Flying home on Christmas Day was a breeze. There was no line at the security check-in, and plenty of space in the overhead compartments, and the flight was dirt cheap.
The last couple weeks have been busy, but this laptop thing has worked out very well, so my time leading up to my flight home was not nearly as packed as I thought it would be. On the downside of this, I get inefficient when I'm not under pressure, so I probably could have more work done than I do, even though I've spent more time working.
And, as if to demonstrate my inefficiency, here are two random observations and reflections I've had since the end of the semester:
1) Professional wrestling has found its way to the SyFy channel. The SyFy channel used to be the SciFi channel, which is short for the Science Fiction Channel. It reminds me of when The Learning Channel turned into TLC and eventually stopped being about learning. Pretty soon, SyFy will be showing reruns of the Amazing Race or something like that.
2) I saw fat free half-and-half at the store. Half and half is supposed to be half milk and half cream. But in order for the half-and-half to be fat free, you would have to have fat free milk and fat free cream. And to the best of my knowledge, fat free cream is just nonfat milk. So fat free half-and-half is 100% nonfat milk.
Anyway, the stuff that I'm working on is coming along well enough. I've got a presentation in about a week at the national math conference in New Orleans, but that talk is pretty much put together. I'll need to take some time to practice and time the talk, but that will wait until I return to Vegas. I'm putting notes together for next semester, and this is where I feel like I'm still behind where I want to be (but not too bad).
Spending time at home with family is good. We went out to San Francisco to visit the Academy of Sciences. As a side note, show up early, and expect to stand in line like you're waiting to get into Disneyland. I think we spent about 40 minutes waiting just to get in, and the major attractions on the inside have lines, too. But it was still fun to wander through the exhibits, especially the rain forest, the penguins, and aquarium. Actually, that probably accounts for 75% of what I saw. There was also an interactive exhibit that was controlled by stepping in an area that had an overhead projector displaying images on the floor. The object was to lure out bugs with food that you pushed around the floor, but some kids thought that the goal was to step on the bugs, and so no learning was accomplished.
I tend to do a lot more TV watching in Livermore than I do in Vegas. Since arriving here, I've watched an entire season of Hoarders and This American Life, plus some episodes of MST 3K and a few other things. At least this time, I have the laptop available so that I can work while watching. It's probably a good thing I don't have NetFlix and instant downloads of shows.
I don't have any special end of year insights or reflections. It's been a good year overall, with a few periods stretches of increased work stress (probably more work stress than I've ever had before) and a couple other rough patches, but if I look at where I am and what I've got, there's not much room for complaining. Life keeps moving forward. We'll see what 2011 brings.
