My spring break has been more work-ful than I had hoped, but going in three days is better than five. There are a number of things going on right now.
I had to spend some time this week writing up a short report for the chair. It's faculty evaluation time and he needed a list of service and scholarship activities that I had done. Fortunately, I've got moderately organized notes so it didn't take too long. I was actually quite pleased with my list as feels like I've done a lot more activities than I've realized.
I am also in the process of applying to a program called Project NExT (New Experiences in Teaching), which is a program for new faculty in mathematics sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America. It sounds like a great opportunity, but before it can happen I need to get funding approval (~$3000) from the school, which means it has to go through a committee and things like that. So I spent some time filling out the grant form and writing up a personal statement for the application. Personal statements are difficult and time-consuming, but I think I have a pretty decent one at this point, and over the next week or so I hope to tighten it up a bit.
I played in my first live HORSE tournament (a form of poker where you rotate through 5 different games) at Green Valley Ranch. I played pretty well to make it to the final table and by simply being tight and patient, I got into the top four with a tiny stack. That's when things got funny. I lost a hand to another player and was left with a mere 500 chips in the Stud-8 round. The antes were 1000 and the blinds were 3000/6000, which gives you an indication of how little money this represented. Due to some absurd levels of luck, I went from 500 to 1000 to 4000 to 12000. One player busted out not too much later, and after playing for a tiny bit longer, the stacks ended up being fairly even and we chopped the remaining money. Net profit was $240. Not bad for four hours of poker.
I've got a NCAA tourney bracket with Kevin's work pool. I don't follow college basketball very much, so I make fairly uninformed and conservative picks (based on relative rankings of teams). Right now, Duke (my pick for champion) is scaring me being down 1 with only 30 seconds to go, but hopefully by the time I reach the end of this blog entry, they will have worked their way to a win. In fact, in the span of time it took me to type that, a Duke player just got a rebound and went coast to coast to score and put Duke up by 1.
Keri and Mike are coming into town late tomorrow night/Saturday morning. They've got a nice busy weekend planned, so that will be fun. Part of that may include an Easter buffet on the strip, which is always fine by me.
Duke got a steal off the inbound, got fouled, and missed the free throw, which means I'm not going to know the result for another 5 minutes. But I'm all done posting, so I guess you'll just have to look up the final score somewhere else.
