My summer travel season is basically over. I have a trip next weekend to Reno for a wedding, and then it's just another week until the start of the semester.
The week between Mexico and Santa Barbara was quite short. I got a little bit of work done for classes in the Fall, but it was mostly catching up on emails and touching base on a few projects that are still in the air. It did take a day or two to get rested up and fall back into a normal sleep pattern. There were a couple times that week that I took a short "nap" in my office (5-10 minutes of sitting with the door and my eyes closed to try to reset my brain). I'm glad I have a job where I can do that sort of thing. But on the other hand, I wasn't even on contract, so I didn't even need to be there. I'm just such a terrible worker at home sometimes that going into the office is what it takes for me to do the prep work that I need to do.
And just when I was starting to fall back into a stride, it was time for the next trip. I left Vegas on Saturday to spend a night with my brother's family. My parents happened to be there, too. It's always fun to visit. I stayed with them until Sunday afternoon, and finished the drive to Santa Barbara. (Well, to Westmont, which is in Montecito and it looks like you can technically get there without ever being in the city of Santa Barbara. But you have to go right up to the border.)
This year's West Coast GFM retreat was themed around "Making All Things New" (taken from Revelation 21:5, which was part of the study we did). It's always nice to meet new people and catch up with old friends. We use the dorms, and my roommate happened to be a professor from Fresno that was working on remedial math, and so we ended up talking shop and swapping experiences. Since this is part of my habit (and has been for quite a few years), I have to admit that I'm mostly there to unplug and recharge. That means some afternoon naps and just walking around the campus by myself a bit to spend some time thinking through my thoughts a little more slowly and carefully. Last year, I was coming out of being Department Chair and stepping into Leadership Las Vegas (my interview was literally the day that I left for Mexico). This year, my thoughts were kind of mixed between work stuff and day-to-day life stuff.
The work stuff had to do with thinking through the transition we're stepping into. We've got a bunch of new math faculty coming on and programs being built up. We had been working on a change to our degree program to make it more compatible with the math education program. That was mostly in place. We've got the data science minor, and we're still in the process of trying to build out relationships to support that (SNHD and MGM have both been brought to the table with positive interactions thus far). And then there's the math conference coming up in November that we need to start to work on. So there's just a lot of things to juggle right now.
In the more mundane day-to-day life stuff, I'm going to try to get back to reading books a little bit more and try to get more music to happen. I haven't really been on any type of pattern of book-reading for a while. I read a lot of articles and such online, but there's something different about reading a book. So I ended up buying three books from the book table at the conference (plus there was a free book). I tried to get a mixture of things. "Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes" is a thinking book. "Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering" is probably going to be a challenging heart-level book. "Liturgy of the Ordinary" will probably be a fast read of simple insights. "The Cultivated Life" is the free book, and I really don't know what to think of it. So we'll see if I stick with reading. I've still got to go back and try to read "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" at some point. I got maybe a third of the way through that book before it slipped out of focus.
After the conference ended, I went back to my brother's house for a night. That night, we watched "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1." I've never been good at reading fantasy, and I didn't really follow along with the Harry Potter series. We joked a bit about whether anything made sense because there were a bunch of references to things from earlier in the series. I'm sure I missed a lot of things, but the basic plot was easy enough to follow because it felt like not much happened. They were running away from something, and then had find a thing that they needed to destroy, but couldn't figure out how to do it for a while. And then about 90% of the way through the movie, the Deathly Hallows was actually introduced. But it was a fun film to watch, which is really the only thing that matters. Maybe at some point, I'll sit down and watch them all in order and actually understand the story. Or not.
I've moved offices again. This is only a temporary move. My permanent office is currently occupied because the office that person is supposed to move to isn't finished yet. So all five math faculty have been put into a classroom with partitions. I've been calling it "Cubicle Land." What it really means is that I'll be working in a fairly minimalist manner for perhaps the next 6 weeks. I don't want to unbox a bunch of stuff to just box it up again in such a short period of time. It's been interesting wandering around the halls of the Dawson building for the last couple days. Unfortunately, it just feels kind of dreary and un-cared for as a space. The most amusing thing I saw was looking up at one of the vents and seeing that whoever installed the filter couldn't even have been bothered to do it correctly, because instead of the two filters being side-by-side to occupy the whole space, one is stacked halfway across the other. So I've been spending time trying to think through the things I would do to make the space more inviting or something. The good news is that things aren't terrible. It's not as if the place is falling apart. But it's definitely been neglected. It will be interesting to watch things change over the next couple weeks and see what things get attention and what things don't.
I'm in the process of laying out the schedule and advertising for the January medical mission in Oaxaca, which will also (hopefully) tie back to the science center project. Typing this reminds me that I haven't updated the webpage for a while, and so I'll have to add that to the list of things to do.
What else? I'm still pickling carrots and eating them. That's been a fun one to play with, and I've probably consumed more carrots in the last couple months than I had all of last year. (I'm not a big fan of carrots, but the pickle treatment has been great.) I've been working my way through a 1 kilo ball of Oaxacan cheese (quesillo). I added it to leftover pizza, made quesadillas, and put it in sandwiches. And some out-of-hand eating. But mostly it's going into sandwiches. I froze some of it in plastic and foil to see if it holds up to longer term storage. I'll find out in a day or two how that worked out. After my roommate gets married and moves out, I'll probably give the room a fresh coat of paint. I've never actually painted a room, but it doesn't look hard (mostly because I'm not too proud to just tape off things I don't want to paint instead of trying to carefully cut in with a brush). And then I don't know what will happen to that room.
