It been a hectic couple of weeks. I don't even remember if anything interesting happened last week.
This week was especially busy on campus. We had two chemistry candidates come through. I can't say anything in particular about them because the committee is still in the decision-making process, but I think we're moving towards the same conclusion. This took up much of my time on Tuesday and Thursday, which are the days that I usually do most of my non-teaching work. It would be okay if I had Friday to catch up.
But on Friday, I went to Reno to give a talk at TMCC at an assessment conference. This involves getting up at 4:45 AM to catch a 6:15 AM flight up to Reno. I thought the conference wasn't that good. Maybe it was fatigue, but the keynote speaker started to put me to sleep. It felt dry, slightly disorganized, and uninformative. The first workshop I attended was okay, I think. I don't remember much about it, though. It had something to do with developing a class where the students got involved in the community at large. During the next workshop period, I got on a computer and sent off some emails that needed to be sent. It felt like a better use of my time (plus I actually had a couple emails that needed to get taken care of). Then it was lunch, and I gave my talk to about 6-7 people. They were almost all math faculty who I've crossed paths with before. I hope they found it useful to see some of the data I had and how I was approaching the data in general.
I got back into Vegas at around 4:30 PM, and went straight to campus to pick up some tests to grade and do some other work. But when I got there, the network was acting up, and so I wasn't actually able to get the work done. So I just went home. I think I ended up falling asleep around 9:30... And woke up this morning at about 8.
I actually went to campus in the late morning to try to do some of the stuff I had wanted to do yesterday, but the network was still out. So I just graded papers in my office and went home. I took care of a couple other errands over the course of the day. I sent out a packet of papers to Experian that will hopefully take care of that credit thing I've been dealing with for the last year. I did some clean-up in the front yard, sweeping some pine needles off the roof and some leaves off of the walkway. There was some weed-killing, too. I saw a small trail of ants, and thought about breaking out the Terro again. I would have done it, except that I was feeling lazy.
Things at church are sort of in a waiting mode. The leadership class is now over, and a few more people have some basic training under their belts. However, the lack of a long term plan means that we're not able to create any other structures around this in order to start moving things forward. The good news is that the search committee has chosen a candidate, and I'm hoping that they'll tell us tomorrow when he's coming to candidate. From what I've heard so far, I'm optimistic. But right now, it's only hearsay. I'm looking forward to seeing the guy in person hopefully before the end of the month.
Small group is going well, though everyone else is very busy as well. It seems like we've all got stuff going on in our lives that's making us a little tired, or a little crazy, or a little something that's keeping us from being our normal selves. We're in the middle of a short study of some parables that I've been writing. It's been a fun set of studies so far. It's been a while since I've last written and led studies, and I've enjoyed being back in that saddle again. One thing I've tried to do with these studies is to make sure that the parables are not treated in complete isolation of each other, but rather as a longer conversation that Jesus is having with his audience. I hope that this has brought out some broader themes that might have otherwise been missed by taking the narrower view.
I was watching Essential Pepin, and he made a Puerto Rican pork and beans. It looked interesting. Here's a link to the recipe:
http://blogs.kqed.org/essentialpepin/2011/09/18/puerto-rican-pork-and-beans/
But I didn't really follow the recipe because I didn't bother to look it up before going food shopping, or cooking it. I just kind of did what I could recall watching, which wasn't too far off. I have too much bean and not enough onion. Other than that, I was actually pretty good. It's pretty tasty as I made it, and it reminds me of red beans and rice from New Orleans. That might actually make sense, since I think red beans and rice has its origins from the Caribbean. I actually think it's closer to that than my previous attempt at red beans and rice, which doesn't speak well of my ability to make red beans and rice.
