All employees are entitled to a minimum of two weeks paid vacation time annually. The actual days to be used as vacation are subject to approval by the individual employee’s supervisor.

Insurance

All employees are qualified for any of the health insurance plans offered by the college. Information on the various plans is available from Human Resources. This benefit is extended to members of the employee’s immediate family. Part-time employees may apply for this benefit but will pay a higher percentage of the premium.

Use of College Facilities

All employees, full and part time, may use any of the college facilities, including the library, gym, swimming pool, and tennis courts, free of charge. A faculty or staff ID card must be shown when requesting access to these facilities. Immediate family members also have the right to enjoy this benefit, but must obtain an ID card from Human Resources before using college facilities.

Parking

Free parking is available on campus for all college employees; however, a parking sticker must be obtained from Human Resources. The sticker must be displayed on the windshield at all times when parked on campus. The sticker is valid for parking in specially designated employee parking areas as well as in any parking space marked “Visitor.” Student parking areas are reserved for student parking only.

Taking Classes

Employees may take classes in any department at the college. Show your faculty or staff ID when registering for the class. Employees may enroll in up to three classes per year free of charge. Any additional classes beyond that must be paid for at the full tuition rate. In addition, any employee wishing to pursue a degree must apply for and be accepted into the program of his or her choice before being considered a degree candidate. In this case, student service fees will apply.

One of the costs of being a lover of old trees is the all-too-frequent loss of a beautiful soul you've grown fond of.Last summer was harder than most for old trees and their human supporters.The spring's nonstop rains flooded soils and caused root systems of many large,old trees to rot in part.Then,when the summer came,trees could not tap deep sources of water that would normally have maintained(维持）them.Many valuable old trees died.

When I volunteered on the Mount Rainier Tree Commission,I heard from many people concerned about their trees.We had little to offer them.That's because public and private urban tree resources and programs were aimed almost entirely at planting trees and not at all maintaining trees.No state or province program that I could find provided any financial resources for maintaining tree health. Small and under resourced cities such as ours were on their own.

This is backward.Scientists are learning that large,old trees are the most valuable,especially in cities.They put on wood fastest and take the most carbon out of the air. They harbor the most wildlife.They can lower summer temperatures by 20 degrees or more.In a recent study,researchers found that Boston would get more benefit from keeping the trees it has alive than from planting new trees.There's reason to think this finding would apply in other cities,too.

Now,our public and private tree programs often ignore old trees until it is too late.As long as we abandon our old trees,planting more is merely to keep pace with growing losses. We want trees to help protect us,but we leave them unprotected.Consider this in the human world:Nobody would send a baby into the world and expect it to just make it. Children need caring for and it's why we have schools and child health-insurance programs.We could get so much more out of our trees if we just put   a little more into them.

Time and how we experience it have always puzzled us. Physicists have created fascinating theories, but their time is measured by a pendulum (钟摆) and is not psychological time, which leaps with little regard to the clock or calendar. As someone who understood the distinction observed, ''When you sit with a nice girl for two hours it seems like a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove, a minute seems like two hours. ''

Psychologists have long noticed that larger units of time, such as months and years, fly on swifter wings as we age. They also note that the more time is structured with schedules and appointments, the more rapidly it seems to pass. For example, a day at the office flies compared with a day at the beach.

Expectation and familiarity also make time seem to flow more rapidly. Almost all of us have had the experience of driving somewhere we've never been before. Surrounded by unfamiliar scenery, with no real idea of when we’ll arrive, we experience the trip as lasing a long time. But the return trip, although exactly as long, seems to take far less time. The novelty of the outward journey has become routine.

When days become as identical as beads (小珠子)on a string, they mix together, and even months become a single day. To counter this, try to find ways to interrupt the structure of your day-- to stop time, so to speak.

Learning something new is one of the ways to slow the passage of time. One of the reasons the days of our youth seems to be full and long is that these are the days of learning and discovery. For many of us, learning ends when we leave school, but this doesn't have to be.

Hardware in general, and smartphones in particular, have become a huge environmental and health problem in the Global South' s landfill sites(垃圾填埋场).

Electronic waste(e-waste) currently takes up 5 percent of all global waste, and it is set to increase rapidly as more of us own more than one smartphone, laptop and power bank. They end up in places like Agbogbloshie on the outskirts of Ghana's capital, Accra.It is the biggest e-waste dump in the world, where 10,000 informal workers walk through tons of abandoned goods as part of an informal recycling process.They risk their health searching for the precious metals that are found in abandoned smartphones.

But Agbogbloshie should not exist. The Basel Convention, a 1989 treaty aims to prevent developed nations from unauthorized dumping of e-waste in less developed countries. The E-waste industry, however, circumvents the regulations by exporting e-waste labelled as “secondhand goods” to poor countries like Ghana, knowing full well that it is heading for a landfill site.

A recent report found Agbogbloshie contained some of the most dangerous chemicals.This is not surprising: smartphones contain chemicals like mercury(水银), lead and even   arsenic (砷 ) Reportedly, one egg from a free-range chicken in Agbogbloshie contained a certain chemical which can cause cancer and damage the immune system at a level that's about 220 times greater than a limit set by the European Food Safety Authority(EFSA), Most worryingly, these poisonous chemicals are free to pollute the broader soil and water system. This should concern us all, since some of Ghana's top exports are cocoa and nuts.

Some governments have started to take responsibility for their consumers' waste.For example, Germany has started a project that includes a sustainable recycling system at Agbogbloshie, along with a health clinic for workers.However, governments cannot solve the problem alone, as there is am almost limitless consumer demand for hardware, especially when governments’ green policies are focused on issues like climate change.

Only the manufacturers can fix this.A more economically sustainable and politically possible solution is through encouraging hardware manufacturers to make the repair, reuse and recycling of hardware profitable, or at least cost-neutral.