop fall syllabi, which causes one kind of annoyance and stress, but an entirely different level of stress and grumbling and despair arise from the rumors swirling about impending cuts of faculty and staff and programs and--well, anything that can be cut to save a nickel, and meanwhile, many departments are struggling to do essential work with insufficient staffing. It's easy to talk about doing more with less but it's not so easy to make the painful decisions about valuable things we won't be able to do at all.

The grumbling gets louder the closer I get, so after my meetings, I'm spending time with the fritillaries. As long as no one decides to add the pollinator garden to the list of items to be cut, I think I may survive this semester.