I'm mostly done with the MATH 126-127 notes. And by "mostly done" I mean that I have 7 out of 8 chapters complete. (I had 5 of 7 complete on the last post, but then as I looked at things later on I realized that I had 8 chapters to complete and not 7.) I feel as though I should be able to crank out that last chapter by the end of the week. So that will be one item completely checked off the list.
But it may end up not serving me at all next semester because there's still some schedule juggling happening. We need to settle things pretty soon, but I may end up shifting my teaching around and lose both my MATH 126 and MATH 127 courses. The reason for this is that we might be opening up a section of calculus, and I might end up teaching it. We still don't know yet, but I'm hoping that have that squared up by the end of the week as well, because I will need to start focusing on prepping that class sooner rather than later.
I've also finished 6 YouTube videos on LaTeX. As I've finished them, I've sent them to a couple other math faculty for comments and review. There have been some good suggestions that I've incorporated, which has meant going back and re-recording some audio and adding in some extra content. But since it's making the videos better, I don't really have reason to complain. I should have two more videos complete by the end of this week if I'm able to stay focused on it after getting back home.
I think I've found a good home-school work balance. I think the money I spent on the home computer to allow me to separate out my video-editing stuff has made my school time more productive. I think it has something to do with not feeling as though I need to stay late to get the video stuff done means that I have a slightly higher motivation to get school stuff done sooner specifically so that I can go home and play with YouTube stuff. I can theoretically do a remote log-in from home to campus from the computer and work from home on everything, but I think that will start to fall into the same trapping as doing everything on campus. It's only been a couple weeks of this, so I will still need more time to feel that all out.
I've got my MATH 427 outline put together, and it's looking like a pretty standard course. I had wanted to try to do some bigger project stuff and applied something or another, but I think I'm going to have to temper my expectations a bit on that one and just do the more traditional things. That being said, I have written up a Python script to make slope fields and also plot solutions, so I will get to incorporate that programming element into things. The notes for that class should come together rather quickly because I don't need to write out all of the details into the notes. I might even be able to get that done by the end of next week if things go super-quickly for me.
On the CS 202 front, I was able to get a couple databases of information into my work computer and run queries, so I feel pretty good about the software side. I do need to do some stuff with linked lists as part of that course, because that's technically part of the course. But I will definitely move into relational databases as the heart of what we get to. That class only has one student in it, which will give me a lot of flexibility for teaching it, and can really try to use it as a learning experience for myself.
We officially lost our data science candidate, which means that next Fall we're going to have to start over with a whole new search process. That being said, we now have the ability to search with a little bit more focus on what we want to see in the potential candidate. We started last year with a very wide net to see what we would come up with, and through the experience of working through it over the course of the year we were able to learn a lot about the position and things we were able to realistically hope for. If we combine that knowledge with much better timing, we will be well on our way to hiring a good candidate to keep things moving forward.
But this does put us in a position to have to figure out what's going to happen in the next year. There seems to be an interest in trying to at least get the paperwork moving forward to keep the Fall 2020 launch date intact. This will require a bit more administrative support and potentially some challenging conversations, but that's something that may be added to the list of things to be working on late Summer or early Fall.
I got to spend a few days up in Zion this last weekend with some Leadership folks. There were only a relative few of us there (five family units out of nearly 60 people in the class) but it was still a great trip. The accommodations were great. We got a nearly-free upgrade because someone messed up the scheduling. I rode up with Amy's family, which was definitely better than making the four hour drive alone. This gave me the opportunity to get to know her and her family. There was an interesting moment on the drive up when we passed some people having some sort of argument on the side of the freeway, and one of the guys had a gun drawn. But it was one of those things where the road was busy and so you only saw a couple seconds of it. We called 911 on the situation, but its one of those things where we have no idea what came of it. Presumably, since I didn't see any news about a shooting along I-15, there probably wasn't one. But it was still one of those weird moments.
There's actually not too much to talk about for the time up there. We did a couple short hikes, hung out, cooked and ate food together, and just generally spent time in community with each other. But I don't think you need to have a day packed with activity for it to be good. I actually spent a fair amount of time with the kids trying to catch lizards with grass snares. (I seem to be pretty good with kids in the 4-7 year old range. Don't ask me how or why.)
Here are some obligatory pictures.
Also on the general topic of community, I had the crawfish a week ago. I was hoping to get a mixture of NSC and church people together, but it ended up being mostly NSC folks because the church people bailed out on me. But that's okay. Things came up and plans don't always work out as one might hope. I went up to 70 pounds of crawfish this year because I had anticipated a couple extra people, but in the end I probably could have just stuck with 60. This year, I made an improvement to the cleaning process, which was to use a bin with a grate (made from wire shelving) for cleaning. This increased the speed at which I was able to do it and also made the cleaning more effective. Aside from that, it was business as usual.
And here are pictures of that.
There's not a whole lot to update with Thor. I've learned that he likes chasing the red dot of a laser pointer, so I'm able to get a little bit of play out of him. I don't know whether he understands that I'm connected to the laser, but he does pause and look at me sometimes while he's playing. However, I cannot quite get him to transition to playing with something physical. I still haven't found quite the right toy for that. Jackson Galaxy (the "Cat from Hell" guy) talks about Hunt-Catch-Kill-Eat as the natural cycle of playing with cats. He doesn't like the laser pointer because there's no actual "catch." But at this point, it's the only play that I can get out of him.
At night, he's spending his time moving in and out of my room, and is often sleeping on the futon in the mornings (which has been moved to my bedroom). So he's at least socially comfortable with me being around. However, he still often runs away if I approach him. Right now, he spends a lot of time hiding in the window sill behind the curtain, but that's at least better than him hiding under the bed or under the futon. I can't tell if he's actually looking out the window or if he's just facing the wall. I'll have to try to go in the back yard some time that he's there and take a peek. He's definitely more comfortable in the dark than in the light, which makes sense if he lacks confidence.
I've started up a new thing, which is putting wet food in a bowl and moving that bowl to different places to see if he finds it. I'd like to try to make at least that part of it into a game of some sort, and encourage him to keep exploring different things and occupy different spaces. We'll see how that goes.
I've also restricted his movement to just the office and master bedroom. It took a couple tries because he was able to jump over the baby gate that I put up, and then after making it taller (with cardboard) he started pushing through the grates. But after I blocked that off, he has now settled into the mini-house concept. The reason for this is mostly to force him to be around me more often. I found that when he had the whole house, he would run and hide in the living room when I was in the bedroom, and hide in the bedroom when I was in the living room. And that's the opposite of socialization. So now he has to deal with the fact that I'm around, which is probably healthier for him than squeezing behind the small gap between the base of the couch and the wall.
And just as I had some obligatory Zion and crawfish pictures, I feel as though I should post some obligatory Thor pictures. If they look grainy, it's because I had to use digital zoom to get closer because he would run away when I tried to take the pictures.
