you spin me right round, baby

Phew. In the Department of Bullets Recently Dodged: my car's engine has been making a weird squeaky noise increasingly often for the last couple of weeks. To me it sounded like a proto-incipient version of the squeal you get from a slipping fanbelt, and I suggested this to my Amazing Tame Mechanic this morning when I dropped the car off at the garage. Turns out it is sort of a belt-related noise, only the belt bits related to the cam-shaft, which is squeaking because a vital bit of it is almost seized solid. If I'd carried on blithely driving it, the whole cam would have self-destructed fairly soon, so just as well I went all pre-emptive on it. I am once again grateful for random bits of arcane engine lore imparted by my father when I was a mere adolescent driver prone to cactus-destruction, and which have given me a nervous habit of listening to my car engine more or less continually and trying to match its odder sound effects against my incomplete and shaky mental schematic of the Infernal Combustion Engine. (My Biscuit Tin was really good for odd sound effects. I swear the squeaks and rattles were poltergeist activity and necessary for its continued locomotion).
Score: Self 1, Techno-Jinx 0. Feeling: smug.

In the Department of There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch: my department gave me a farewell lunch today. Experienced extemp-readers will immediately appreciate the multi-levelled irony inherent in this gesture. They've never employed me properly, they've certainly never paid me properly, they have repeatedly refused to give me an actual post, and I'm only leaving because I refuse to teach any further for the pittance they do pay. The dept. members present were my supporters, and were very sweet, but I'm groping for a metaphor here. It's not locking the stable door after the horse has bolted: it's closer to opening, with a flourish, the triple-locked stable door in order to permit the exit of a horse which was never inside the damned stable in the first place, because it's been locked outside. Cropping the sparse dry grass of the paddock. In the rain.
Score: Self 1 (free lunch), Cosmic Irony 3. Feeling: unloved, but strangely loved.

In the Department of Cosmic Slapdowns: I have to spend the entire weekend doing progression codings, which entails taking the printed academic record of every second-year BSocSci student and counting whether they've completed enough courses to be allowed to continue. This is a howl-inducing combination of time-consuming, nitpicky, mindlessly boring and absolutely vital, and will undoubtedly have caused me to gnaw off a random selection of my own limbs by the end of the weekend.
Score: Self 0, Cosmic Sadism 23. Feeling: aargh.

But! In the Department of Oh My God Eventually, the press finally got back to me about the book revisions. (Remember? The Revisions That Brutalised The Bunny?) Both readers in the second round of reviews strongly recommend publication; both have expressed only minor, easily fixable nitpicks. Both seem to have bought, hook, line and sinker, the notion that the updates involved close, careful, scholarly reading and absorption of a variety of dense critical material. I swear they've almost convinced me that's that what I did.
Self: 3, (ftw), Academia 0 (pwned!). Feeling: inexpressible joy.

And, as a bonus: the departmental lunch featured the reading out of a selection of comments from student assessments of my teaching. The bit that made me snort my champagne:
"My god, what a mind! And ... she is never an arrogant bitch."

It makes it all seem so ... worthwhile! Possibly.