Random assortment

For the first time ever, all three of the final exams I’m giving are on the same day: 1-3, 4-6, and 8:30-10:30 on December 15th. I even get a bit of a dinner break in there.
I realise that it’s very old-school of me to complain about writing style in e-mail (“Full sentences, with clauses and everything? Proper punctuation? That’s, like, so 19th-century epistolary, dude.”), but I’m going to do it anyway. My first contact with a student this semester was an e-mail that consisted of one line, with no capitalisation at all and no punctuation except the question mark at the end. At the very least, is it unreasonable to expect people to introduce themselves when sending a message to someone they’ve never met?
I’ve been distracting myself from course planning this afternoon by scheming and plotting. One of the objects of my scheming is a pair of diploma frames, that I might finally remove my degree-paper-things from the poster tube in which they’ve languished for lo these many years. I fail to see why it should be worth $200+ to me to put one of these into a frame, doctorate or not.
Another plot concerns trip planning; it turns out that the Rochester/Toronto ferry has anticipated my desires and moved to thwart them far in advance of my own plans. At last, a worthy opponent…