Enough of April

Life continues to be rich and full for me, and maybe also for other members of the family, but I've been head down, plowing forward, so not really sure about them.

Here's what I love about April as an academic: it's a hurricane of activity, but you know (when you're in the midst of it) that the hurricane will end. When my husband was still working in business, he could have similar amazing hurricanes of work, but he had no assurance that the storm would let up anytime soon.

Well, it's April, and there has been a heck of a lot happening in the work side of my life… but this week was the last week of classes, and I feel like this means that soon I'll be able to start breathing again.  I think that's true even though I am an associate dean.

Having said that, I also know from a long experience in academia that May does not exist. There's a month in my calendar that says "May", and so you'd think that the month is actually there.  I always schedule many tasks for "May", thinking that I will finally have lots of time then, but somehow whenever I get to the end of those days in my calendar, I look up and realize that I have felt busy for 31 days but can't remember a single task that I have done. It's really only in June that I actually start to think about research and summer projects.

At any rate, this was the last week of classes, and so my research students and I wrapped up our project. Next week many students will have exams; I'll get to go to student research presentations and honors defenses. We'll celebrate the seniors and try to squeeze in a few more committee meetings.

My own personal fun this week came when I realized that I am almost out of monthly planner pages. A bunch of years ago, I had figured out how to design monthly planner pages in Excel, but the last year that I printed out was "2022", so I'm going to need next year's pages soon.  Microsoft updates to Excel means that the spacing on my old spreadsheet is now all wrong, darn it, and so I decided to go back to my true love of LaTeX, which allows me to space things precisely and plop numbers exactly where I want to put them. To make the numbers and the lines come out in the right places I had to teach myself how to do for loops in LaTeX and also if then else statements, which I did, and it made me so happy to be geeking around in code that requires a bit compiling and then creates something beautiful that I can carry in my hands.

What else? My phone flaked out on me, which is only fair because I don't like my phone, so why should my phone like me? My husband likes me though, so he got me a new phone. We'll see if me and my new phone get along better than me and the old one.

I also got my second booster today, which was a real shot in the arm, so to speak. I'm in a group that's now apparently the minority of Americans – people who have never gotten Covid (at least as far as I know). I'm happy to do what I can to keep it that way.

I haven't done a very good job of keeping up with my kids, because April and also because hate phones, but now that we're entering the Month that Does Not Exist, I might try to get back in touch with them and see what they're up to.  More on that later, I guess.

And that's the news from one person in our family, who continues the wealthy in my adventures. May you and yours be similarly prosperous.