Confused?

There have been some unusual happenings these past few days. For one, I wrote my first letter of recommendation! (one more step on the path to becoming an academic). This is sort of strange, but what's even weirder is that it was a letter for one of my professors at Stanford. That's right, a student wrote a letter of recommendation for a professor. An interesing reversal of roles =). Stanford apparently places great importance upon quality of teaching, and requests student input in the form of these letters whenever a given professor is up for promotion. My dad says that they never do things like this at Georgia Tech. Generalizing to all public schools, this could perhaps explain why teaching quality was so much better at Stanford than it is here at Davis. Anyway, this is the third time that I've received such a request from Stanford. The other two were for professors I hardly knew and had only taken one class from and never really interacted with, so I didn't feel compelled to write a letter. This time it was one of my favorite professors going up for promotion and tenure. Since he's such a great professor and I'd really like him to get tenure at Stanford, I figured I should go ahead and write the letter. I hope he's successful! I do wonder how they select students to write letters though. Do they request everyone who's taken a class from a given professor assuming that that way they'll at least receive some respondants? Or perhaps refrain from asking the flunkies assuming that they might be jaded and have only negative, biased opinions? Or do they ask the professor to suggest students, much as we students select professors to write recommendations for us? I wonder...

In other oddities, I've now had Ozzie for about 2.5 weeks. This is apparently long enough for him to start thinking I'm his mother. Such a silly kitty. This manifests itself as him trying to milk me =P. I didn't make this connection when he started sucking on my thumb the other day. (it was so cute! His ears twitched with every slurp.) Giving up there, he seems to have decided that the most likely location of my teats is on my neck. Don't even ask me how he got that idea. I probably still wouldn't have discovered that his sucking was suckling except it started to be accompanied by kneading at my throat. This is how kittens stimulate milk flow (an item of kitty trivia that I'm familiar with). It's not entirely pleasant as it sometimes involves clawing... Happily, Ozzie didn't suck hard enough to bruise my neck. I don't think I'd enjoy having to explain a hickey from my kitten... =)