Update, at the end of my personal hurricane season

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  This is the kind of week it was:  by 7:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, I'd already run 10 miles with a friend as the sun rose, and was heading for the shower and a good stretch of stretching.  That run was the first 10 miles of a 30-mile week; there were a few other miles with another friend and a lot of miles that were by myself (which is hard, just hard), and then the last 7.85 miles  was with my sister, on Saturday morning.  I'm feeling kind of happy-sore, and glad that the half-marathon is a month away, after which I'll get to do only those runs that involve other people, and ditch the solo runs.

I also got to do an opera screening, hiring interviews and hiring meetings, Bachata dancing demonstrations, a lovely Black History Month event, and a visit to join my dad and sisters to celebrate my dad's birthday.  (Also, the usual teach-my-classes-and-grade-all-the-papers things).  It has been rich; it has been full.  I'm feeling glad to have so much good stuff in my life, and -- as with the runs -- glad that the future holds good stuff but not as much of it all at once!

Matching sticky notes with awesome African Americans.

So many photos matched -- this is part of what it looked like
the next morning (there was a whole other wall, too).  

From the kids and spouse, a variety of kinds of news:

From Nelson: 

I had a job interview at Arby's in [nearby location] today and I am proud to announce I got the job

From Gosling:  

Guinness [the dog] has had an increase in seizure activity over the last few months. Well, we went to a specialist, a veterinary neurologist to be exact, and while I could take or leave the customer service, we learned that G-force (aka Guinness), is a fast metabolizer. So basically his body is an over achiever . I guess he takes after the family in that way... we all over achieve at various things, sports, travel, medicine, waste reduction, fiber arts, etc...Some med changes are being made and we are hoping we will get better control moving forward! So, that’s the pupdate .

From Kinderling:  

So, I went to the urgent care because the spots haven't gone away, and I started worrying it might be staph... it's shingles!

My jaw dropped.
I was not expecting that!
I have antiviral medication prescribed. The Dr. Was like, have you been stressed out lately? LOL
I'm like, I have 3 kids Wild.

From my guy:

I landed in Miami a little while ago. My flight to NYC is in 2.5 hours. I should be there late and on the way home tomorrow morning. Assuming no problems with the next flight I will be home between three and four pm.  

I listened to a BBC podcast "In Our Time" about Paul Erdos. Three math profs from the UK talking about his life and why he is so amazing.  The panel had Erdos numbers of 3, 2 and 2.  

I am glad you are resting and having fun with your visit. 

See you in 24 hours or so!

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

Glimpse of a moment in the middle of the over-full week

Earlier this week, the second Tuesday in my two-week hurricane, I let the busyness get to me. It was 4 o'clock – actually, 4:07, – and one of the six people who were supposed to be in our meeting had just come into the meeting, and yet people were still talking about random college gossip.  The slow-motion replay that keeps running over and over in my head repeats these two lines:

Me: I have a meeting at 5 o'clock tonight and another meeting at 6, and another event at 8, so can we get started on our agenda?

Organizer: [Bristling] Why, yes; that's what I was getting ready to do. I was just about to start the meeting. If other people want to lead the meeting besides me, they can do so. I was just waiting for George, to start the meeting.

I keep searching back in my head, wondering if what I said was actually so rude as the organizer's response indicated.  Maybe it was, I don't know.  But it certainly wasn't gracious, and it clearly frazzled the organizer, a person who's taking a lot on this semester, reluctantly, even though they are organizationally the the person in line to take on this job.  

Coming back to not being gracious: I also know that came from a place inside of me that is feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the wave-after-wave of events coming at me this week. They're mostly very good events – some of which I planned myself long ago, and others of which I'm very grateful to be part of. The grand coincidence of timing brings them all together at once, and I'm freaking out (I guess) about dropping a ball, missing important details, embarrassing myself. Tuesday, I didn't mess up on catering or on running a class or on doing all the required reading – the things I have been worried about – but I did mess up on being kind to somebody who is doing a lot of work.  

It's a good lesson for me to remember for the future: that the pitfalls of a busy week lie in my head (and in how they come out of my mouth), even more than in the calendar details that rain down through all the holes in my schedule.

Update in the midst of the work hurricane

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  I'm about halfway through what I'm thinking of as a two-week hurricane of activities, and being halfway through the storm is kind of exciting!

Even with work buffeting me side-to-side, I've gotten to have some good family time.  Robert Grudin, in his marvelous little book of meditations on time, wrote about shooting an arrow into the future and then arriving at the landing point, and that's a bit of what my family interactions have been.  That is, a while ago I aimed at a Wednesday-night grandchild evening, and a Valen-dinner on Friday the 17th, and then -- in spite of being up to my ears in campus-based stuff, somehow the grandchild/Valen-dinner events just magically arrived and swooped me up with them.  

Bchild and I played with cars, and ate muffins, 
and drew on the chalkboard.

My tickler file reminded me, "make a heart-shaped pizza", 
and so I did.

Then Inkling and I had a lovely Valen-dinner together.
The cherry cobbler (not shown here) was super delicious.

I love it when the Swamped-Me gets to reap all the rewards that the Quiet-Planning-Time-Me had set in motion.

Inkling, by the way, was taken by surprise this week in Sock Madness, when the qualifying round pattern "dropped" on February 16, a date which is (checks calendar) not yet March.  Nonetheless, she showed me her impressive start, a sock that has an intarsia image of a young woman holding dozens of colors of balloons (and her sock-in-progress dangled dozens of ends of different colors of yarn needing still to be woven in -- it looked like a spaghetti alien had invaded her sock).  

Further away, in Minnesota, Nelson had his head rearranged, thusly.  

I love this pattern.  I want to start talking about
tessellations and Euler's formula,
but perhaps you don't need to hear about that.

He's been helping to coach a middle school basketball season, and his team made it all the way to the final game of the playoffs -- huzzah for them! -- but didn't quite eke out that final win.  

Nelson:  I love this team so much

Nelson is a bit heartbroken, both by that final loss and also by having to say good-bye to the team.  But I, as his mom, am just super proud that he got to connect so deeply and that the team did so well.  As I tell OfSnough when he's feeling low about coming in 20th in a bike race, "you only have eyes in the front of your head".  It's easy to see the people who beat you, but all the by-standers get to see the bikers in places 21 through 60, the racers who were looking at the underside of your shoes, wishing they could catch you.  

And where is OfSnough?  At the top of Europe.  

At the lab at the top of Jungfraujoch, Switzerland . Almost 12,000 feet.

Two trains, a cable car, an underground train and an elevator to get here!

Gosling:  What do they study there?

OfSnough: Climate science. Cosmic radiation

Gosling:  Dad, do the employees at the lab stay for rotations? Like a week or month at a time. It would seem like quite a daily commute.

OfSnough: Yes. Some for weeks and months

Gosling: How many hours a day and how many days a week do they work?

OfSnough: Long days depending on the project

And "long days" brings us back to my hurricane.  I thought I'd do a quick update on a project I started in January to give me something mindless (but not internet-surfing-mindless) to do as a way to re-center myself in otherwise busy times: weaving a yoga mat. 

My sister gave me a large box of used jeans, too holey to wear or to repair further. 

The box is labeled, "yoga mat to be"

I built a frame from scraps of wood scavenged from a bed frame that had gotten damaged in Nelson's former apartment, and tore up old sheets to make the "warp" (up-and-down) strips.  Then I started tearing the jeans into strips, and those are becoming the "weft".  

You can see the completed part at 
the bottom, about 16 inches of yoga mat
done, so far.  

I have no idea if this will come out serviceable, but it's a good meditative activity, and I thought I'd start documenting it so I can come back and look at how this came together, in case it works out so spectacularly I decide to repeat the project in future years.  

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

My dryer is on its last legs . . . literally.

 My dryer is on its last legs . . . literally.

By "dryer", I mean "drying rack", a beautiful behemoth made of wooden dowels and struts, that I bought for my husband two or more decades ago.  It's gotten a lot of use -- and abuse -- over the years, so it's not surprising that it's started to deteriorate a bit.  

Two years ago, I painted the previously-bare wood with some extra green paint, to try to help keep the thing together.  I also worked on reattaching the dowels along the bottom (the ones that had been most stressed and kept falling apart) with screws.

Here's a dog's-eye view of the drying rack, 
as seen from the balcony where Prewash and I like to hang out.

It might seem surprising that it's the bottom -- not the top -- dowels that were the most prone to breaking, but that's because it's those ones that keep the rack from stretching two wide.   When we fold it up, the rack is like this:

|||||||||

As it opens, it's kind of like this:

WWWW

And we don't want it to pancake flat, like this:

=

It's those bottom three bars, and the ties between them, that keep the drying rack from collapsing.  Or rather, that kept the rack from collapsing, because earlier this month they finally handed in their pink slips and quit.  And so the drying rack would go from "||||" to " = " without staying in the "WWWW" position.

Man, oh man, I figured I would have to get a new drying rack.  And someday, this spring, I probably will get a new one, because I love that my husband has a drying rack he likes using almost as much as the electric dryer.  But the place to get a new one is a bit of a drive away, and right now time is precious to me, so I wasn't ready to get in the car and go shopping just yet. 

As I was doing the exit interviews with the dowel rods and the ties between them, I realized, however, I could hire a temp:  a lovely piece of rope.   I pulled out my handy dandy cordless drill to make rope-sized holes in the legs, right where the previous dowel rods and struts had been, and created a perfectly serviceable connector that keeps the legs from doing the splits. 

The rope that keeps it all together
(there's another one on the opposite side, naturally).

The missing dowel rods were at the bottom,
so this fix hardly affect the drying space we have, fortunately!

And now my drying rack is opened like WWWW, and full of dry clothes that my husband hung on it before he left for places far away, and I'm very happy to have a drying rack on its own legs, even if those legs are the last legs.

How I spend my time these days

 Life here in Enoughsville continues to be rich and full.  

On Monday morning, my husband walked me to work, kissed me good-bye, and then turned around and walked to the train that took him to the plane that took him to Europe for three weeks.

"I got a four-across row of seats all to myself on the flight over!!
It was wonderful. I did not sleep much,
but it was sooooooo nice to lie flat whenever I wanted to."

And what am I doing while he's away? A lot of job-related stuff, mostly.  This is my last semester of teaching (I thought that was true two years ago, so apparently I'm kind of like the opera singer, Beverly Sills,  who had multiple final tours).  Having said that, the phrase "semester of teaching" doesn't really describe the way I spend my days.  I'm mainly doing three kinds of things.

1. Hiring.  I'm on hiring committees for new people in our department, for a new senior administrator (Vice President of Silo X) at our College, and for an editor for a national math journal.  The tasks involved with these are quite different: in some cases (like the editor), I'm trying to be a recruiter and drum up good applicants, in others (like the VP), I'm one of many who is working with a professional search firm.  Job applications are often my weekend reading these days -- often, when I haven't come out with a newsletter some weekend, that was why.  The next week or two will be especially full with this aspect of my work.
   
   
2.  Serving as the don (an academic head) of a college house.  This is a job that comes with a lot of person-to-person interaction.   I advise students who have questions, students who have a lot of potential and are applying for fancy things, students who have fallen off the rails and need academic support.  I have three different committee meetings each week with other people related to my job (other dons, my house dean, our house student leaders).  I work with faculty who want to do programming in the house -- like, next week, we're going to have a showing of a past performance of Bizet's opera Carmen for one of the voice classes, and open it up to everyone.  And I get to do my own programming, including running a book club on Your Money or Your Life, or bringing to the house the Black History Month event I'd pulled together for my family a few years ago.

   

   A graffiti poster I put up in my college House.

   This is a job that gets to bring together a lot of the organizational aspects of my personality, and I like getting to be a little bit bossy about things and to be creative about designing events.
   
   
3. And of course, I teach.  I have just one class, which is over-full at 22 students.  I am super happy to be at a school where an upper-level class can be "over-full" at this level.  Still, I designed this course for about 16 students, and with this many people in it, the grading is a bit overwhelming.  My students have two different kinds of assignments each week,  and they're not the kind of computational "right or wrong" kind, but rather are creative drawing and writing assignments, so giving feedback is a big deal.  It's my own doing . . . but I am nonetheless locked into spending about 7 hours each week doing that grading. So, what was I doing Friday evening with my husband out of town?  I was grading my students' math/art projects, that's what!

In between all this, I'm trying to find time for the other parts of my life: reaching out to my family, being a good global citizen, staying in shape with my running buddies.  I feel like I'm managing with these, but just barely.  I'm so grateful that my family keeps reaching out to me: that I get to do math on Wednesday evenings with my granddaughter Achild, that Nelson calls me regularly, that Inkling comes over for waffles on most Sundays.  

The global citizen part is the aspect I feel is most keenly falling apart right now.  I attended an emotional roller coaster of a talk earlier this week on the responses of the Pakistani people to their devastating flood: there was so much suffering, so much courage -- stories of amazing heroism and innovation, but also an acknowledgement that the devastation there is a result of the kind of climate disruption and economic choices cause by people far away from the floods.  I want to think about this more.

While I was in the throes of feeling overwhelmed and inadequate about my global impact, I got this note from the mom of one of the children we sponsor in Zimbabwe.  It's not exactly saving the world, but it was the kind of encouragement I needed at the time. 

Thank you for the money that you sent,
we managed to pay fees, track suit, stationary,
exercise books, soap and covers.
25% was used for community allocation.
Thank you for the helping hand.

Oh, and I filed my taxes!  Now Turbo Tax keeps sending me texts like we're besties:

TT:  Great news, 'Snough ! Your federal return was accepted by the IRS.

So, that's the news from my corner of the planet this week, where I continue to be rich in my adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous. 

My monthly to-do list

I used to keep a monthly to-do list on an index card, with holes punched so that I'd move it from month to month in my planner.  Nowadays, because I've started making my calendar pages in LaTex, I just add this list to the front of every month.  

It seems weird to say that I remind myself to cut my toenails, but I have discovered that (a) cutting my toenails monthly has resulted in fewer holes in my socks and stockings, so apparently I didn't used to trim the toenails often enough before I wrote it down, and (b) writing down that I'm supposed to trim them means that my brain can relax a bit, not having to wonder "is it time yet?", but rather, knowing that the time will come when the list pops up again.  Likewise, ever since my husband and I suffered through a spate of bed bugs early in the pandemic, I relax a bit knowing that I'm doing monthly checks and that they keep turning up nothing.

At any rate, here's the list of things I check off my to-do list every time I transition from one month into the next:

• Trim my toenails
• Trim my hair
• Give the dog her monthly meds
• Check the beds for bedbugs 
• Check tires  [that is, check the air pressure in the car tires]
• Pull out my Tickler File

The last item -- the Tickler File -- is where I store paper reminders for things that will be relevant in a particular month.  February's file held a note for me as Associate Dean about spring break building access (I've now passed this along to the new AD), recipes for Valentine's day pizza and dessert, and a couple of birthday cards that I'll send out.  It also has the fabulous materials I pulled together one summer for Black History Month; it's fun to dust those off again.  

We're a week into February now, so this little reflection is a week late, I guess.  But even though the blog post is a tad delayed, the checklist got checked off right on time.  Fab!

Working backwards update

 Life continues to be so rich and full that I'm kind of having a hard time remembering it all, so I'm going to work my way backwards this week, starting with what I did today -- the easiest to remember.

Today, I got to see Jason!  I haven't seen this son of mine in person since Christmas 2019, and, man, have I missed him.  So I was delighted that OfSnough and I could take an afternoon trip to visit Jason in the new apartment he'd just moved to last week.  

The black-and-white cat (Moo-Moo) and I
hit it off especially well, for some reason. 

He has five cats which climbed all over me (by my invitation and encouragement).  The apartment is bright and sunny, clean and quiet, and it seems like a happy place.  Jason himself looks awesome; he's had the same job making and lifting pallets for a couple of years now, and it keeps him in kickin' shape.  

I asked him, I dunno, about 85 times if there's anything he needs.  He finally said, "yes, a hug".  I had one of those to spare, it turns out.  Good for the soul to see him!

Backing up one day, on Friday my guy came back from Miami, where he'd been hanging out with other science geeks thinking about the upcoming IEEE meeting.  We continued the science geek theme by watching the first half of Star Wars III, which apparently we'd both missed out on seeing earlier.  We're going to finish it tonight . . . I have a sneaking suspicion that something bad is going to happen to Anakin Skywalker, but don't ruin it for me!!!!!

So, that's Friday.  The day before that, on Thursday, I had two different highlights.  One was getting a CAT scan (my head is fine; the reason I still occasionally lisp is really truly only because I bit my tongue two weeks ago and not because of any more dire reason; and now it's official that it's only my tongue getting me in trouble per usual).  The other highlight was getting to see a hilarious -- rollicking and awesome -- performance of The Play that Goes Wrong.  My daughter Inkling sat next to me and noted that she actually heard me laughing out loud (I'm often jealous of other people's abilities to do so).   Several times during the show, I wished that the actors would stop talking because I was laughing so hard I couldn't hear them.  Wow, what a wonderful experience to have!

Way-back-when on Wednesday, I had some lovely phone conversations with Nelson.  He was asking me for advice [quickest way to his mother's heart!!!] about rising early, and also sharing awesome news about how well things are going in his new place.  There's a blood-sugar measurement that sounds a bit like a Star Wars Droid (A13PO, or something like that) that he's rocking these days, the best it's been in years.  Perhaps that is because he's got stability in his new home, or perhaps that's because a few weeks ago he asked me for advice [happy sigh] about nutrition stuff and then followed up on my free-yet-excellent suggestions for cooking grilled veggies with parmesan cheese.  At any rate, he's thriving, and that is making me super happy.

On Tuesday . . . let's see, on Tuesday I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the assignments my students keep giving me to grade (possibly related to me letting extra students into the class and then assigning lots and lots of work, but why point fingers?).  I was also wondering why I was still sometimes slipping into lisping, and that's why Thursday I had someone examine my head.  

On Monday, I got to spend the day at work and then managed to catch a few moments for conversation with my husband before he took off for Miami the next day.

And that's my week in reverse.  Oh, and Anakin S. made totally the wrong choice in that movie, by the way.  I think he needed to do a better job of getting advice from his mom.

At any rate, that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.