At least it seems that way. One friend is pregnant, another friend is losing her job, another friend is trying to go from part-time to full-time in her job, and one just went home to Texas. Oh, and there's another guy who has already been in Texas for a few weeks on a 3 month internship. And another guy is trying to take that step from grad student to professor. And church is going orange. Egypt is destabilizing... There's just a lot of stuff going on out there.
For myself, I'm starting into a new type of project related to work, but not specifically as a work project. I've been in contact with one of the coordinators at the Boys and Girls Club of Las Vegas, and we're looking at ways that I could help them to develop some math curriculum to help their elementary level students as well as their high school students who are struggling to pass the exit exams. Even though I'm involved in this way because of my position, it's not tied to my regular work load. In my mind, it's sort of in the same category as a lawyer picking up some pro bono work. Yes, it's a reflection of my actual job and it plays a PR role as something that (if successful) we would like to have our school's name on it. But in a very real way, it's just volunteer work like almost any other form of volunteer work. This is a brand new direction for me, and it sounds like a lot of fun. We've exchanged a few emails, and we had a phone conference, and we'll probably do a face-to-face meeting towards the end of the month, and we'll see what happens.
School budget stuff is just starting. Here's a brief article from the local paper:
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/jan/29/proposed-cuts-leave-nevadans-both-sides-budget-deb/
I'm not particularly worried because I'm not in a position where my worrying is going to do anything positive. It does rise to the position of me paying attention to it, but when I skim over the online articles for things regarding the budget, it's not with any particular sense of fear or urgency. It's just information. Just as with last year, it seems that we have a lot of support from a lot of the important people, and so I'm just going to watch the fight play itself out.
The Super Bowl was today. I was not invested in either team, so the outcome is pretty close to meaningless to me. In the battle between food and commercials, the food that the small group brought clearly won. Super Bowl commercials have not been very good for the past few years. A couple good ones and a lot of commercials that I've forgotten.
Although I feel like there's other stuff going on, I can't think of anything. If it's important, I'm sure I'll remember eventually.
