[Facebook will no longer import notes from an RSS feed. But I don't want to try to figure out how to move everything from here to there, so I'll just keep everything here.]
It's been a busy month, but I'm also at a point where I feel that things have slowed down to a reasonably normal pace from the frenzy that I've been at a while now.
I'm officially an uncle. Corwin and Mandy had their first child (Elijah) on 10/27/11. I'm excited to get a chance to see him over Thanksgiving. The baby inundation continues!
I had a random conversation with some students about the appearance of age based on marriage and children. Married people are older than single people, and married people with kids are older than married people without kids. You can especially see this in church contexts, where "family" (as defined by having children) is sometimes more highly emphasized than in other contexts. So I guess this means that my younger brother is now older than my older brother, or something like that.
Also in the last month, I had the revenge of the chicken pox virus. I had a vague knowledge of this, but now I have more intimate knowledge. Apparently, when you get the chicken pox, you don't actually get rid of the varicella zoster virus. Instead, the virus hangs out in your nervous system, and in most people it just sits there and does nothing. But for reasons that are not understood by the medical community, it is possible for the virus to randomly start doing stuff, causing shingles. Yes, I got shingles. Yes, it's a disease that generally occurs in people 50 and older. No, I don't know why.
The good news is that it wasn't as painful for me as it apparently is for some. I think part of that is simply my age, and that my body is generally more able to deal with things like this. So instead of being a very painful rash, it was a slightly painful but really annoying rash. It took a couple weeks to get over it. There's just a little bit of discoloring on my neck and chest where the rash was, and there's a tiny bit of residual itching.
While I was at the doctor, we also looked at some blood work that was done as a part of the school's wellness program. In the last year, my LDL (bad) cholesterol went from a very healthy 75 to a still-healthy-but-less-so 117. Also, my HDL (good) cholesterol when down from 82 to 50. The actual values are not as concerning as the sizes of the jumps in the given time frame. It is true that, especially in the last 3 months, I've been eating fast food much more often than I used to. But I think I'll blame genetics. (I will have to make some adjustments, but don't think it will be a big deal.)
I'm counting down the weeks until the semester is over. It has been a busy semester, and I'm looking forward to hitting the break. The break will be less busy, but still busy. I'm teaching a new class next semester (differential equations). It's not going to be a hard course to teach, but I do need to make sure I put notes together, pick homework problems, and all that stuff. This is something that, if I can just sit down without having distractions, I could probably push through in relatively short order.
But other than being busy, things are going well on campus. Both transitions of the remediation program have gone through with no problems. I've got that NGA trip to North Carolina in early December. I expect to have some sort of phone conference or something before that, so that I will have an opportunity to meet the other people on the committee, but it's less than a month away and there has been no contact so far.
And then the Joint Meetings in Boston in January. Hmmmm... if I include Thanksgiving and Christmas, that will be four trips in six weeks. I guess things aren't actually ready to slow down just yet. Oh well.
