It's now the end of June, and time to transition into a period of less work and more other stuff. I'd like to say that the last couple weeks have been pretty efficient, but that would be a lie. The reason for that is because two weeks ago, I went out to the strip on a Monday night/Tuesday morning to watch a building implode. That pretty much ruined the week's productivity. But it was worth it.
A while ago, I was talking with a student and we somehow ended up on the topic of implosions on the strip and the fact that I have not seen one before. Apparently, she remembered that conversation because I got a message from her on Sunday telling me that she and her husband were taking their daughter to watch the Riviera implode, and that I was invited to join them. This was a little bit special in the sense that the Riviera has a long history on the Strip, according to some website that I found. It was built back in 1955 and had a solid 60 year run. Liberace played there and Dean Martin was a partial owner. I don't think I ever went into the Riviera when it was open, so I didn't have any sort of personal connection to it. I just understand its historical value at an abstract level. Fortunately, that did not diminish my enjoyment of the implosion.
I posted a one-minute video on Facebook. I recorded this from the parking garage at the SpringHill Suites, and we were probably about 1000 feet away from the base of the building. I actually have about 7-10 minutes of video, which included a firework show, but I didn't want to move around to catch the fireworks and potentially miss the implosion. So it's not the best footage. My favorite part of the video is that it caught my (now former) student's daughter yelling "Dude! Blow it up!" in the pause between the literal fireworks and the metaphorical fireworks. So now I can say that I saw an implosion on the Las Vegas strip.
But as mentioned above, this messed me up quite a bit for the rest of the week. I didn't go to bed until maybe about 5 AM, but my body woke me up around 8 AM and wouldn't let me sleep, so I just went in to work and tried to have as normal of a work week as possible. It's not like the week was wasted, but it definitely wasn't a week to be proud of. So I fell behind, and I don't really care.
I finished the EdReady project on Monday, which was three days ahead of the schedule that would have made me 6 months late. I'm very relieved to have that one behind me. It was a fun project to work on, but there was just too much other stuff going on for me to really give it the type of attention it deserved.
Class prep got a little bit stalled. I've almost finished with my Real Analysis course, but haven't really gotten started on the Precalculus course yet. I requested a desk copy of the textbook, but it has just come in. So that's my excuse.
I was thinking about the horse racing project, and I decided to shift the direction a bit. I'm going to try to set up something that's more like a power ranking than a modeling program. The reason for the switch comes down to the simple fact that one is easy to set up and program and the other is not. I'm going to need to spend quite a bit more time entering data, but it's still something I can do. I still want to do the modeling side, but that's just going to have to wait for a little while. I did get to talk with my horse racing friend and he talked me through some of the logic of handicapping, which has also inspired a third train of thought for how to do this. I guess it's probably better to have too many ideas instead of not enough, even though it makes the mountain of things I want to do seem larger and larger.
I haven't heard anything about the book project in a little while, but that colleague has been busy (and I'm busy, too), so I'm okay if that one floats a bit. I haven't had a chance to play with the drone, but that's okay. I've got most of the pieces ready for the gummy bear experiment, but that's probably not going to happen until August because we need to have some space blocked off for an extended period of time to run it.
I had family in town the last couple days, and I took the days off of work so I could spend it with them. We went to the Children's Museum and the Natural History Museum. I was a bit surprised by the Natural History Museum. From the outside, it doesn't look like there's going to be that much, but when you go in it's actually got quite a bit to do. It's not a great museum, but it was okay. It definitely shows its age. Some of the exhibits had electronics that didn't work that well, and the it's clear that some of the videos were quite old. It has a temporary exhibit about Roman technology, but the hands-on bits were not very descriptive or helpful. There was an exhibit about building an arch with no instructions, and even though I had a sense of what was supposed to happen, I couldn't get it to work. They had some stuff with gears that were broken and other problems. But at $10, the price is right for what you get. We also did some swimming and hit up the buffet at the M. I also got to hang out and stay up late with my brother and sister-in-law and have some interesting conversations about our perceptions on a variety of topics. So that was a good time.
I'm gearing up for Oaxaca in just a few weeks. Oaxaca is an interesting place these days. Dave Miller shared his own perceptions of the violence between the government and the teachers' union. It's so easy to get swept up in the cheap characterizations of a complex situation and pretend as if there's clearly a villain. Just like politics in the US, it's complicated. And oversimplified presentations are most likely wrong. There was also a 5.7 magnitude earthquake just a few days ago.
I've gone back to Hope Baptist Church, and I'm feeling moderately confident that I'm going to stay there. I liked the Presbyterian Church, but it's a church in transition and I don't want to wait another 9 months or so to see what type of identity it starts to take on. South Hills was nice, but I feel as though Hope is a church that would have more opportunities for me to plug into what they're doing. This isn't a firm declaration just yet, just an inclination. I'm going to wait until after summer because then I'll at least be in a place where I'm attending with regularity.
I did look back at Life Springs one last time. But I was once again disappointed with the sermon choices. The current series is called "Avoiding Election Infection" and both the title and the imagery is directly taken from Andy Stanley's sermon by the same title, but the sermons themselves are pretty far from the source material. Two out of the five sermons have a very high focus on America ("Our National Conscience" and "Our National Motto") and the three sermons in the middle are all framed in terms of "God vs. Culture." I've never really been fond of American nationalistic ideas being inserted into Christianity. I'm also not convinced that Christianity wagging its finger at culture is really an effective way for it to reach out and connect. So it's just turning into something that I have no interest in being a part of, and so it's time to move on for good.
