I've never been one to do a lot of decorating for Christmas (really, for any reason). But those days are gone. We had our Christmas tree up in mid-November. We also have a row of stockings above the piano (no fireplace) in preparation for Joan's family coming to town for Christmas. To be clear, I have no objection to decorating for Christmas. It just wasn't a thing I did as a single person, especially as I usually spent Christmas on the road.
Hannah is sticking with the skeleton thing. For whatever reason, she got into them during Halloween, and the idea hasn't left. She'll wake up in the morning and say, "I'm still a skeleton!" Or sometimes, she's just a skull. (There was a decoration that was an inflatable with three skulls that we called "skull family" with one mommy skull, one daddy skull, and one Hannah skull. So that also seems to have stuck.) She also likes to watch the skeleton dance song. I tried to show her the Disney Silly Symphony Skeleton Dance but she didn't last long enough to get to the skeletons.
Of course, dancing is still a thing. As I'm typing this, she's watching the Daniel Tiger Nutcracker Ballet episode, and she likes to copy the "One arm up, then the other arm, turn around, and leap!" as it happens in the episode. She specifically went off to her room in the middle of the episode to get her ballet slippers and dress when she knew it was coming up. The play dancing is starting to get a little more elaborate. She likes to talk about there being a stage where this is all happening, instead of just dancing wherever. And it's not so much just dancing, but she's starting to ask us to dance with her more often. I'm not sure whether this is a transition from parallel play to associative play (using the language of this article on the different stages of play), but it's a transition that has both literal and metphorical ups and downs. It has certainly been nice to sit back and watch her burn off her energy, and I'm admittedly a little disappointed that I can't do that any more. But it's also good to see her growing up and wanting me to do things with her besides hold on to a stuffed animal while she does something else.
She's also just starting to make toys with actual names (the horse's name is Gallop) and not just calling it what it is (the horse's name is Horse). I think this is a different type of play development, though I don't know that I know what to call it. But it's some sort of imagination where there's more space to just make stuff up. I have some vague memories of not wanting to name things, but I'm having trouble trying to remember any details or context for that sort of thing, so I'm not even sure that's a real memory or something my brain made up. What I do know is that I currently find names to be somewhat arbitrary and so I think I would give a generic name (or canonical names our Alice and Bob, which is a cryptography thing) to an object if I were forced to name it.
She has been a little sick over the last month (and by extension, I've been a little sick). It's been a couple different sicknesses, but nothing serious or unusual. Just a low fever and a runny nose. It's been enough that we've taken a few days at home for her to just rest and not infect other people, but not sick enough where she's really slowing down and showing signs of general fatigue or things like that. During that time, she slept with us again, and she's being a bit stubborn as we try to get her back into her own bed at night. We're getting her to go down for the first time in her bed, but when she wakes up in the middle of the night, there's not as much willpower on our side to try to hold the line, and she ends up back with us again.
We took Hannah to the NSU Early Childhood Education Center for a little tour. She had a great time there, and we're still trying to figure out whether we will want to take advantage of that. They wouldn't take her until next Fall because of their age requirements, and they won't open enrollment until sometime in the Spring, so we have a lot of time to think about it. It's not clear whether we'll really need the childcare, but she's also going to be getting to an age where having more experiences in structured environments could really be helpful. So we'll see how that goes.
I think our big outing of the last month was going to the District when they had their tree-lighting ceremony and fake snow (soap bubbles). She did her usual thing and danced to the music (especially later when it was less crowded and we felt more comfortable letting her have a long leash). She saw the soap bubbles on the ground and recognized that it was similar to the Bubble Bash, which is a solid connection to make.
Some little things: She saw a Snoopy decoration but wasn't completely confident or something, and ended up calling it Snoop Dog, which is pretty funny. She also says "Vegetable Tales" instead of "Veggie Tales." She does this thing where she will say the opposite of what she means, then change it, and I'm not sure if it's intentional or just a mental error. For example, if I know she wants some cheese, I'll ask her if she wants it, and she'll say no, followed by yes.
It's been a weird month at work. On November 12, campus went into lockdown for an hour. It turned out not to be a campus thing, just a think that ended up on campus. I was teaching a class that ended a little early and there were just a few students doing some work when we heard police cars and a helicopter. I could see that they were all gathered up the street a bit, but it didn't seem like something scary was going on. There was kind of a clue that it wasn't something like a campus shooting because it all happened out of order. The cups were there first, then the lockdown was put in place. In a campus violence situation, the lockdown happens while police are mobilizing because they are still in the early stages of reacting.
In this case, it was a car jacking at gunpoint that started in Laughlin (something like 90 miles away) that turned into a multiple jurisdiction pursuit that ended up in the hills behind campus. The distance would explain why there was enough time to get the helicopter mobilized and everything.
Because I was reasonably sure that it wasn't a more scary type of incident, it wasn't that stressful for me. Initially, a couple students were a little nervous, but between me and an older student that was ex-military, I think we both conveyed enough general calm and confidence that the stress went down. We were also getting information from informal networks of students, all of it pointing to morning scary. The students basically just kept working and then played cards after they finished their work. There was one random student that was in the hallway when things went down and he ducked into the classroom with us. He was chatting to a friend on the phone, and from what I overheard he had literally just stepped out of his dorm room to get something to eat when all the cops pulled up and locked things down, so he was just kind of stuck.
I heard from students over the next couple days that it was stressful to them, even if they weren't on campus, because there wasn't a lot of information coming out about it while it was going on. Some students took an extra day off because they didn't want to be on campus. There's some residual sense of this because of the shooting that happened at UNLV just a couple years ago. But within a couple days (and with information coming out about what happened), life was back to normal.
Not long after that, we had a large amount of rain and the roof of the building my office is in leaked. It wasn't a small leak. For some of the classrooms (and offices), it was apparently almost like it was raining indoors. From what I have gathered from talking to folks, they've known that the roof was a problem, and that we were scheduled to replace it soon. There was a hailstorm earlier in the year, and that probably did the roof damage that led to the leaks. So we're going to get that new roof sooner. Fortunately, that didn't happen to my office, so all of my stuff is fine. But that did lead to a couple weeks of being displaced from the office, which was surprisingly disruptive. It was mostly missing the triple monitor setup I have to spread out my work and having a place to leave my stuff instead of lugging it around everywhere.
Classes themselves are going fine. They are getting ready for their final projects. So I'm mostly ready to move on to next semester. I have a bit of revamping to do with the VIS 115 course because this will only be my second time teaching it. I want to restructure the labs a bit. Not the content, but the way it's presented to them. So I've started into that a bit. I also need to review/revise the notes that I lecture from. The 3D printing course will require only a little bit of updating (I think). And since I'm only teaching those two classes next semester, that's all the prep work I need to do. The rest of my teaching load was bought out by the Provost's Office for me to do data stuff, and I don't think there's really anything I can do to prepare for that right now. That still hasn't started to take shape yet, but I'm not expecting it to until we get to mid-January.
Things around the house are moving forward. As noted above, we've done a bit of decorating for Christmas. The tree has been up for a bit. We've got a row of stockings for Joan's family for when they come into town. We have a little Advent tree-calendar thing that we had hoped to use but we're not organized enough to put it all together. (Hannah has enjoyed taking the drawers out, so at least it's getting some usage. Maybe by next year, she will be more able to go in order and sit while we read the scriptures or whatever.
We're also getting our curtains up soon, I think. We replaced the vertical blinds across the back door with a ceiling curtain track from IKEA and curtains from somewhere on the internet. Joan was able to find curtains that work really well in that space. Curtain rods should be coming in for the living room soon, and since we've got stacked windows, it's going to be a 10-foot long curtain. I was initially unsure of whether I would be comfortable doing that with the 6-foot ladder we have, but after climbing up and measuring things out, it seems like something I can do safely. I went ahead and spent the money on a laser level to help with making sure I can keep things straight. So we'll have to see if I'll be able to get that up before Christmas.
We had our first Thanksgiving with friends or family since... ever? I think our first couple were just the two of us as we were coming out of the pandemic, and then another couple with just us and Hannah. In fact, I don't think we even did Thanksgiving with friends while we were dating. Our first date was in September 2019, so a friends Thanksgiving would have been premature (especially for long-distance dating), and we were in the pandemic in November 2020. Food-wise, my two takeaways are apple-honey-ginger cranberry sauce and cheddar cheese on traditional green bean casserole.
This is getting kind of long, so I should really wrap it up. For the last couple months, I've had a lot of thoughts as we have continued to try to find a church. Thoughts about American Christianity, Charlie Kirk (not a fan of him and some of the reactions to him on all sides), some of the Christian culture war stuff (very recently, that OU student essay), and the nature of incarnate community (individualist vs. collectivist faith models and both influencing and being influenced by such a community). Unfortunately, it's far too much to try to organize into some sort of essay-like semi-coherent ramble, so I'm just going to have to leave it at that.
Small stuff: Thor is doing well. I've had brief moments of piano time. I typically try to keep my personal email as fully read, but it's currently sitting at 84 unread messages. (Or at least it was until I just did a quick select-all and mark-as-read... Not my preferred way of clearing it out.) The plants seem to be mostly doing okay in the planter box. But with the temperature dropping, I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with it. I'm working on this year's photo album when I can find the time. I should go to bed now.
