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In sad news, my mom's Uncle Gene passed away this week due to complications from pulmonary hypertension. The SA crew went up to St. Louis this weekend for the funeral, and we here at the Boston contingent wish everyone down there the best. Uncle Gene was, like the entire St. Louis contingent of our family, a great guy.
I guess it's largely lame of me to give such a hot running leadup to school and then to drop off the face once it began. So here's the week-late report, and it comes with some bonus news that largely affects the economic status / daily caloric intake of your humble narrator.
The second half of Labor Day weekend was not quite as explosively awesome as the first half, though it's a bit hazy now - Beck worked and/or got called in last Sunday afternoon, so I watched Citizen Hearst twice, once for real and once accompanied by the Roger Ebert commentary - review is in the to-do-queue, so you'll just have to hold your breath for whatever I have to add to the 5,000,000 articles on the AFI's #1 Film. I then sucked it up and prepared for my Tuesday morning class - some devil of mistimed appointments decided to put my Statistics class in the slot that puts it starting at 8 AM on 3 days out of the week, which means I have to lively up myself even more than you would think in order to get teenagers excited about stats. Wahoo - let's hear it for added hurdles. No problem, got everything ready for Tuesday morning...
No real excitement here. My class has 9 (then 8, then 7, now back up to 9 ) students, all female, rendering all sports-allusions obsolete, and before you get all bra-burning on me just trust that actually, the fact that these are Nutters pretty much renders sports metaphors Sanskrit, what with the multiple hours per day devoted to the Arts and none devoted to the SpArts. So it goes - wouldn't be such a big deal, except every stat in the book is oriented around baseball teams' salaries or whathaveyou. Hurdles, yay! Anyways, the class, currently and hopefully permanently set at Paula, Jenny, Vicky, Sooji, Danielle, Sarah, Ellie, Christine and Noel, is a very nice if not thoroughly talkative at 8 AM one - but everything has been relatively amicable thus far, and everything has also been thoroughly devoid of math-like work, which may or may not be correlated to the relative amiable personalities of said Walnuts. We shall see - actually, the biggest challenge right now is not boring people have to death with vocabulary, which hopefully I have accomplished to a reasonable degree.
Quick Note: Amiable and Amicable. The Sea, it appears, is meaningless.
So, um, that's about it schoolwise for the Stats class. One class a day every day last week, so I gave some extra help and attended meetings and assemblies and advised and otherwise found myself feeling pointless. And to twist the knife - one of my advisees did not work out - I'll leave that up there cryptically so as to protect the sacred advisor-ee trust - another one is swamped in his own personality, and my Bio class from next semester got thrown curiously up in the air - I may be teaching another math section next semester in its stead. So in the bonus news department - I just had an Alg. II section added to my schedule this morning, so now I've got two classes this semester and (hopefully, I've learned to trust nothing as guaranteed in this cold indifferent lifescape) still two classes next semester. Bonzai! Actually, it should be cool; I've got some students in the new class whom I know from Win's class last year, so that will be fun. And also good, because now I've got twice as much work to do on a nightly basis, more outer buzzing to drown out the inner, which has been shown in many a study to be just as effective as exercising for 30 minutes 3 times a week in preventing brain implosions. I.e., a good thing. There ya got it.
Somewhere last week (Wednesday?) Kathy, the science head, took the rest of the science dept. out to lunch at Minado, super duper Japanese / Chinese food buffet place in Natick that is seriously yummy but assaults will power and waistlines with equal abandon. Other culinary insanity from the previous 8 days... Beck and I hit up the S&S on labor Day in fear of that being its closing day, but found out it was the 30th day of hath September, so we have three more weeks to get our fat on. In battling down the fat-asses, we spent part of Saturday going on a jog up to S&S and then walking the 2.3 miles home. Awesome - it's like sitting still, without the danger of pulmonary embolism! But seriously, it was good to get out and enjoy the sunshine whilst dodging shoulderward drifting drivers of Providence Rd. Living in the super-suburbs, gliding down 122 without a non-car-collision-related concern in the world...
In other terrible news, Beck saw a neighborhood dog run over by a car two feet in front of her. The poor guy (a very small 10 lbs. white dog) had crossed the street to say hi to S&W, and then his 12 year old girl caregiver had called to him so he tried to run back to her... the car literally rolled straight over him. Just terrible, sad - an older lady was nice enough to stop and offer to drive everyone to Tufts, but the dog wasn't going to make it anyways. Score one for the good in people - but predictably, score one also for the bad side, as the driver who hit the dog just kept on driving without pause. The debate rages on...
Getting back to happier themes, we went out to Bollywood Friday night with Ali-Ben and the newest set of applicants for "cool enough to hang with us" status, Sarah and Kristof. (Incidentally, recent applicants iPMM and iPJ passed their Sunday brunch audition color-flyingly but were ultimately DQ'd for their non-South-Grafton-residence as well as what can only be deemed "the greatest synthetic HGH doping scandal to rock the iWorld"). They (Sarah and Kristof, not the iParents) may or may not have passed; there's a committee meeting later this week where we will likely table the discussion indefinitely. In honesty though, they were fun and we had a good time. Highlights included Beck speaking of nothing but death for the first 10 minutes, Ali's official crowning and more importantly nicknaming of PGOAT, Ben turning various shades of purple as Ali questioned loudly why was there a Reservation in Grafton when she had never seen an Indian (Native American) there... and loads more of the usual banter that tends to get people thrown out of upscale joints, a veritable scat session of razor-witted jokes involving all damning topics up to and including pedanecrophilia. In related news, Kristof is a lawyer who claims he only occasionally uses his powers for evil - he's an environmental lawyer working for the black-wearing bad guys, i.e. The Man. I shake my fist with appropriate fury. Sarah, lest it go unmentioned, is a fellow vet-to-be, though she's pathology-focused and not really into the whole first-person curing experience. They met and have dated since they were 14. Like Romeo and Juliet, only minus the antibiotics, plus the 77 year life expectancy. Anyways... good times, indeed.
This weekend, jogs for ice cream aside, featured a lot of reading and football and movies and Lost. A good relative break and recharge for this week. I've clearly grown bored with the account - but it was, trust, a good weekend. Reviews to come, at some point. I now, thanks to structure, have quizzes to right and lessons to plan. I unleash myself on the world with quivering feet...
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