Surf City, Baby

I love that the NYT story on Hurricane Earl has a picture of surfers.  We have to have priorities, and the surfers demonstrate that quite well. 

Of course, my self-centered question is: will the hurricane hit DC during the APSA?  It would not be the first conference disrupted by a hurricane but the first one I was attending.  Blogging is likely to be light, not because of an evacuation (the hurricane is likely to miss us), but due to the long hours of schmoozing with old friends, ex-colleagues, the Obama kids, former students, new acquaintances, random Congressional Pages, and whoever else that crosses my path over the next several days.

I will say it was fun to be back to lecturing yesterday for the first time in eight months (I had course releases lasts winter/spring).  Ambivalence on the first day: nice to see standing room only but hard to keep telling students that there is little I can do to add students to my classes.  McGill simply does not offer enough upper division classes, plus the topic of my 400-level (senior) lecture is pretty interesting: the International Relations of Ethnic Conflict.  I have not taught it in about five years, having developed a course on Civil-Military Relations.  Back to my roots. And my intro class of 612 is a gateway to upper division classes, so it is not only inherently interesting (IR is more interesting than the other subfields), but also a requirement.  But only 612 fit into the room and I have a finite number of TAs with a finite number of hours they can work.

Anyhow, I will try to post about this conference and what I am learning here, but it may be difficult especially as I sweat all over the computer in the tropical heat and humidity that is DC in early Sept.