Making room for Mr. Epiphany

You do all the work to apply for a grant to fund some faculty and staff development activities in the summer and then the grant gets approved (which is great because nothing's happening on campus right now without outside funding) and so you get to work setting up the details and everything is going smoothly until it isn't--a key contact is out of the office with Lyme Disease, the online system for catering campus events won't recognize your credentials, the books the group needs to discuss at the first meeting get hung up in a supply-chain snafu and won't arrive until after the meeting date--and you have to scramble to adapt to changing circumstances and you come perilously close to throwing in the towel entirely until an early-morning epiphany disrupts your sleep, and while epiphanies that arrive at 2 a.m. often aren't worth the paper they're scribbled on, this one actually smooths out the biggest barrier to successful completion of the project, because while wondering whether you ought to stand at the photocopier and scan the first 80 or so pages of the book and send it to participants so they can be prepared to discuss it next week, Mr. Early-Morning Epiphany asks a simple question: Have you checked Ohiolink?  

So first thing in the morning you check Ohiolink and see that the missing book is available as an ebook that can be downloaded for free by anyone with a college ID. So you send out the link to participants and give them their reading assignment and thank your lucky stars that Mr. Early-Morning Epiphany isn't suffering from Lyme Disease.

You may be sleepy, but at least you're happy. How happy? This happy:

(I'm using this photo in a PowerPoint presentation next week. Maybe at some point I'll write about why.)