Congrats to Son! And back in grading jail

Son finished his last undergraduate exam this morning. Yay! He is going to take it easy today and then tomorrow we start moving him into the condo. Big milestone! Another graduate!

Okay, I am back in grading jail for the next few days. Here's my to-do list (grades have to be in by Monday):

• 31 graduate exams
• 31 homework assignments
• 17 project reports
• 7 undergrad exams

Guess I'd better get started....

Up and working already

Kitty Son woke me at 6:30 because he was down to little "cracks" in his food bowl. So, I got up, fed him, had breakfast, got dressed, and finished the paper review for IEEE. Tonight is the final for my data mining class; I finished writing that last night, and also input all the presentation grades yesterday(peer grading is a wonderful exercise for the students but inputting all those grades is a pain for me!). The nice IT guy came around 1 and fixed my Excel installation, which I managed to mess up. Turns out my version of Office was one revision down from the uni standard, so he upgraded it for me. He also suggested I see if my Ethernet jack is active because my connection keeps dropping and is slow. I've got a spare cable around here somewhere, so I will bring it in and test it.

Today I have my first thesis committee meeting! I am excited! Then I have to meet with an adjunct about one of our courses, get the final printed out, take Youngest Daughter to her voice lesson, and then give the final. After that, nothing left to do for this quarter but finish grading. I had to contact one student to resubmit his final for the stats class because he handed in a pdf of his handwritten exam--and the last five pages were completely unreadable, just random marks on the page. Now, I can read all sorts of chicken-scratch writing: right side up, upside down, and backwards--but even my formidable pattern recognition skills fail when the letters are almost completely missing.

Grading...ugh.....but once I am done with that, I'm concentrating on research and writing so I can get the book chapter done and possibly one article out before the new quarter starts.

This will be an eventful week: tomorrow my mom is having cataract surgery on her right eye. Then Thursday-Saturday we are moving Son into the condo, as he is graduating this quarter. I need to get his car moving; it hasn't started since just after the ice storm. I think the battery needs charging.

I finished Murray's With Christ in the School of Prayer. It's a compact little book, with 31 chapters: one for each day of the month. He starts off in Chapter One with the phrase "Lord, teach us to pray" and takes the reader through different views of that phrase depending on where the emphasis is.

Lord, teach us to pray: because Jesus is the Master Teacher.
Lord, teach us to pray: because God's power is available to us through this means. If we want to tap into it, we need to learn to pray.
Lord, teach us to pray: because that awesome power that was evident in Biblical times--both Old and New Testament--is available to us too, today.
Lord, teach us to pray: because prayer is simple and yet deeply complex. And, as Murray states, sin has darkened our minds so that we don't know how to apply the Word; it has skewed our thinking so that we don't know what to pray for or how to do it correctly.

Like any other skill, effective praying is learned through practice and careful study. This little book has a lot of gems packed into it as Murray expounds on these themes.

Wow, what a performance!

Okay, I didn't get to see Amazing Grace. Son had too much end-of-quarter work to do, and Youngest Daughter wasn't interested so I had NO ONE TO GO WITH ME. >pouts<

But YD and I did go see the HD simulcast of Eugene Onegin with Renee Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky. The broadcast was at a local Regal theater; we got there about half an hour before showtime and it was like walking to an AARP convention, lol. YD said she was the only non-grey-haired person in the whole place. We ended up wayyyyy up in the back corner of the theater, right against the wall in the very last row. I thought about what I would do if there was a fire, because there would be no way that place would clear out in less than half an hour (which is about how long it took us to get out after the opera was over). Anyway, we settled in with our popcorn, Butterfingers, pretzels with cheese sauce, and bottled water, and waited for the show to start. I told YD we could go to the Met in NYC to see an opera live, but that we certainly wouldn't be able to bring popcorn!

Anyway, the last scene was soooo fabulous. And Ramon Vargas did a masterful job as Lensky.

Afterwards we came home and watched hockey, and I finished grading the fifth homework assignment. One more to go, plus the final and the projects. Then we will be done for this class. Yay!!

Toe loop! And more random stuff

Youngest Daughter did her very first toe loop jump today! It was neat! She is practicing for a competition taking place next month and the coach showed her how to do the jump.

I messed up my Excel program and now it won't open. Sent a SOS message to the IT people and they haven't contacted me yet but I need that program fixed ASAP. So maybe tomorrow I will take my laptop over there myself to get it fixed, instead of waiting for them to come to me.

Tonight was the last data mining class before the final, and the last set of presentations. One of my students from last quarter stopped by to watch, and that was really nice. They also did the course evaluations, yikes. I will be so glad to not have evening classes for a while!

There is a slim possibility I might get to teach in China sometime this year. Wow.

Tomorrow night we are going to go see Amazing Grace and Saturday we will see Eugene Onegin in high definition. Can't wait! But I am seriously tired tonight and am heading off to bed now.

Random stuff

I'm home today, working on graph mining stuff and proposals and grading and whatever. Yesterday was tiring! Youngest Daughter worked very hard helping her brother out by assembling the parts to his game. Then we played it (fun!) and took him home around midnight. Neither one of us wanted to get up this morning.

My grad class is doing their presentations this week, and last night I had to yell at them. They kept going in and out of the room while one of their classmates was presenting, and several talked the whole time. So I told them such behavior was rude and unprofessional; that the presentations were not that long that they couldn't wait to talk in between speakers; and that no one was to leave the room unless there was blood, vomit, or diarrhea involved.

After that, they behaved much better.

Here's a great ad from 18 Doughty Street in conjunction with BritainandAmerica.com (thanks to Iain Murray at nationalreviewonline.com for the link:

Grading, grading

and other stuff.

I'm trying to make a dent in the grading pile, but it sure is a slow slog. It's Week Ten, so there are no more assignments after this--just final exams to get through. Then a week off and the whole cycle starts all over again.

Sunday we had a missionary from Zambia speak, and over lunch we were talking about things they need in her work. She runs a community health organization that teaches the villagers about food safety and how to avoid communicable diseases. Anyway, she mentioned that they need a windmill. Must look into this for possible student projects.......wouldn't it be cool to design something that would help these people and get to go there to install it?

I have 10 students signed up for my design class this spring! That will be lots of fun. Each student gets $100 for expenses and must design a new product (or variant on an old one) during the quarter. At the end, the students have to demo their products for the rest of the class. I am looking forward to seeing what they do. Maybe something Zambian.......

Today we had another discussion about the new dean. OldTenuredDude seems to have it in for our colleagues in the engineering school, because he made several statements that were just out in left field and not true at all, from my experience in engineering school. He also has this paradigm of students as colleagues. His mantra for today was that if he wasn't teaching at our school, he would be working side by side with his former students--and that this was true of everyone in our college. I don't necessarily agree with him. The undergrads are certainly not my colleagues. He speak consistently from the viewpoint of his narrow department which is fine but he generalizes to a college with four disparate academic units and two thriving international programs, and I don't think his generalizations apply as widely as he thinks they do.

Son is here working on one of his course projects (he designed an endangered species game) and doing his laundry. It's nice to have him here. Youngest Daughter is helping him out, lured by the promise of money in return for doing the mindless and tedious work of making the game cards.

Hockey night!

Sitting in grading jail again, with about 70 assignments to work through, and still plodding away at proposals and papers and stuff.

It took the maintenance guys until last night to get the driveways cleaned up from all the snow. If there were little kids living in this neighborhood they would have a blast playing in the huge snowmounds.

Youngest Daughter went to campus today to a potluck dinner hosted by Son and his friends. I made chocolate chip cookies so she wouldn't go empty-handed, and she also took a half gallon of ice cream from our freezer. They had a great time.

Sigh. So much grading to do...as Eldest Daughter would say, "Work, work, work. Just like Cinderella."

Happy Valentine's Day!

More random stuff:

It's a snowy day here in UniTown. Indeed, it's a snowy day all over the region. Spouse came in for a site visit with a couple of his groups, and met up with me for a quick kiss and pass-the-presents in the parking lot. He gave me a dozen roses and some cookies and candy for Son and Youngest Daughter. I gave him a pen and a pack of car air fresheners (Macintosh) from Yankee Candle. I think I got the better of the deal!

The weather was so bad that we didn't stop to have lunch together, just went our separate ways. I was a little worried that I'd fishtail going into the condo garage because of all the snow in the driveway, but I made it okay. He was worried he'd get stuck in the cookie dough that always piles up at the base of the driveway at the HomeCity house, but he made it okay too. The condo maintenance guys were working down the street to clear sidewalks and driveways which meant they had not gotten to my condo yet. There was a good foot of snow in front of my door.

Youngest Daughter got something in her eye right as she was opening the door for me, and there was much weeping and wailing for a while until it came out, after several washings with saline and tears. She is still sitting with a compress on it, as it's all irritated now from whatever the object was. Poor kid.

So, I got stood up again today by two students. I e-mailed the Friday offenders and asked what was up. One forgot, the other came 30 minutes late. I pointed out that I waited twice as long as students are required to wait for professors, then told them the next time I drive from HomeCity to UniTown to get stood up--they pay for my gas and tolls. Today's offenders will get a similar message. And then I will tell the office managers that any students who miss their appointments will have to come back another day. I drove through a snowstorm today just for this one meeting, and they didn't show. I could have stayed home and had a lunch ready for Spouse instead of the parking lot tango we ended up doing.

My undergrad adviser once told me a story about his stint as a graduate director in my department at Alma Mater U. He was annoyed with the current cohort of graduate students because they were dragging their feet on getting their research done and finishing their degrees. So he sent out a letter warning them that the university's deadlines for graduate study would be strictly enforced. He sent the letter on Valentine's Day. And, in true grad student fashion, that letter was forever after called the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. I am apparently following in his footsteps because today I sent out an e-mail telling a student I would not allow his proposal to be submitted to the graduate committee because it was substandard. I haven't gotten a reply yet. Should be interesting, especially if the parental unit gets involved, which I have heard does happen with this student--despite FERPA and all that.

Our school is running a five week health program with a local supermarket, and those who are on the department team have been issued pedometers. They are supposed to walk 10,000 steps a day. I am not on the team because 10,000 steps would pretty much do me in, thanks to my flat feet. Anyway, I digress. One of my coworkers who is on the team attached her pedometer to her fashionably low boots, and it looked just like one of those ankle monitors Martha Stewart had to wear. I teased her about it, and she said that had crossed her mind, so she made sure her dress was long enough to cover it--but guessed it wasn't if I saw it! Hahahaha!

When all the snow was coming down in full force Kitty Son was gazing out the patio door at it. I asked him if he would like to go out and play in it--and he immediately turned around, went to his favorite chair, and snuggled in his blankie. Smart cat.

Department chair bought each of us a carnation from a student group selling Valentine's Day flowers for a fundraiser. I thanked him for it, and then asked if the flower was a bribe because we do evaluations on our chairs next week. I told him I am holding out for chocolate. :-)

Wow, it's been a while since I blogged

Eldest Daughter is always after me to blog, but I just didn't have the time this week. It was a busy week!

We are winding down the quarter, which means all the work is piling up. I have homework to grade for two classes, literature reviews to read, thesis proposals to review, plus one more lecture to do for this week. I have a committee report section to write. And I still have three white papers to churn out. Those have been repeatedly pushed to the back burner, and it's time to get them out and off my desk. In addition, I have two papers to get to co-authors. I could work all day every day, and never be totally caught up. But, I need to at least plod on, plod on, plod on.

Random stuff:

• I'm watching Cool Runnings and mourning the loss of John Candy, who was a great guy and a wonderful actor.
  
• The car repairs cost me $300; the mechanic didn't replace the oxygen sensors, even though they were the cause of the error code, because they both apparently went out and that would have cost me another $300. The check engine light popped on again Friday. I won't bother trying to fix it again until it needs an inspection, which is in November.
  
• I've lost six pounds and my BP dropped considerably. You'd think my physician would be happy and smile for once, but he seems to be the glass half empty type. I always feel this vague disapproval. Could just be that he is grumpy most of the time.
  
• Spouse and I packed up a box to ship to Eldest Daughter. I think she will like it.
• I've printed out the forms to get my passport. Now to pay for it.
• After I spouted off here about the TenuredDude shooting down my suggestions, I got an e-mail from the committee chair asking for recommendations to give the dean. I wrote a long explanation of my position on things and some observations about what I see as erroneous perceptions about research. Chair immediately wrote back agreeing with me. That felt good.
• I didn't skip garbage night. That made me feel quite virtuous.
  

Later this week I will post some of what I've been reading in Murray about prayer. Interesting stuff, and food for thought.

Cars, fill valves, scholarship, students, and garbage

That was today in a nutshell. Took my car in to the shop to get the transmission fluid changed, front end aligned, fuses changed, and the check engine light looked at. Still don't know how much that is going to set me back, as the mechanic wants to keep it overnight and test the defroster and the engine. Dad picked me up and took me to Uni to get Son's car, which decided not to start. Dad's jumper cables were in his garage, not in the truck, so there was no jumping of the car.

I borrowed my mother's car instead. Came back to the condo to wait for the plumber--I called the landlady yesterday morning because the toilet decided not to flush Monday night, and the tank was completely empty. We've been flushing it by pouring big pots of water in the bowl. But last night Youngest Daughter discovered the tank was filling again, and we've not had to use the pot. We had left the filled pot in the tub--and Kitty Son, who loves fresh cold water, was happily slurping out of it. Anyway, I didn't want YD home alone when the plumber came, so I was anxious to get back here after dropping the car off. I needn't have worried. The plumber was a tiny, ancient man with bad feet and thick glasses. He jiggled a few things and puttered around for a minute or so, then told me to call if I had any more problems. When I left for work a few minutes later I noticed that he had dropped some things along the sidewalk, sort of like a plumber's version of Hansel and Gretel's bread crumbs. So when the fill valve clogs up again, he can just follow his trail back here.

Today's meeting was the scholarship committee. I made a suggestion and TenuredDude shot it down. Made another suggestion and TenuredDude shot it down. Made a third suggestion and TenuredDude shot it down. I was beginning to see a pattern here. Anyway, the two other TenuredDudes didn't think they were bad suggestions, so they may actually use one or two of them. Cool.

Then I came back to my office for office hours, which I had rescheduled from Monday. I only had one student come in, begging for extra credit to offset a poor job on two assignments. She got a zero on the first one for plagiarizing, so her mission today was to convince me that she did not, after all, copy sentences and paragraphs wholesale. She asserted that her high Turnitin similarity score was merely the result of matching article titles and author names. So I opened up the Turnitin report and showed the offending paragraphs, color-coded and side-by-side with the original paper. She quickly moved past that argument and started on her second task, challenging her grade on Homework 2. I showed her that her results were nonsensical and obviously cut-and-pasted. The software we use calculates statistics in a report the students were to include in their papers. It was pretty obvious that she just pasted the report for one run of the software and tried to alter it to pass for the second run of the software. When I asked her to explain how these numbers just didn't add up (literally), she had no answer. What I probably should have said was that she had discovered a serious glitch in the program and that we should write the software designers and alert them to this bug--then watched her face to see her reaction.

Right now I am watching hockey (no score), IMing a friend, and texting Eldest Daughter who is bored. She had some blood work done today, and wanted to know if she still got a treat for getting stuck with a needle, like she did when she was little. I usually bought them candy, but if it was a particularly big stick, or lots of sticks, they got a Hot Wheels car. I looked for a Hot Wheels Jaguar, found a Matchbox 2006 red E-type for $10. Whattya know, she wants a REAL one. Well! That would have to be a pretty big needle to justify a $50K "treat"!

Tonight is garbage night. I hate garbage night. I may skip it.

Go COLTS!

Super Bowl Sunday is finally here, and I'm rooting for Peyton Manning and his Colts to win the Big One.

We went to the funeral home today to pay our respects to Sis. Rose (the funeral is tomorrow). There were TONS of people there; the line went right out the door. Eldest Daughter made a beautiful graphic for the front of the funeral bulletin.

It was seriously cold today, but not as bitter as I thought it was going to be. My heat bills here at the condo aren't too bad, considering that it's exposed on three sides and part of the fourth, and built on a slab. I think Kitty Mama was happy that she's in the nice warm indoors instead of the nasty snowy windy cold outdoors.

Only three weeks left in the winter quarter, whoohoo! I am going to end up with a teaching overload again, though. One of the adjuncts has once again backed out of her teaching schedule. It's not her fault, I know, but this year she has reneged on teaching four courses over three quarters, and that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that I can count on her in the future.

I'm trying to get this week's lectures done and uploaded but it's slow going. Lots of stuff to explain, and that takes time when it's all asynchronous and online. Ah well. Got to get back at it, once I make another cup of tea.

GO COLTS!!!

Is it me, or...

is Blogger less stable now since Google took over? I never got so many error messages before.

The futon came this morning, and Son is already taking it for a test nap. It looks really nice, and is very comfortable. I may use it myself now and then, since we don't have a regular sofa to stretch out on.

I'm picking up an external hard drive today and a wireless network card for the HP laptop. I'd like to get a table to put the laptop, printer, and scanner on. Maybe I can find one cheap at the Sauder store nearby. I only want a wooden table, doesn't need a keyboard drawer or anything fancy.

The parents and I are going to the uni hockey game tonight. Should be fun! Too bad Spouse can't come, but the weather in Home City is not looking good for tonight and tomorrow.

Gone home

Sis. Rose died last night, somewhere around midnight. She'd had several very good days, able to visit with her children and grandchildren, and remarkably pain-free for hours and hours. Thanks for the prayers--she is home now, and experiencing the ultimate healing.