(More than) Enough Cake

Life continues to be rich and fall here in Enoughsville. This week has been particularly rich with cake and celebrations of all kinds.

On Monday, I baked muffins (apple oatmeal chocolate chip) for my last-ever writing circle with my students. Tuesday, I finished up teaching regular material (numerical projective invariants, in case you're curious), and then went home to bake a chocolate cake that doubled as a pirate ship.

Wednesday, I brought my chocolate pirate ship to our registrar's PeepOrama (peep show?), where we all displayed our own creativity with peeps, in dioramas.  I explained that in my own particular diorama, everything was edible except for the shark.  Well, and arguably the peeps. 

A peep walks the plank,
which is dangerous because there is a
peep-eating shark swimming by.

Both Tuesday night and Wednesday night ended up being late-night baking nights for me. By Thursday, I was a little brain fried, . . .  but I have to say that if I'm pulling late-night hours because of baking cakes, I know my life is overall pretty good.

Peeps in the crow's nest, and an island where
X marks the spot for the buried treasure.

Thursday, I taught my last class.  This is the second time I've taught my last class -- the first time was two years ago, just before I went off into the administration . . . but that chewed me up and spit me back into the classroom for one more round of "last ever".  I do think that this last class was really the last class, though.  

My students chalked my board for me.

One of the mathematicians in our department has started a tradition of clapping a professor out during the last class before retirement, so about midway through that class period the rest of my colleagues and a whole bunch of my former students swamped the room, bringing in ice cream and brownies and cheering.  It was a super lovely way to wrap up my teaching career!

The comment that makes me happiest about what I've done.

And even with all that, the parties of the week were just getting started.  I went straight from my class to a party for the College House I headed up this year, to do a champagne toast to the seniors. 

The cake I made on Wednesday night for our
House's senior celebration on Thursday.

And then there was a sophomore dinner, and on Friday there was a math lunch for the senior majors, and then an All-campus party . . . and there will be more of the celebrations next week, as we pass through Reading Days into finals (and my final grading spree!! Yay!!!) and then commencement.  So I'm feeling well-rounded with all the cake and all the celebration that is filling me up right now.

Nelson called to chat, and he, too, has adventures awaiting.  He's signing up for classes in construction and in audio production.  He's very much enjoying working with his basketball team, and got to give the middle schoolers a pep talk about moving beyond losing one game: he reminded them about getting their heads in a good place by thinking about playing the next game just the way they played in practice.  He's thinking maybe he'll even get to travel with them when they go to Memphis in August.  

My guy is still active in Torah studies and protests and bicycling; he's not traveling much right now, and I am enjoying having him home (when I'm home to enjoy him, that is). 

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours enjoy this spring and all that it brings.   

Peep show (Pirates, Monsters, Javelins, and Mario)

A little over a year ago, I wandered into our Registrar's office to ask about something deanly, or maybe just to gossip, and they greeted me excitedly with, "Are you here to see the Peeps?".  I had no idea what they were talking about, but when someone asks me a question like that I say "yes", because it's clear that excitement and novelty await just around the corner.  Plus, our registrars happen to be fun-loving and funny people who always make me feel good, so when they're bubbling over with happiness about something I don't mind getting some of those bubbles on myself.

It turns out, they'd each made a diorama featuring marshmallow peeps (what my sister used to call "marshmallow yucks").  There was an orchestra of peeps wearing little tuxedos and playing instruments; there was an outdoor camping scene with peeps in tents or huddled around a campfire roasting little marshmallows (wait: is that cannibalism?).   I loved it, and told them I wanted in.

Fast forward to this year: I co-opted our usual September Pirate Cake into a Pirate peep display.

One poor peep waking the plank.

On the left, a shark eating a peep;
on the right, X marks the spot of buried treasure.

See the peep with a hook? Also peep in the crow's nest?

A former registrar who now works in Institutional Research loves traveling to Scotland, and so her PeepORama is perfectly fitting for her fave travel spot.

"Beware the Peep Ness Monster"

The monster rises from the Loch!

And another awesome Peeperator got a lot of advice from one of her student workers, who loves track and field:

High jump peepsters, hurdlers, and 
shot-put (shot-peep?) in the background. 

Also, long jumpers and javelin peepsters!

And another got much help from her kids (and sculpy) to create a different kind of peep games.

Mario, I presume?

Now I'm seeing peeporama opportunities everywhere I look.  What'll I do next year?  Astronauts?  Math class?  Peep rodeo?  

I'll take suggestions!

The untangled web: it once was blind, and now it's free again.

Random fun: one of my favorite tasks at the soup kitchen where I volunteer is to untangle the aprons.

The kitchen uses a lot of aprons, of course, and these aprons all have long straps that come together in an octopus orgy as they pass through the washing machine and dryer, and then they don't want to come apart again.  A lot of the other volunteers and staff dread untangling the aprons, so I always jump at the chance to help with this; I love the meditation that comes from patiently following the twists and turns and ins and outs of various strands.  

On what sounds like a completely unrelated topic, at home we have cordless blinds.  I had never seen these before we moved into this house, and when I first realized how to use them, it was like magic.  You pull the bar at the bottom of the blinds down, and the blinds go down; you lift the bar at the bottom of the blinds up, and the blinds obediently rise.  There's no hunting to the left and right to see which side the cord is on; no futzing with pulling to the left and the right to see which way locks the blinds at the right height; no fears of long, dangly cords causing strangulation -- these blinds are ah-may-zing.   

I've come to love the evening ritual of lowering the blinds at night, and the corresponding morning ritual of raising the blinds as the sun comes up.  At night, it's like nestling into my space, and in the morning, it's a way to greet the day.   And my husband agrees; just the other day we were talking about how much we appreciate these blinds.

And, as though the universe was listening and had a sense of humor, the very next morning I lifted the blinds in the large, front window, and they stalled midway. 

The blinds would go up this far, and no further.

I tried again and again, and the blinds kept stalling at the same height.  I said a bunch of internal "drat"s.  We've owned this home for almost four years, and I don't know how long ago the previous owners had purchased these window covers, so maybe it makes sense that the blinds would break by now, but I was nonetheless still sad to contemplate their demise.  Replacing them would cost a pretty penny, let me tell you.

But as I looked more and more carefully, I started to get an inkling of what the problem is.  It helps that I've done a lot of sewing by hand in my life: if you've done that, too, you know the experience of having your thread spontaneously knot itself into a kind of hangman's noose.  I could see the silhouette and feel exactly this kind of knot in the honeycombs of the blinds, right where they were getting stuck.

There's a knot in the cord, where that dark "o" is. 

I could even peer down through the honeycombs and see the knot there, about a foot into the blinds.  

It's hard to see in the photo,
but I could see the knot with my eye.

The knot was way too far away to reach with my fingers, and even the crochet hook I own was way too short to nab it.  So I fashioned a hook out of some bendable scrap metal that I happened to have in the basement. 

Reaching into the blinds to grab the cord . . . 

Et voila!  Pulling the knot out of the blinds!

The cord is under a lot of tension, but I gave myself some slack by winding part of the cord around one finger, and then I could use my other fingers (and maybe just a little bit of teeth, if you want to know the truth) to gently prize apart the noose that had tightened itself in the cord.  It was a lot like pulling apart apron strings -- although I don't use my teeth on the aprons!

The knot was very stubborn until all-of-a-sudden it wasn't; after about 45 seconds of gentle tugging, it just gave a little ropey sigh and relaxed out of the noose into a strand of simple cord.  Then I let go of the cord, which scooted back into its proper place, and the blinds rose and fell like their usual magic selves again.

All the way up again!

And that's how I fixed my fancy, expensive, and beloved blinds.

Update with food fun

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  It's April!  in Academia!  So much is going on. 

In between teaching (we're getting close to the end of the semester) and interviewing job candidates and prize selection committees and all sorts of other stuff I'm doing, I had a bunch of fun food things.   Monday was our college's "Edible Books" gathering, and I offered up Calcu-lox by Jams Stew Art (a not particularly good pun on "Calculus by James Stewart").  You know, it wasn't the most awesome entry there, but I was really glad to get the chance to participate at all.  

If you squint hard and then believe,
the bagels spell "integral of f(x) dx". 

On Tuesday, which was tax day, we got to celebrate our annual "Money dinner".  I didn't take pictures, but A-child drew an adorable one on the chalkboard, and I'll try to snag that for a future newsletter.  (I'm kinda still playing catch up).  Speaking of which, on Wednesday, I played that fun game, Catch-up with Committee Work, while my husband and Inkling went to NYC.  On Thursday and Friday, I went to the dance concert with Inkling, and I also got to complete the "food" cycle by getting an orientation for our local compost collective.  I'm sure I'll get to write more about that fun group in the future, too! 

Compost Collective orientation.

And today, since I kind of magically had no grading, I got to run with friends, do a church clean up that just might have enabled me to snag a suit of armor for our dungeon, and played in the park with Prewash and a young friend for a couple of hours.  So, that's me. 

Kind of along the compost/eco lines, I forgot to share some of my favorite pics that Gosling sent a few weeks ago, but Earth Day seems to be a great time to look at Goats At Work:

Colin has goats and sheet clearing brush and ivy for the next couple days

Another cool Eco (and frugal) adventure came from OfSnough.  He wrote to me last weekend as I was returning from my math conference:

When you get home there will be a new bike hanging in the basement. I traded the red/black single-speed bike at Common Wheel for a green single-speed road bike.

I missed the red single speed I had in Iraq since it was stolen. [Our bike shop] had a green steel single-speed. I think I am far enough along in your way of thinking that it seemed ludicrous to have ANOTHER bike. So I thought about it then offered to swap. The [mountain] bike I bought three years ago is newer and a more popular style. So the owner said yes and we traded. No money exchanged, both of us with a bike we wanted. 

It really is fun to ride. Our total bike count is the same.

Our "new" (to us, at least) vehicle.

And Inkling's eco/frugal adventure was to stock up on Library books just before our local library closed.  (It's not closing forever -- just moving to a new location). 

My last visit to the [Old] Street library

Also, she got behind in Sock Madness because of an alternative (impressive) knitting project:

Finished the tee in 10 days!

And she had great fun in NYC knitting AND seeing shows.  Indeed, she even suffered a theater injury when an evil armrest reached out and punched her in the leg as she was trying to slide past it.

NYC! (Broadway + knitting a garment in the garment district), and
Souvenir bruise

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

Easter (and beyond) update

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville. I was deeply glad, early this week, to be able to have the time and space to celebrate Easter with my church. (He is risen; He is risen indeed!).  Amid all the turbulence that is always April-in-Academia, this reminder of hope and love and promise is like a rock under my feet and like a beacon shining a path forward, both at the same time.  

Nature agrees. Thursday, I awoke to pink light streaming through my bedroom windows, because the branches just outside had exploded with cherry blossoms.

The view from my bed is lovely.

Things are just bursting into life here on our campus, also: what a difference a few days has made! 

The same tree, twice.
Above: March 30; below: April 10.

Walking around outside this week has brought constant reminders for gratitude and joy; when I greet students or colleagues or strangers, we all remark with delight about how fabulous the weather has been.  And indoor spaces have also gotten some nice spring bling, as well.  Inkling prepared for the Easter holiday by knitting up a surprise for the owners of the yarn store where she works: an Easter egg hunt!  

The yarn eggs she made.

The hunt.

Adorable, no?

I've also gotten some much-appreciated updates from Y.  She'd been in her medical residency in Georgia, which was challenging for many reasons.  I was glad to learn that from there, she'd gotten the chance to do what she'd really wanted to start working on: medical missions overseas in Honduras.    Some excerpts from her letters:

 Llegué a Loma De Luz! ("I arrived at Loma De Luz").
The suspension bridge behind me is my daily commute.
Beautiful motmot birds fly past it because their nest is nearby.

My first day was great- woke up, instant coffee, devotional, suspension bridge, orientation with the CMO, and then a patient was brought into the emergency room (which is literally a room) so I just jumped in with the Honduran doctor. We made a good team- he taught me how order things and follow through, and I taught him some relevant pathophysiology and ultrasound.   

 The hospital basically closes at 4pm so afterwards we were invited to celebrate a missionary’s 10th birthday party! I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to share in her celebration- I felt a kind of community that reminded me of Enoughsville. That was healing for my soul today.

She has sent us further updates on Easter day itself. 

I only got to hear part of the sermon today because the hospital was busier than expected, but I thought serving patients was also a godly thing to do on Easter. I thought you would want to hear about these patient prayer requests…

1. Wendy, a 30-something year old woman with a 6 year old child at home who was bitten by a poisonous snake (Bomba Amarilla) on Thursday night. She is in acute renal failure from rhabdomyolysis (see photo of her urine). I am very worried about her because her labs and clinical state are worsening despite medical intervention. If it doesn’t turn around soon, she might die if she doesn’t get emergency hemodialysis, which essentially a type of life support where a machine cleans the blood instead of failed kidneys. The closest hemodialysis is 1-2hr away in the city La Ceiba, and even they do not do this on a regular basis… Please pray for her, that God would cause the kidneys to heal as soon as possible, and that He would cause her to survive illness.

2. Gabriela, a 12 year old girl who had anoxic brain injury at birth leaving her paralyzed on the R side and with epilepsy. Today she had her breakthrough seizure in over a year. I believe this is because they ran out of her seizure-suppressing medicine, Dilantin. While I had her in the Emergency Room, she was able to wake up and tell her name and point to her momma, which is reassuring, but she feels terrible. My hospital has some medicines but not the one that she uses, which is usually best in these cases. Me and the Honduran pediatrician came up with a plan together to write the prescription for the medicine so the family can go to every pharmacy in town and even 2 hours away to the city to buy the medicine and bring it back. This family clearly is so concerned and loves her so much, and has done a lot of good work to keep her well over the last 12 years. Please pray that there is a pharmacy that will sell them Dilantin injection and oral pills for us to administer as soon as possible. Pray that the Holy Spirit would protect her heart, lungs, and brain from significant injury if she does have another seizure before the medicine is obtained.

This all sounds so scary; I'm so glad that Y can be there, and that these experiences will lead her toward a life of helping even more people.  My own volunteering this week (serving breakfast at our local homeless shelter) has been much more prosaic and much less dramatic, so I'm grateful to Y for letting me peek at her experiences, and that she is the one to find giant tarantulas in her room.  [See update at the end for why I say this!]

I untangled a bunch of (tarantula-free) aprons
that had gotten knotted together in the dryer.
Go, me!

As we head beyond Easter, I'm getting ready for a nifty Peep Diorama event that my registrar's office will be holding next week.  To lay in supplies, I asked my husband to purchase a bunch of marshmallow peeps:  "8 rabbit peeps, 6 chicks (not blue)".  He kind of lost the shopping list, and kind of remembered it  . . . aaaannnd, so . . . he got 6 boxes of blue rabbit peeps, and 8 boxes of (yellow, at least: not blue) chicks.   So now I'm rich in marshmallow peeps, which my sister calls "marshmallow yucks".

Stay tuned for what may or may not turn out to be Peep-Pirate-Ship awesomeness.  

I finished up the week in an even greener place: Memphis, Tennessee.  I talked about math here, and listened to other cool math talks.  I walked through a beautiful forest in the middle of the (admittedly, very sprawling) city, and I walked across the Mississippi River into Arkansas, where I did not get to see Bill Clinton, and then I walked back across the river into Memphis again, where I did not get to see Elvis.  But I did get to see the stage where Elvis first performed, so there's that.

Rhodes College, Overton Woods
Big River Bridge, and the Overton Shell

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

Extra, late-breaking update from Y:

Speaking of encountering God in between, thank you for going to Him in prayer for the patients in the last update! The family of the 12 year old girl with seizures found her medicine in the city, we administered it, and she safely discharged home! The 33 year old woman with a child at home started to recover some kidney function without emergency hemodialysis, and discharged home to continue to heal and see me in the office this coming week! I hope she makes maximum recovery for her future bodily wellbeing.

 

Outside of work, I have really enjoyed new friendships here. It’s only been 2 weeks, but I feel very welcome and connected to the 4 Honduran doctors (my age) and CMO’s family (wife, 3 kids below age 10). We spend time together and talk about medicine and life pretty much every day. For example, last night at 9pm I had to call Dr. Gerardo and Dra. Osiris to come kill a tarantula in my room! They said it was the biggest one they’d ever seen  But they did come help me even that late at night so I was less afraid. This morning, all 8 of us went to the beach to enjoy the calm waves and winds.

Update tidbits

Life continues to be rich and full of April, here in Enoughsville.  This is going to be a short update, because April-in-Academia is keeping me every bit as on my toes as one would expect. The main events of the week are . . . 

• My guy went to Glasgow and then returned home.  Aside from digestive woes that plagued him one day of the trip, he had a great time.
• For the second time this academic year, [his being gone] = [my forgetting about street cleaning days], and therefore it appears that one expense of his international travel is my local parking tickets. Sheesh.  
• At the beginning of the week, I picked up a copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and by the end of the week, I had devoured it all. It's a page-turner of a book!
• I made it through 8 hours of zoom candidate interviews this week, and I think we have some totally awesome people to invite to campus.  Better yet, I suspect the hiring committee largely agrees on which people those will be.  
• A speaker I brought to campus for a Very Big Talk did a great job: he spoke about the fourth dimension and fractal dimensions, and all sorts of non-math people in the audience came up to me afterward to say how their minds were blown, but in a good way.  I'm basking.
• I think I've caught back up with my grading.
• But just barely.
• Our next door neighbors (not surprisingly) have changed their minds about having our compost pile in their backyard.  It was nice to have that option while it lasted, but now I'll have to switch to alternative schemes.  In an absolutely wonderful coincidence of events, in the few short years since we moved to this home a professor at my college organized a series of neighborhood compost collectives -- one of those is just a half block from our house, and the requisite orientation needed to join is just two weeks from now.  I've already signed up.

And, since I want to go spend a bit of time with my recently-returned husband, I'll just wrap it up with that little list of adventures.  May you and yours enjoy April in all its glory.

March ends with a birthday sandwich of a week

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville. This week, my life was mostly full of job applications. Don't worry; I'm not applying for jobs – rather, I'm reading job applications and interviewing other people who are applying for jobs.  I'm on the search committee both for a VIP campus and also for an editor for a national math journal. Yes, I am aware that I hold the fate of other people in my own hands! At any rate, I spent a lot of time this week thinking about other people's futures and whether those futures might overlap with that of my favorite math journal or the college I've loved working at so much.

There was so much to do with job applications, in fact, that I actually read  candidate's applications on Sunday! I try hard not to use the computer on Sunday, and rather to observe a weekly Internet sabbath.  The double-extra-special reason not to do work last Sunday was that it was my birthday!  But the pile of stuff to read was so large, and my upcoming week was so full, that I decided a birthday present to myself was to promise never to spend my birthday like that again -- and then I dove in and read and read and read.

Prewash wonders when I'll be done reading.
(If you look hard, you can see an electric canner box
through the doorway!)

But I also had fun. I got lovely cow cards, and I also got two different kinds of electric canners, and I'm sure I'll be writing more about those in the future!

Somehow, in spite of the extra work, I finally finished reading a 400-and-something-page book called "The Pencil". It was an amazingly fun book; the author really  geeked out (and helped me do likewise) about the engineering, chemistry, business, and cultural issues surrounding an object that we overlook even while it's so instrumental to so much that we do.  I highly recommend the book!

Speaking of finishing, Inkling just finished her latest round of socks, and just barely made it into this next round of Sock Madness. Way to go, Inkling!

My completed Round 2 SockMadness socks

I got the second-to-last spot on my team!

In between reading, teaching, and interviewing, I got to appreciate the increasingly beautiful weather. Some of the trees on our campus have started to flower – there are some tulip magnolias that are really just delightful to look at.  

When the sun comes out and the skies are blue,
I love to get right under the tree and look straight up through the branches.

Other trees have just barely started to put forth buds, and I'm keeping an eye on those trees, too.

The week began with my birthday; it ended with A-child's birthday. Kinderling threw a lovely, flower-themed birthday party that I very much enjoyed going to, although I forgot to take pictures. Afterwards, Kinderling let us know that the youngest granddaughter is getting a head start on learning how to hunt Easter eggs.

Question: why is an Easter egg like a key ring?

Answer: because they both go in your mouth!

 As for my guy, he came home from Indiana, and then he took off for Glasgow. So that's what he's up to!

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