RRBOC (Really RBOC!)

• One of my students has a pair of shoes more awesome than anything that I own.  It eats me up with envy.  I don't want to give him a swelled head or cross any lines of appropriate professor-student relationship, but I'm dying to know where he found those shoes.  I'm also scandalized to think that his shoes might cost four times what I'd spend on a pair.
• Speaking again of footwear, I continue to despise this godawful trend of wearing black socks and shower sandals.  I have yet to see anyone wearing this who doesn't look like zi just escaped from an insane asylum.  I am utterly baffled that any person in possession of hir full faculties would ever think of putting on such items together, much less walking out of doors like that.  It actually makes those running shoes with toes look reasonable, even stylish.
• Crickets keep making ill-advised incursions into my garage when I come home in the evening.  They don't seem to realize that they are cutting themselves from their friends and family by hopping in there.  They probably neither realize nor care how much it irritates me when they start chirping in there, and the walls and cement floor magnify the sound half a bajillion times when I'm trying to sleep.
• It always shakes me a little when a student tells me that they can't attend one thing or another because a hugely traumatic event has befallen them.  I was such a blissfully ignorant college student, I now see.  There are so many awful things that can happen out of the blue that can throw a student totally off-track for a semester or more.  Had I even been aware of them all, I might have become an insomniac by my sophomore year.
• I used a BB&B 20%-off coupon as a flimsy pretext to treat myself to a new roasting pan, a small saucepan, and a rice cooker.  I am excited.  (I suck at cooking rice.)  I briefly considered going hog-wild and getting a pressure cooker too, but I don't yet have a clear idea what I'd do with the thing, and the trustworthy models all seem to be at least $100. 
• I think I'm going to use the book contract as a reason to host my first house party in years.  It'll be my first time to have colleagues over to my place.  Maybe I should buy a coffee table ahead of that?  And maybe put up the wall art that I've had leaning against a wall for months now?  And Christ, I should probably at least unpack that freaking vacuum cleaner that has sat unopened as a makeshift end table for way too long now.