Geeking out

I got a job offer and I accepted it! Beginning in the fall, I'll be an Assistant Professor of Psychology - no "adjunct" there!

Among the complexities of relocating to a new state, I get to get all nerdy about things like:
-Decorating my OWN office
-Framing my PhD diploma (which currently resides in the giant envelope in which it was mailed to me 3 years ago)
-Planning course offerings
-Designing courses that have never been offered at this college
-Getting to teach something besides "Intro to Psych" and "Human Growth and Development" -- topics in my area of specialty!
-Thinking about all the *neat* things I can do with a student population which is largely on-campus residential and of traditional college age, and who all have regular and reliable access to the internet (Group projects! Online discussion groups! Special Topics courses!)

 I so totally cannot wait. The next three months are going to be like the longest Christmas Eve, ever. Until then, I'm reading "Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other" by Sherry Turkle. Ironically, I am reading it on my Kindle ... but I like this book so far and what it has to say about robotics and their status as somewhere between alive-and-not alive. The mental shift for people and how they deal with robots has a lot of implications at a philosophical and spiritual level. So far, I'm only in the first section - I was totally hooked in the Introduction - but I can see this being used as one "textbook" for a Special Topics kind of course on the Psychology of Technology or something like that. Even more intriguing, this book seems to be one of several that this author has written about the psychology of technology; she seems to be something of an expert and I am looking forward to reading those next.