I should be more organized about opening my mail. I opened something I had put aside and discovered a letter informing me I have received a performance raise. Trouble is, now I have to grade papers and pull together a talk I am giving tomorrow at my kids' Montessori school, not celebrate. The university has been in a budget crunch for several years, so raises have been extremely rare for a while. I talked to a colleague who also got one who told me everything that was wrong with the way the system worked and what we got, but I will try to keep seeing the glass as half full.