Don't let the birds build a nest in your brainpan

Here I am tackling piles of work two weeks before the end of the semester--the wrong time to be required to learn something new, but nevertheless men with tools are removing all our office phone lines so we can switch to team Teams. 

I suppose I ought to read all the information our IT people sent to prepare us for the shift to VOIP calling, but I don't wanna. Too many other things to do: teaching and grading and departmental assessment and hiring adjuncts (still) and dealing with issues before the Professional Review Committee (again) and planning the big end-of-semester pedagogy workshop. I don't want to learn a whole new method of phone-calling. Maybe Teams is wonderful; maybe it's the most excellent calling method ever invented; but I'm tired and my brain is full. 

But at least birds haven't built a nest in my brainpan. Yesterday I went out back to fetch the weed-whacker and found an elaborate bird's nest in the battery compartment. I had to clean it out before I could even start on the weed-whacking and mowing, and then of course the mower decided that it was tired too: it's self-propelled, but it wasn't self-propelling very well, especially on the uphill parts. Its get up and and go has got up and gone, with the result that every muscle in my body is now sore.

What kind of winter workout would prepare me for the first yard work of the season? I probably ought to just take the mower out and push it around the yard a couple times a week all winter long, though it wouldn't care for the snow. Getting out the weed-whacker and waving it around a few times a week might deter the birds. Then again, why not hire a landscaping company and spread the pain around?

This week everyone in my building will be sharing the pain of learning the new phone system, or non-phone system since it doesn't involve actual phones. So now I can make calls on my laptop, kind of like a Zoom call? And I can set up Teams to automatically transcribe all my voice mails into something resembling human language? And all I need to do is to click on this and configure that and check to make sure the audio is turned on? And this means I'll be able to respond to work-related calls everywhere I go?

I'll think about it tomorrow. Too much real work to do today.