My calendar tells me that I'm more than halfway through September. My brain doesn't want to believe it.
The Labor Day Weekend Indian food went very well. We cooked at Sean and Jenni's place, and we extended the invitation to include several new people. I think in all, we ended up with 12 adults and 6 kids. The food turned out pretty well. I sort of wish we had increased the spiciness of it a little, but when experimenting for a lot of people it's probably best to be a little conservative.
I thought the tastiest dish was the vegetable rice (that I didn't make). I usually think of rice as just something that's a platform for other flavors. But this recipe had a lot of spices that infused the rice with extra tastes.
The chicken curry had good flavor, but suffered the most from the lack of spiciness. This one reminds me that I don't really know how to make a yogurt-based sauce effectively. I don't often buy plain yogurt, so I don't often give myself the opportunity to try. But now that I have a package of garam masala (an Indian spice mix), it seems like a perfectly reasonable ambition to try making it a few times just to see if I can find something a combination that I like. Of course, that would assume that I had the time to do that.
The naan came out pretty well. I actually thought it lacked a little bit of flavor (maybe it just needed a little more salt), but everyone else seemed to enjoy it. The lentil soup was simple, but tasty. I forgot to add the parsley right when we served it, so it lacked a layer of herbal flavor.
It was also a good time to hang out with some people I had not seen in a while, and to get to know a couple people a little better. I also have a new random phrase ("I want a solid wall of chicken -- all day, every day."). And no, I won't explain what that means.
Classes are in stride, and striding up to the first midterm a couple weeks from now. I'm enjoying the upper division classes because I've had the students before, and we have a generally playful dynamic. I give quizzes every day in my classes, and so a few of them have decided to return the favor by giving me riddles to solve while they take the quiz. I haven't been doing too well on those. I got the first one very quickly, so I think they increased the difficulty. So far, they've been mostly word puzzles, which is not an area of strength for me. But I guess over the course of this semester I'm going to get plenty of practice because I see these students 5 times per week (which means I'm probably going to get 5 riddles per week). But it's fun, and it represents a form of community with the students that is precisely the sort of community that we (as an institution) want to foster.
My remedial classes are going pretty well. I don't have much to say about them. They're just business as usual.
I had my three meetings this week with the consultant who is helping to guide the background phases of the math remediation project. They all went well, and it sounds like it's selling very well within the administrative levels of the school. Our president stopped by my office yesterday just to encourage me again about this project. She indicated that she thinks there might be something going on right now at a system level that may cause this to have more impact than what I think it will have, so we'll have to see what that's all about as we keep moving forward.
It's been really quite interesting to watch various parts of this come together. I've never been involved in a project of this magnitude, and I've certainly never organized such a project. The good news is that we have a lot of competent people in key places who are helping things along, which is saving me from a lot of headache. It also helps that I've got full buy-in from those people, so that I'm not fighting morale issues.
This week, we had our first Christian faculty prayer meeting. We did talk about the things that we should keep in our prayers (personnel shifts, accreditation, scheduling issues), but more of the time was spent in fellowship just talking about being academic Christians, and our various backgrounds and experiences with it. The group is highly ecumenical, which is fun. There were 5 of us there, and we've already set ourselves a regular once-per-month schedule.
I know of a few UNLV faculty who are Christians, but I know that this time and format would not work. However, something that I've got on the horizon is to look for a chance to get faculty from both institutions together. Maybe a luncheon or something like that would work. I haven't given it much thought, but it's certainly within the realm of possibility.
And then there's church... It's been a rough month for a lot of people, but I do see signs of improvement. We had a fall kick-off which seems like it was a bit of a dud. It didn't show a lot of signs of being very well organized, and there were mixed messages being sent, which led to a lot of confusion and frustration. On the other hand, I think the flop brought attention to the fact that we cannot continue with business-as-usual, and it sounds as if the right people are now being invited to the table when it comes to making decisions. It's at least a sign of things moving in the right direction. We'll have to see how things play out in the next month or two to see where it leads.
