Enough with the jackhammer

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  It's been so rich, in fact, that I'm late in writing this up.  I'm late partly because I spent the weekend painting tables in a new student seminar room.  (Also involved in the project: heat gun and orbital sander).

I did NOT use backhoes, jack hammers, earth diggers, or dump trucks.  I left that particular work to the people digging up the road across the street from us, who were highly effective at shaking things up so that our whole house vibrated.  Free massages?

OfSnough returned from even colder places, where he got to visit Nelson and Sizzling.  

See that neat hat?  Two stories about that.  One is that, as people do when they're not me, OfSnough and Nelson spent some bonding time going shopping for new clothes.

Two is that, the hat is an indicator of other stuff that my offspring excel at; as my guy wrote later,

"The basketball game was a lot of fun to watch. You made a couple of three-point shots and played for almost two hours! Wow!"

And I don't even have the words to say how to think about all that this particular picture means to me these days.

At any rate, my guy is back in Enoughsville, cooking, doing laundry and vacuuming a lot of dog hair.   I am flinging emails through cyberspace and having meetings -- mostly Zoom meetings.   We started classes this semester, and I'm teaching a half-credit seminar that, for the first two weeks, will meet remotely.   Last year when I taught via Zoom, we started the year with cameras on, and that remained the default even though more and more students tended to turn them off eventually.  My class on Thursday morning was just the opposite:  a 4-by-5 grid of white names on black rectangles.   Ah, well, I let the students stay camera off; life is hard enough without adding to the stress, and we'll be in-person in February (or at least, that's the plan).

The other cool news is that at a Faculty Meeting, my boss announced the next round of Endowed Chairs, and one of them is . . . me.  (For those who don't know, for professors, being named to an endowed chair is kind of a cross between getting an award and getting a promotion.)  It also means I'll have a confusing title that includes other people's names:  Dr. Snough, the Thurston and Lovey Howell III Professor of Mathematics.  So that's fun.

And that's the hastily jotted-down news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.