Maybe the calendar is lying to me. But probably not. I had to look back at the calendar to figure out what has happened in the last 6-7 weeks since I last posted.
Southern food over labor day was a big win. I was particularly pleased with the blackened catfish with cheesy grits and the pralines. The blackening spice mix I ended up with was rather simple: paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, black pepper, and a tiny bit of cayenne pepper. I had a mayonnaise-based sauce (a remoulade). The pralines were new to me. They're technically a candy, but they could be mistaken for being a cookie. And the recipe is pretty straightforward. Measure out the ingredients, mix them together, heat it all up in a pot until it gets to 240 degrees, stir for a while, and then spoon out onto a silpat or foil. (Ingredients: 1.5 cups white sugar, 0.75 cups brown sugar, 0.5 cups milk, 6 tablespoons butter, 1.5 cups pecans.) I miss doing that sort of thing, but that's okay because the season of eating is coming up quickly. (It's going to be here especially quickly the way time is flying by!)
There was another hanging out event since the last posting, which was a trip to Hofbrauhaus. We haven't been there in a long time, and it was fun to go back. Interestingly, the night we were there was some sort of LA Kings celebration thing. What made it particularly strange was that it was still preseason hockey. I ordered a roulade which was disappointingly dry and not that flavorful. Other than that, it was pretty much the same thing that it's always been.
School-related stuff is responsible for most of my sense of being busy all the time. I've spent much of the last few weeks trying to navigate the world of scheduling and staffing classes. As I was going through this process, I started getting a feeling of living paycheck-to-paycheck. Everything felt like it was hitting all at once and it felt like there were not enough resources to take care of everything, so I was trying to prioritize what things I would leave undone (and hope that it wouldn't come back to bite me). In the end, I managed to get there. (Well, I'm still not quite there. I've got about a half dozen classes that I just don't know what's going to happen with, but they're the classes that are easiest to fill.)
I've also had an instructor miss classes twice. This has resulted in me covering her classes twice on a moment's notice. Both times, I got a phone call from someone in academic advising because a student had gone to them to ask where their instructor was. There's a part of me that wants to be more upset about it, but the instructor has been having medical issues. During one of the classes she missed, it was because she was in surgery. The other time she was in urgent care at 4 AM and then was heading back into surgery around the time her class started. Hopefully, this issues are resolved now. When I talked to her, she sounded as if the surgery she was doing was going to be a bit more definitive.
I'm the faculty advisor for the new InterVarsity group at NSC, and that has been an interesting adventure on its own. We had one leader who was very enthusiastic about his faith, but that's about all he had. You'll notice I'm using the past tense because this student decided to quit school about 3-4 weeks into the semester. From my point of view, this actually a good thing. While I'm glad he was enthusiastic about his faith, I was very uncertain about what his faith was really about. He was a staunch young earth guy and that was his "thing" that he was using as the leading edge for how he portrayed the group. He had created a Facebook page and was posting 5-6 times a day and half of them were about the grand conspiracy of evolution against the Word of God.
Being confrontational like that is a bad way to try to start a group. When I tried to talk to him about this being ineffective outreach, he came back with something very similar to the tract complain I gave on one of the Oaxaca posts. I don't consider a literal interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis as being a central theological issue (it's certainly not the theological mountain -- or molehill -- I would choose to die on) and a great distraction from much more important things. (I have a longer post in my mind about young earth creationism that goes back to the Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate from the beginning of the year, but that's not for tonight.)
Anyway, when he left abruptly, he left the other leader out to dry. So I've sat down with her a couple times to try to encourage her and talk her through things. I can see that she has a lot more leadership potential, but she's going to need to grow in a number of ways before she gets there. It's a good thing that there are InterVarsity staff members who are willing to invest time and resources into her. So I'm optimistic about things.
Speaking of InterVarsity, I'm going to be on a conference call next week with some of the staff that put together the annual faculty retreat. The theme next year is going to be about "Power" and I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.
And now going back to campus matters, I'm also learning what it means to have an administrative assistant working under me. And by learning, I mean that I'm still trying to figure out what to do. So far, she has been doing a lot of things completely independent of me, such as getting people in to sign contracts and managing book requests for next semester. And I've thrown a few random projects at her. But I know she's capable of doing more. I just don't know how to utilize that ability. I'm too used to doing everything myself. She asked me last week if we could meet once a week to plan out projects and that sort of thing, which is actually a really good idea. Now if I could only think of projects that are appropriate for her to be working on.
I've been playing Assassin's Creed 3 a lot in the last couple weeks. That has actually been a good distraction/relaxation thing for me. I went to Lola's with Sara and Ken when they were in town (I need to go back to get that bread pudding dessert again). We're starting a new video-driven small group series that I think should be pretty good. The church inherited about 700-800 stadium style seats for a renovation at some undetermined time in the future. And that should cover just about everything.
