I think the Fall weather has officially started. At the beginning of the month, we were still in the 90s, and just a couple days ago the high was below 70. Looking ahead at the weather, it looks like it might sneak back up a bit. But this is better than last year, when we were still looking at triple digits to start the month of October. We have pictures of Hannah at the splash pad while the Halloween decorations were up. But I really don't think that's in the forecast this year.
This evening, we did our first true Halloween "event" with Hannah (beyond going to a pop-up "pumpkin patch", which is really more like a mini-fair). It was the Halloween Express with the Boulder City Train Museum. Basically, it's a 15-20 minute train ride (out-and-back... not even a loop) and then a little party. It was fun because Joan got tickets on a car with several of the families that we're connected to through Zumbini and other things, so it had more of an "extended family" feel where it was comfortable to let Hannah wander around the car without us needing to hover quite so closely.
The party time was fun. It was the right size/length/energy level for a bunch of little kids. They had a DJ and a dance area, plus some games (2x4 Jenga, oversized Connect-4, bean bag toss) for the kids that were less interested in the dancing. But Hannah was not one of those kids. She was out by the fog machine jumping around and being her unrestrained self. In fact, she was so much so that she won an award for best dancing, even though she had no idea that there was a competition going on. It wasn't anything too formal. The DJ basically brought the kids to the front area, and told the kids that he would give out awards for who he thought did the best dancing. I honestly don't even remember seeing Hannah dancing that much during this time, but maybe she already caught his eye early on when she was dancing by herself. I don't really know. The only thing that I'm certain of is that Hannah's dancing doesn't come from my contribution to her genetics.
Hannah has gotten really into skeletons. Specifically, she really likes Jack Skellington. She hasn't seen the movie or anything, but there are probably 5 Jack Skellington deocrations in the neighborhood, and for whatever reason she likes them. By extension, she likes skeletons in general now. We have mostly cute Halloween decorations in the neighborhood, so our walks are mostly just tours of the blow-ups and things.
It's hard to believe that the last post was focused on potty training. It feels like such a long time ago already. Hannah has had basically no potty issues since then (maybe once?). She's been able to hold it through the night, and even wakes up asking to go potty in the middle of the night sometimes, and bladder control and awareness when she's asleep was definitely not a given. She's not an independent potty-goer just yet, but that's a lot to ask of a 2.5 year old child.
Speaking of sleeping, she's now sleeping in her own bed. I thought that this was going to be a much tougher transition, but she has done pretty well. Joan bought some books and talked up sleeping in her own bed, which almost certainly helped the transition happen. The bed is still in our room, and that's waiting on clearing out some more stuff from Hannah's room (which is waiting on me to get the new garage cabinets up, which will happen soon). She also has a TonieBox to play music/tell her stories as she goes to sleep. This transition has created a little extra time at night for us after she goes to bed, which has been nice. It feels good to have a little bit more productive/useful time back.
She's been using her tricycle more than her strider bike in the last several weeks. The tricycle has a handle attached to the back so that we can help push/steer her a little bit. But she's doing a lot of the steering and pedaling on her own. At some point, she'll get back to the strider bike for a more independent experience, but I think she likes pedaling. We have an indoor 4-wheel balance bike that she rides around the house, and she is pretty comfortable steering that and rolling around in it (pushing herself fast enough so that she can lift her feet and go, at least over short distances.) So I think it's only a matter of time before she does that on the strider bike. She also might just need to get a little bit taller so that it's more comfortable for her.
Other little things: I don't know exactly when it happened, but she got her last set of lower baby molars. We're still waiting for those upper molars. The only reason I know is that Joan noticed that she was biting on stuff a lot more than usual, and then I took a closer look at when teeth were supposed to come in. It's funny how the first ones were such an important milestone, but with these last teeth it was without any fanfare. She's still enjoying cooking class, and has also added an art "class". (It's not so much a class as it is just an open art/tactile experience time. I guess other parents have really enjoyed it, but I see it as just kind of meh.)
Work stuff has been a little bit of a drag in the last couple weeks. I've been very fortunate to have classes that were smaller (due to structure or level of difficulty), and I've forgotten what it's like to have over 100 students in the same class (spread out across three sections). So now when I'm grading individual projects, it just feels like it takes forever.
More annoyingly, because these are lower level math classes with a lot of first year students who may not understand what college is about, I've seen several instances of cheating this year. Two of them were at the level of needing to go through the formal reporting process (exams), and a couple were more were ones that were of a low enough level that I felt okay just talking to them and warning them. This is kind of a weird area because I get the sense that they're used to getting away with it, and perhaps not really understanding what they're doing. The ones that were warnings were on projects where I told them that they can work in groups, but that they also needed to write up their own work. And then students turned in identical (or virtually identical) papers. That's actually okay for the math part, because the math is what it is. It's when they have personal reflections ("What did you learn from this project?") and they say the exact same thing that they get themselves in trouble. Oh well. It just comes with the territory.
I've had the last few weeks of my project time sucked up by the Canvas API, and the Django and Flask stuff is on hold. I'm making a GUI to help some colleagues solve some of their Canvas course-making frustrations. The first project is just deploying a template assignment across unevenly-spaced dates. That one has been my "learning" project where I have to go through and really understand how to make the GUI feel like how I want it to feel. The next project will be to help shift the dates from one semester to the next. There's currently a feature that shifts all of the assignments by a certain number of dates, but that doesn't work with holidays and things like that. So I'm planning to build a 1-to-1 mapper that helps to map the dates in a sensible way (and also updates the due times).
I met with some of the administrative folks to see whether it makes sense to have one of my classes next semester bought out for me to more formally do these types of projects. It that this is a good thing to do, as this is a new type of opportunity for me to continue to develop these skills as part of my formal job expectations instead of doing it in my scant work project time. It will also have benefits this semester because I will have one fewer class to prep. It's interesting because the goals are still kind of vague and dependent upon what data they will be able to extract from the system.
We've got another math competition this upcoming weekend. It's probbaly going to be pretty small. The first one had around 7-8 students, I think. This one will be smaller, with maybe 4-5 students. I think we just haven't found the right connection points (3-4 schools that could consistently give us 5-6 students would be a solid foundation to build on), and I don't know that we will. But we're committed for the year, so we'll just have to keep pushing forward to see what happens.
I'm giving a guest leture for one of the other classes on the mathematics of the Rubik's Cube. Since it's only an hour-long talk, I can't really go too deep, and I also want to leave time to play with solving cubes, so it's going to be a little bit rushed and there will be some things that will get glossed over. But that's okay.
There's some other work stuff going on. I don't know a lot about it, and at some level I don't really care. The President left to pursue another opportunity earlier this year. The Provost's position has been ended. There's some whistleblower stuff going on. But leadership changes happen all the time. I don't know who did or said what to whomever, and it doesn't really matter. I'm quite happy to be the boots-on-the-ground employee whose job description doesn't include dealing with that sort of thing. But the upshot of all of this is that we'll probably be in transition for the next two or three semesters, and that's perfectly fine with me.
Around the house, we've had quite a bit going on. For the first time in years, we have a TV. Even though it's not the best decision, it's nice to be able to sit Hannah in front of it for a little while and get some stuff done. She fits the classic picture of a kid who gets tunnel vision when the TV is on, and it seems like she could sit there for literally a couple hours without moving as long as it's on. (We haven't tested this... yet...) Her go-to show is Daniel Tiger, and I'm not mad at that at all. Joan is working really hard on trying to get the colors of the accent pieces just right, which is a big challenge giving the clashing undertones of the different things we've got.
We're inching closer to having the garage set up. We had the electrician move an outlet so that we could get the cabinets lined up nicely against the wall, and that's going to give us some more storage space and improve our general organization. Last year, I put up some shelves for larger storage bins, and that worked great for the larger stuff. This creates a better space for the smaller things, which will really help things to fit in a more meaningful way in the garage. Or at least, that's the hope.
We built the raised planters and put some plants in them. We've already had some neighbor cats take a poop in one of them, so we're going to have to watch that and maybe play some defense to keep it from happening again. So far, it looks like nothing died, but the way that I've got the sprayer nozzles for the automatic timer, one of them just isn't going to get water, and so it's probably going to die soon. But that's okay. My expectations are pretty low right now, so any success is a big win.
Miscellaneous things: Thor had a period where he was throwing up a bit, but that seemed to have died down, so I don't know what to make of it. But at least he seems fine now. Still no piano. The psoriasis bald spot is starting to disappear, but there are still a couple spots on my face that itch. My parents and aunt/uncle are in town right now, and Hannah is enjoying the extended family time. I'm sure I'm missing stuff, because I'm always missing stuff now that I do this once every 5-6 weeks instead of every 2-3 weeks. I can't believe that Thanksgiving is about a month away. And that Christmas is two months away.
