Writing and woodworking… was there a weekend?

July 27th, 2008

I’m sitting here at the end of the weekend and wondering if I actually had a weekend. Yesterday I spent about five hours sitting at my desk working on the textbook Tom and I are writing. The recurrence relations chapter was in far rougher shape than I recollected it being, so I needed to just hunker down and get to work on it. I made some really good progress, but writing for that many hours in a row is damned hard work. Fortunately, I had a good time last night hanging out with friends. We went to dinner, then chatted, then played Settlers of Catan (Cities and Knights expansion) and had panna cotta that I made.

Today was even more work. Since I’m moving (yeah, don’t know that I ever confirmed here that I am moving to Dunwoody, but it’s now just under three weeks away) rather soon, I’ve started some of my packing efforts. In all honesty, I’m really quite ahead of the schedule on packing. My books are packed, wine glasses packed, out-of-season clothes packed, and more plans on packing made. This has produced some work for me, as the bookcase that I got a few years back never got fully coated with polyurethane. I did the four remaining shelves over the past couple of weeks, but I still had to do the supports. To top it all off, I decided to expand the bookcase when I move into my new apartment by adding another unit with seven 32″ shelves and two doors to cover the bottom section, which also requires another support. Even with my new electric hand sander, it still took forever to sand all the remaining pieces, first with 120 grit then 220 grit. After that, I had to wipe the darn thing down with mineral oil to get rid of the sawdust. Then I had to apply the polyurethane. It took four hours to get from start to having the first coat on, by which time I was exhausted. I’ve now decided that the second coat will have to wait until later in the week. Fortunately I have some mosquito spray to try to kill, or at least chase away, the mosquitoes that have invaded my porch, making working out there on a weeknight possible.

Gonna be a busy week. Try to pack some more, work on a couple more chapters, accuracy check another chapter of this book I’m working on as an independent contractor, work on more stuff for TA orientation, more woodworking, try to preserve some sanity. Hopefully I can make it to the weekend.

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Travel and a move (?)

June 22nd, 2008

So I spent the bulk of the past week in Burlington, VT, at the SIAM Conference on Discrete Mathematics. It was definitely a nice trip. Our research group (at least the student members of it) flew to Boston Sunday and, despite flying on three different airlines, arrived within a 30-minute time span. Dave’s mom picked us up, and we drove to his house in Arlington and hopped in a different car for the drive to Burlington. It was a really great drive. Vermont in particular is a lovely state. Lush with green, mountainous (east coast mountains, that is), and great temperatures. At the conference, we had the chance to talk with some other researchers working in a similar area to some of the stuff we’ve been doing, and hopefully started some connections outside of Georgia Tech. One of those people will hopefully come visit this fall for a week when she’s on sabbatical.

I definitely had conference fatigue by Thursday afternoon, and so I sure didn’t object to the idea of heading back to Boston early. We went for a nice (short) hike through a gorge on the VT/NH state line, which fulfilled Csaba’s desire to go hiking. After arriving back in Boston, we headed into the city. We had dinner at Faneuil Hall. (I had clam chowdah and a shrimp salad roll, which was tasty.) We then ventured into an area of town known as the North End (an area of town full of Italian restaurants) for pastries at Mike’s Pastry. I had a great chocolate mousse cannoli after I finally fought my way to the front of the line. We finished the evening by walking through Boston Common, the public garden, and to Fenway Park. Friday I went to the Museum of Science with Marcus and then headed back to Atlanta at 1800.

I’ve lived in one place for almost four years know, which has been great, as I love my apartment (especially the kitchen) and its location. However, being ~12 miles from campus and needing to drive every day is getting tiring, especially with gas hovering around $4/gallon and little sign of a change there. I’ve been looking for a different apartment for a couple of weeks now, focusing on places where I could be closer to the subway. I again enlisted the assistance of Promove to help in screening out large complexes and monitored craigslist to look for more independent type of places. There’s a place that I’ve had my eye on but had been waiting to get a solid price and specials for August move-in. Finally, when I called yesterday, they were able to give me specific information, and it was good. I went and visited and loved the place. By official space numbers, it’s about 170 square feet larger than my current apartment, but considering that I think there’s a lot of space cheating going on in the number used to rate my current apartment’s area, I think the new place will be even bigger. I’ll post more details once I know for sure that my application has been approved. I had to provide a lot of documentation of my finances to them, since they want you to make 2.5 times the market rate of the apartment, which I don’t (I make over 2.5 the leasing rate, but not this mystical market rate), but they’re willing to take documentation of the money I have in the bank to show that I can afford the place, so hopefully I get good news tomorrow. I’ll post more details once I’m sure that everything works out. Looks like the move will be 16 August, if all goes as plans, so go ahead and start making your travel plans to come help ;-) The new place will be right on a MARTA bus line that runs every 20 minutes and takes 10 minutes to get to a MARTA rail station, giving easy access to campus. My commute will be longer than it is right now, but I’ll be able to read or make other good use of my time then, rather than focusing on driving every morning.

Today’s been kind of blah. Had no idea what I wanted for supper, just knew that I needed to bake bread to use for sandwiches this week. Even on that front, I feel like I’m stuck in a rut. I should probably sit down with The Bread Bible and identify a new recipe to try next week. I wound up just making a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, which was tasty, but not inspiring. It sucks when you’re tired of eating out but have nothing in your kitchen to cook and don’t know what you want to eat. Hopefully things get better this week.

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UND Presidential Search Committee shows it has a brain

January 29th, 2008

Newsflash! The University of North Dakota Presidential Search Committee, which was tasked with sending a list of three finalists for the institution’s next president to the state Board of Higher Education, voted yesterday to send only one candidate forward after conducting thorough campus interviews. Thankfully for the entire state, they selected the only candidate that anyone with half a brain would recognize as viable for the job, Wyoming Dean of Health Sciences Robert Kelley. I mean, what were they thinking when they decided to invite the Beltsville (Md.) Regional Director of the US Department of Agriculture to campus for an interview? The woman has no experience as a higher education administrator, and actually none as tenure-track faculty. Just because she earned all her degrees from UND (in a field that the school barely has a doctoral degree program in) does not mean that she should be president. The internal deans were clearly duds just based on their CVs. (They may be excellent deans, but they’re not Joe Chapman, and I think everyone realizes that UND needs its own Joe Chapman right now.)

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Random thoughts on food, pets, and teaching

January 26th, 2008

Mmmm, I’m fully of yummy food. Tonight I made Cooks Illustrated’s Crunchy Baked Pork Chops, but I followed the suggested variation of topping each chop with a slice of Asiago cheese and then wrapping it in prosciutto. Damn, was that a tasty pork chop. I also made some skillet-roasted potatoes to go with it. I really need to make more of the recipes from Cooks, as I’ve thoroughly enjoyed everything I’ve ever made from their magazine. And to top it all off, my kitchen is cleaned up! I did the dishes (or at least shoved things into the dishwasher for running very soon) right after dinner, which is really unusual for me, as usually I have to wait until the middle of the week to clean up from weekend cooking.

I want a kitty. Matt and Kendra got a new kitty this week, and the pictures make it clear that she’s just adorable. I’m not sure what my additional monthly cost to have a kitty would be exactly, but I know that I’d have to feed it and keep it healthy, and pay some additional rent. The “pet rent” aspect is the part that I’m afraid could break my budget. Right now my plan is to wait until May and see if I can get my VA education benefits extended, ’cause if I can, then I can afford pet rent for the duration of graduate school and take care of a kitty. Now I just need to stay away from pet adoption websites until I know whether I can afford to get a kitty. If nothing else, hopefully I can parlay this desire for a kitty into a push to be more productive and get myself graduated.

I’ve gotten a bit of a leg up on job searching this week, as I’ve been writing a teaching philosophy statement for an award for which I’m being nominated by the department. I think my statement is in pretty good shape, but I’ve called in some skilled editing hands for suggestions, especially since I think my closing paragraph sounds rather cliché. I’m quite honored to be nominated for the award, and it’s had the nice side effect of allowing me to get in contact with some former students I haven’t seen for awhile to see if they’ll write a letter of support. Several have already responded and said that they will, and one, who has graduated since I taught him, wrote in his email to me “I can honestly say that you were the best TA I had at my time at Tech.” That just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. This week, which is the third week of the term, we’ve started having some discussion about what I’ll be teaching next year. I’m hoping for a shot at a course that I’ve been wanting to teach for quite awhile, and it looks like there’s a good shot, since my advisor wants me to teach it as well.

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