Done

Well, I'm finished with my narrative evaluations. Fall term 2007 is officially behind me. Time to celebrate with a Fin du monde. Tomorrow I turn my full attention to other writing projects, including letters of recommendation and some referee reports.

The Letter U

The "U" on my laptop's keyboard just snapped off. I can still type "U"'s by pressing on the button that usually lives beneath the square plastic thingey with "U" on it. But it's not easy to type fast. Fortunately, "U" isn't that common a letter. Nevertheless, I'm not thrilled with the situation. It seems like the key should snap back on, but I haven't been able to get it to snap yet. Arg.

In other news, I'm done with Linear Algebra evaluations and am making slow but steady progress on the Human Ecology evals.

Plugging Away

I've submitted my Physics evaluations and I'm almost done with my Linear Algebra evals. I have a lot of work still to be done on my evals for the Human Ecology Core Course. This will be the main task for tomorrow. I also finished a letter of recommendation today. The student is applying to a around dozen schools, so I still have to send off other copies. But once the first version is written making the slight changes necessary for other schools is pretty easy. I think I have at least four more students for whom I need to write letters next week.

There was a little bit of a thaw today which resulted in some rather spectacular icicles hanging off our house. Although I like icicles, it's not good for the roof to have them hanging off the eaves. Icicles are heavy, since they're basically water, and water is heavy. So I knocked the icicles down. It's sad to see them, but it's for the best.

It's late, but I still have some energy, so I'm going to try and get a little bit more work done.

Friday Miscellaneous

Beginning the final push to finish narrative evaluations. They're due Monday. And I have more than a few letters of recommendation to write. So I'm caffeinated and trying to make the most of my hyperness and short attention span by working productively on several things at once. So far, so good.

Anyway, here are some miscellaneous Friday musings:

• Ham for Chanukah. Awesome.
  
  
• I have a bit of a cold. So I've been munching golden throat lozenges. They make everything better. On the package it says: "Coursing wind and clearing heat, resolving toxin and disinhibiting throat, transforming turbidity with aroma." Excellent. I bring a bunch back with me every year when I return from China.
  
  
• It was cold this morning. According to the weather web page the low was seven degrees. I'm not sure what it was at our house, because our outside thermometer is totally encrusted in snow. So I can state with some certainty that it was below 32, but that's about it. The hot water pipe to the bathroom sink was frozen this morning. Fortunately, that was the only pipe frozen. It's warmed up a lot as the day has gone on, so I susepct it will be unfrozen when I return home.
  
  

Snow

The snowstorm arrived, pretty much as advertised. It's now Tuesday morning and it's been snowing for over 24 hours. It's hard to tell, but it looks like around ten to twelve inches have fallen. Yesterday was a lazy day spent inside. I ventured out only once or twice to do some shoveling. The snow started off pretty wet and heavy, so lots of the trees and shrubs are bent over and sagging. But the last few inches have been lighter and fluffy, so things are looking very pretty.

Meanwhile, Doreen has been tromping around Bolivia. She recently returned from some salt lakes in the western part of the country where she saw flamingos. She sent the the following picture. Pretty cool.


Time for me to finish my coffee and extract my car and head onto campus. The roads appear to be in pretty good condition. So I should head in and get some work done. Since I didn't do much yesterday, I'm feeling like I'm behind where I'd like to be. I had a lot of momentum from my week in Santa Fe which I don't want to lose.

Back Home

After a long day of travel I've made it back home. The house is cold, but I have a big fire going so it should warm up soon. The cats are fine and I don't thnk any of the plants died.

I made it here just in time. A messy storm is supposed to hit us tomorrow and last for a little more than a day. Eight to fourteen inches of wet snow and fifty mile an hour winds. I hope we don't lose power.

I better water at least a few of the most thirsty-looking plants before I go to sleep. It's good to be back. I'm looking forward to a long night's sleep with a cat curled up next to me.

Wet Friday

The storm has arrived and so far it's been just a lot of rain. It's a little gloomy, but it's kinda nice, too. I can't recall being in Santa Fe during such a hard, steady rain. I've been here for steady snow and lots of fantastic thunderstorms. But I can't remember persistent rain. As the temperature drops a little more the rain might turn to snow. But right now it's still very liquid. I can see it beading up and running down the windows in my office.

I finished the proposal I was working on yesterday. Some good comments from a COA colleage pepped it up so I think it has the right level of enthusiasm. It's hard to know if the funding agency will be happy, since the instructions and guidelines for the proposal weren't that clear.

I had Vietnamese food tonight. The only noteworthy thing about the meal was that an unusually large amount of some fibrous material got stuck between my molars. As soon as I get back to the place I'm staying I will floss.

It's the end of a long week, and I've spent much of the day feeling a little brain-dead. I'm looking forward to recharging a little over the weekend. Sunday I travel all day back to Maine. Not relaxing, but it's a different sort of stress than de-bugging code and editing proposals.

Time to head to my temporary home, floss, have a glass of red wine, do some reading, and sleep.

Thursday Ramblings

It's nearing midnight here and I'm plugging away on a preliminary grant proposal sort of thing that's due midday tomorrow. I need to get a pretty complete draft done tonight so I can get comments from a few people at COA tomorrow morning and then I can make some final edits. The proposal is straightforward, and it seems quite certain we'll get almost all that we ask for, but it's a little boring. It'll help us develop a few new classes and better support some classes that we already offer. The stuff I need to provide the granting agency is supposed to be short. But I find it very difficult to write short first drafts. So I expect that at least half of what I'm writing will end up being cut tomorrow morning.

There is a winter storm watch for Santa Fe for Friday into Saturday. From the weather reports it's not at all clear how much snow we'll get, or even if we'll get any. It might end up as rain. Right now they say there could be one to two feet of snow above 7500 ft. Santa Fe is at roughly 7200ft. So does this mean we'll get rain? Or just less snow? Or both? Some snow would be nice, as long as things clear out in time for me to head home. I leave from Albuquerque early Sunday morning.

Well, despite the fact that I'm bored, I should push though and finish the draft of this document. It will be a late night, but it'll get done. I might need to make a cup of tea for a final energy boost.

Update: I'm done with the draft. I think it's in pretty good shape, but it's not very peppy. I'll try to insert some peppiness tomorrow morning when I do my last editing pass. I'm now going to head to the place I'm staying at and eat some sushi. I picked up some sushi at Whole Foods when I was there this evening. My plan was to eat some salad from their salad bar and then the sushi for dinner. But the salad filled me up, so I still have the sushi. I don't really know what motivated me to get the sushi in the first place, since I'm not a huge sushi fan. But for some reason it looked good. When I was in Paris last summer I had sushi for the first time in years and it was surprisingly tasty.

New Mexico

I'm in the midst of a one-week visit at the Santa Fe Institute. The main purpose of my visit is to plan the 2008 Beijing Complex Systems Summer School. But while I'm here there are a number of other projects I'm working on, too. The days have been busy, but good.

I've been coming to SFI since 1996. It's a great place, and I feel very fortunate to have been able to spend time here over the years. SFI isn't a utopia, but it's been in some sense a refuge for me over the past decade. Even though I haven't spent that much time here in the big scheme of things, SFI has a certain familiarity and almost a home-like feeling.

Although I've had a very productive few days, I'm starting to wonder how I'm going to get done all the things I need to get done before December 16, when I'm heading to Chile to spend two weeks with Doreen trekking and hanging out.

Well ... this post is going nowhere. I'm feeling somewhat introspective and pleasantly melancholy, but I seem incapable of capturing these thoughts in writing. This doesn't bode well, since the vast majority of what I need to do in the next few weeks is writing of some sort of another: A small grant, a research paper, student evaluations, two referee reports, many letters of recommendation, and many memos and notes and emails. But I suppose that these writing tasks probably shouldn't involve too much introspection or melancholy, so maybe it's ok.

Spice Odyssey in Northern California

I visited family in Northern California over the long Thanksgiving weekend. The day before Thanksgiving I did some shopping for the meals I was going to cook Wednesday and Thursday. One of the ingredients I needed was marjoram. Dried, not fresh. It's Northern California, so I figured this wouldn't be difficult to find. The first store I went to, a relatively high-end little grocery store with lots of great produce, didn't have any marjoram at all. Hmmm... I wasn't sure what other stores were in the area, but I knew there was a Safeway nearby, so I gave it a try.

The Safeway was packed with frantic shoppers. Scanning the spice section was particularly tricky because there was a guy desperately looking for poultry seasoning. He had enlisted the help of one of the Safeway workers, and together they were scanning the shelves, squinting and muttering "poultry seasoning... poultry seasoning." I too was scanning the labels on the shelves, and found the slot where marjoram was supposed to be. However, there was no marjoram. Instead, there was cardamom. Close, I guess. It does rhyme. Sorta.

I left the Safeway empty handed. My last hope was another Safeway, this one closer to my brother's house. Happily, this store did indeed have marjoram. Victorious at last, I bought a small bottle and headed home. We cooked some excellent food, and had a nice few days.

Perhaps the highlight of my spice Odyssey occurred at the first store. I was scanning the shelf labels to see if marjoram was listed. No marjoram. But there was a label for poppy seeds. Almost. It was misspelled as "poopy seeds." Awesome.