I looked at the calendar today, and it's the end of week 7. But since the second half of the semester has so many days off (Nevada Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, voluntary mandatory backgammon days), the semester is really half over. At least it's close enough for me to declare it so.
On November 15, I'm scheduled to do something that I've never done before. I'm going to preach a sermon at church. I guess I'm honored to have the opportunity, and I'm looking forward to it, but in another way, I'm not. Maybe it's because it's a little outside of my comfort zone (my usual audience is in the 30-40 person range, not 300-400), or maybe it's just because when I read the passage (James 4:13-5:6) nothing interesting came to mind. I've got a month to figure it out, but I'm definitely going to need a little help coming up with ideas.
Sticking with the church theme, we've picked up playing basketball again. It's a good thing for me to get out and run around a bit, even if it is only half court basketball. Aside from this and the quarter-mile walk to and from the LAS building to the Dawson building twice a week, I don't get much exercise. The weather is nicer now, and I think I might start taking evening walks around the neighborhood before it gets cold.
I finished reading Eric Clapton's autobiography about a week ago. It's a long, but easy read. If I were more interested in music, I'm sure that the book could almost be used as an encyclopedia of names and musical connections that are worth a closer look. But I'm not, so the long list of people and bands is just going to remain a list without connections.
I've been a little sick the last couple days, which hasn't been all that much fun. Fortunately, it wasn't as bad as it could have been, and I think I'm going to get through with only a minor inconvenience. There's a faculty gathering tomorrow night that I would like to go to, but I'm not going to go if I'm still feeling a little out of it.
I've still got a stack of midterms to finish grading, which I will get to as soon as I'm done typing. I probably could have finished earlier, but being sick means I can't concentrate as much as I would like, and so I couldn't get through as much grading as I had hoped.
Dipping just briefly into politics, I'm confused by (but strangely not surprised by) Obama's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. It seems rather premature given that he hasn't actually done anything yet. I don't begrudge the fact that he won, I just find the choice to be unusual. It seems that a lot of people, even strong Obama supporters, are going to scratch their heads over this one for the next couple weeks (until the next thing comes along and this is more or less forgotten).
I've managed a brief update of my textbook. I've rearranged the problems a little bit so that it saves paper by being more space efficient, and in doing so cut out about 10% of the pages (it comes out to about one page every two or three sections). Those pages will come back in the next edition when I put in the chapter review sections, plus a few more needed sections. I've also rearranged one of the chapters that I decided was completely out of order and fixed a large number of typos in the solutions. It's too bad that I need to have the new textbook submitted before the semester is over, as this means that the second half of the book will remain largely unedited.
My $200 has been sent in for the backgammon tournament in November. Based on a couple loosely defined metrics, I'm supposedly playing anywhere between a mid-level intermediate player to a low-level open player. But with a limited amount of live experience at those levels, I can't really say with confidence that those metrics are accurate.
Enough rambling. Time to grade.
