Home again, again
As the seasons pass, I keep running into things I hadn’t quite remembered about this place that make me grin. I went to the grocery store today, mostly for some fresh mozzarella to have with tomatoes, and instead of the usual muzak over the store speakers, we were treated to—live radio coverage of the Packers game. Welcome to Wisconsin!
I taught my first class Thursday, giving myself an outline but trusting myself to follow interesting tangents where they led me. It was okay, though not my best effort ever. First day is the hardest, after all; actual classes are much more cut-and-dried. I’ve got my lecture slides for this Thursday done, and final-project plans are trickling in from students.
I will say that if Johannes Trithemius hadn’t actually existed, I would have had to invent him…
Partly for reasons external and unavoidable, partly because of the brain-fog I’d been struggling with (that seems to have departed now that the B12 has kicked in, I am grateful to say), I’m a little overcommitted until ASIST. The poster I need to finish for that august gathering is in a disgraceful state, and Tim and I will be talking about our preconference this Friday, so I have some work to do there as well. I have a book review that’s slightly past due that’s discouraging me because the book I’m reviewing is so vilely bad I don’t even want to finish it. The fantasy-guide editors came back with a polite demand that is going to take me several straight hours to accomplish, and said hours must take place before the end of this month. Roach Motel still needs work. I’ll have a wodge of grading to do after October 1, which is when the first chunk of my class is doing their mini-job-talks, and of course since I’ve never taught this class before, all my lectures have to be worked up from scratch.
So, yeah, sorta busy. Blogging likely to suffer. I wimped out and picked Google Reader to track student links and blogs; I’d meant to put in another Gregarius install, but the less time I have to spend messing with servers, the better. (Plus, Gregarius’s development pace has slowed to something rather slower than a snail. No stable version for well over a year. Disappointing. I may decide to migrate off it. I wish the desktop RSS clients would bag a clue and let me keep data on the web, so that I can check from multiple locations.)
Mouser is filling out and looking much healthier; her scratches are furring up nicely. She hasn’t shown any sign at all of resenting becoming an indoor cat—I suspect the solid week of rain she’d endured before we took her in conditioned her thinking in that regard. We’ve let her out of the bedroom to start the acculturation process, which so far is going in fits and starts. Dream is extraordinarily affronted, and we’ve had to separate him from Mouser a few times on grounds of violence. Didi, on the other hand, is quite willing to be friends, but Mouser isn’t having any, nuh-uh, no way, hisssssssss, so Didi is patiently giving her a wide berth.