Bit neurotic about a lecture I had to give this morning. It was on mindmapping. I'm familiar with the topic and have taught on it before at TheOldPlace, but it's been a while. And this was to 80+ students. And I'd spent the weekend trying and failing to hunt down a folder full of lovely examples of mind maps I'd collected over the years (I suspect I threw them out in some attempt at a clear out - maybe between jobs).

Always difficult to judge how it's gone - especially when someone sitting in the middle of the second row of one of our largest lecture theatres has quite evidently gone to sleep. (I debated waking him up and then decided to leave him as it would only have been jealousy. If I'd stopped talking for more than two minutes, *I'd* have probably been asleep.)

After a couple more hours of lectures to Masters students over lunch and the early afternoon, the rest of the day turned into a horrible example of good news/bad news.

The bad news was this I discovered I'd lost the key to the drawer where I put my laptop and digital recorder.
The good news was the latter bits of expensive kit were both very safe!

The bad news was it took the best part of an hour trawling everywhere I've been today (various bits of the library, a nearby bookshop, a lunchtime eatery to celebrate someone's birthday, the lecture theatre from this morning). I'd left the lecture theatre till the very last place as it was furthest away. Of course, I arrived half way through a lecture and sat down to wait till the end of the hour.

The good news is that with time to kill I went through *all* my pockets again and actually found a pocket in my suit I didn't even know existed - and there was my (small) key.

The bad news is I'm utterly exhausted after three hours of really big lectures (not to mention the additional hike round the city and campus that I could have lived without!)

The good news is that if weren't for the latter I wouldn't have bumped into a student from the mass this morning who stopped me as I scoured the sidewalks to say thank you for the lecture this morning! It almost made it worthwhile.

(Oh and thank you to S from TheOldPlace who helped dig out some of the old material we'd prepared back when we did mind mapping as a shared session).