My brain keeps wanting to use the word centurion. It's because it sounds closer to century than centenarian does. But I can pretend that I'm thinking some sort of warrior-like imagery for having fought through 100 years of life. Po-po (or Pau-pau or Paw-paw, depending on how you want to transliterate that) is in relatively good health physically, but is not as mentally with us as she used to be. A number of years ago, she had some early dementia problems and was getting a little paranoid. In her apartment, she lived by the stairwell and I guess she thought people were coming in and moving or taking her stuff. Later, she fell and broke her hip, and my memory was that it took about a full day before we knew. That one was rather interesting, because as she recovered from that one, she got significantly less paranoid about things and kind of opened up again. As she has continued to age, she's needed more and more care, slowly increasing to needing 24 hour care. She got an infection maybe a year or two ago that got her sent to the hospice care facility that she's in now. They thought the infection was bad enough that they didn't think she would survive. But here she is.
So yesterday, we celebrated her hundredth birthday. Well... it was her second hundredth birthday party (that's second [hundredth birthday], not [second hundred]th birthday). I've joked a bit about not really being sure when she was born, but I don't think I ever really spelled out some of the details of that. The first question is the year. For this, everyone is relying on a collective memory of how old she was when we celebrated her birthday the previous year. In theory, this works just fine, but would it be possible that things got off? Maybe. Birthdays are traditionally counted differently in China. Age is counted from inception and not time of birth. So there's kind of a +1 thing that happens. They also traditionally increase the age each Chinese New Year, and not on the actual birthday.
Even if there were birth records available to go back and try to check things, you have to add in the fact that China's official calendar was still mostly the lunar calendar around the time that she was born. Lazy internet researching shows that although the Gregorian calendar was officially adopted in 1912, there was a lot of resistance to it, and different warlords were on different calendars in the period of time just after this. This same lazy internet researching also indicates that it wasn't until 1929 that things got fully back on the Gregorian calendar.
As to why it was celebrated twice, I think this is just a family dynamic thing. There was a party thrown for her about a month ago just ahead of Chinese New Year, but then it was decided independently that a party should be thrown at the end of Chinese New Year. Therefore, two parties. Or something like that. I don't claim to be well-versed in this stuff, and I know that everyone remembers seeing the Chinese New Year stuff a couple weeks ago. But this is a thing. There was even a Chinese New Year parade last night in San Francisco. So I don't know. Maybe we just party a lot.
But I think it all worked out well in the end. The first party was much more with the staff of the hospice facility, and last night was a lot more about getting extended family and friends together. So everyone got a piece of the party. One of my cousins whose husband is a pastor in Indonesia was there, and it has been maybe a decade since I last saw her and her daughters. One of the cousins brought "Keep Talking and Nobody Blows Up" which ended up being a hit with most of us "younger" people. Some relatives of the family that I don't know at all were there, and maybe some family friends, too. And it was all good.
So now I'm sitting here on a Sunday morning in Livermore. I'm heading back to Vegas this afternoon around 5.
Campus stuff is good. I'm not going to do a class by class like I normally do this time just because I'm trying to hurry this up and finish this. (I guess I spent more time reading up on the Chinese calendar than I thought I did.) But they're all going well, and I'm pleased with that.
We're about to start yet another course revision with our precalculus course (MATH 126). The loss of remedial classes means that we're going to have to build mathematical foundations as we're going into the precalculus level material, which is a tough ask. My job right now is to think about which of those remedial pieces can fit where and to think of how we can deliver it to students in an efficient manner. I've got some ideas, but we'll have to see how it fits with what's happening in other parts of the revision.
I'm still sending out feeler emails for my sabbatical work opportunity. I've gotten a couple positive responses, but no commitments yet. I'm also still waiting for the UNLV folks to get their plan together so I can figure out how I'm going to pursue the certificate. So all of that stuff is still kind of rolling along slowly.
The searches are going well. We finished the on campus portion of the math search we're going into the final stages of preparing the recommendation. The data science search is bringing people to campus next week and the week after, so we should be finishing up with that one around mid-March. So that work is coming to a close as well.
We're doing some surveys for the AXIOM conference for next year, and so we'll see what changes will need to be made. I'm mostly interested in the timing of the conference. If the conference is going to happen while I'm on sabbatical, that's going to be kind of difficult. It's going to be difficult even if it's in the Spring semester (because so much work needs to be done in the Fall semester), but it's less difficult to do it that way because I'll be around campus in the final steps of that process.
Other stuff: Piano is untouched. Thor is doing well -- My next project is to try to figure out how I'm going to get him into the cat carrier to take him to the vet. I really want to work on a couple video projects. I don't think I've had my weekends this stacked in a while, and I'm looking forward to finding some more pauses soon. I haven't gone curling in a while. Church vision stuff is getting challenging (lots of tough questions to think about), but it's going well.
