They're here...they've come...

The running nose and the post-nasal drip and the sore throat and the sneezing and the cough...

Sigh.

Off to feel miserable for a couple of days (I hope it's only a couple of days!)

Not sick yet, thank goodness

Hopefully Youngest Daughter's sickness will not spread to me. She is better, but had a spell this morning where we thought she was going to faint. At least the sore throat is gone, but she has a nasty cough. Lots of people at work are sick too. I'm drinking orange juice and washing my hands a lot in hopes of avoiding coming down with the same thing.

So, the evaluation---he sort of scared me that is was going to be bad, because he came in and shut my door, asked for a piece of paper, and acted very solemn. Then he said that he was very happy with what I'd done this year, thanked me for being "Steady Eddie", and gave me advice on what to do next to make sure I stay on this good trajectory. I need to get my siege weapons course approved for Gen Ed (in progress), get on a university-wide committee (done; I'm on Academic Affairs starting in the fall) and get some outside funding (gotta start working on that). He took one course off my list for the fall, and said I've got enough courses to be confident that come tenure time I won't have to worry.

Eldest Daughter continues to need special prayer for a work situation. She is feeling a bit better but misses her hamster friend. I would really like to go visit her for a weekend soon.

Son is doing well with school so far this quarter. I miss him! Sent him a HUGE box full of stuff, including the presents YD brought him from Peru. We have had a mega$$ outlay of repair bills for his car, and I hope that's done for a while. At least I hope it waits to break down until I've paid off these last bills.

Monday is the second lecture for my course at Alma Mater U. One of the students e-mailed me saying he was going to miss the first two weeks of class, and apologized for any problem or inconvenience that might cause me. I don't understand this trend of going on vacation or wherever and not planning to come back until after the term begins. The problem and inconvenience are his, because I cannot, nor will I, repeat 6 hours' worth of lectures. I told him to get the notes from a classmate and find out what the homework assignment was. I just have no patience for this stuff any more.

R.I.P. Pavel the Siberian Hamster

Eldest Daughter text-messaged me this morning at 6:30 to tell me Pavel had died. Poor little guy. He was really cute. We are sad. Farewell, Pavel. You were a lot of fun and we loved you.

///////////////////////////////

Youngest Daughter has been sick with a sore throat and coughing. Poor honey girl.

Kitty Son got in the dryer again and was pawing at its walls. Weird.

Today is my yearly evaluation with Boss. Eeek.


Update: Evaluation went very very very very well. I think I am getting YD's sickness.

Heaven, I'm in heaven....

Spouse TiVo'd the Bills Comeback Game!! I spent several hours this weekend immersed in football glory.

Ahhhhhh.

I copied it to my computer so I can watch my boys any time I want.

Silly kitty

Kitty Son has been doing some strange things lately. Well, stranger than usual.

I was on the phone with Son the other day, and all of a sudden a Sun Chips bag walked past me. It was on Kitty Son's head, pushed all the way down to his front legs, and he was backing up trying to get away from it.

Today he ate a furball on the floor. He does that now and then, so that isn't too strange, for him.

I tried to get it away from him but juuuuuust missed. Then I noticed a white substance on his nose. At first I thought it was tissue, as if he stuck his wet little pink nose in the Kleenex--but when I wiped my thumb across his nose, the white substance came right off and was kind of creamy. On a hunch, I took a quick sniff--and burst out laughing.

Kitty Son is sniffing (hopefully not LICKING) the honey almond soap Son bought me for Christmas. It does smell divine, I do admit. Guess I will have to cover it when it's not in use.

Oh, the physical results--

Lost six pounds (So what do I do? Come home and eat chocolate.)
BP fine.
Cholesterol "excellent".
Don't have to come back until a BP check in July.

Yeah, and he made me get a flu shot. Ow. Ow. Ow.

Wednesday musings

I got this e-mail from one of my students complaining about his grade on the latest homework assignment. They were given 10 data points and were to calculate descriptive statistics from those data points.

So if the books talks to “Sample Mean” as something different then “Population Mean” and I did what the book talks to shouldn’t I get credit for my work? How was I supposed to know the 10 data points in the book were the “Sample Set?” A 92 is far better then an 84.

This student, for some reason, decided that the question also asked him to gather a random sample from the data points. Did he state that in his submitted homework? No. He just gave the numbers, with no work shown. Since his numbers were wrong, and since he offered no evidence that he didn't just roll a dice to get them, he got no credit for the answers.

My response:

1) The question did not ask you to take any kind of sample, random or otherwise, from the data.

2) See my comment on 18b.

The comment on 18b says that since he showed no work he got no partial credit. Dream on, kid.

In the grand scheme of things, the difference between an 84 and a 92 (assuming I gave him full credit for the two wrong answers, which I wouldn't anyway even if I was so cowed by the tone of his e-mail that I caved to his demands, which I am not, and which I will not do) is 0.8 of a point toward his final grade.

Yup, there's one who will give me a bad eval. Tough nuggies.

Monday was my first class at Alma Mater U. It was weird to be back there, in my old office, with the same crappy furniture and the same plastic chair. No internet access, as I am apparently not yet on the system. So I worked on the lecture which was a good thing, because they want us to use Powerpoint and I always go too fast with Powerpoint so I need more material per lecture. Plus, this class is two hours and forty minutes long. And I mean long. I thought I was gonna die by the end of it. I was hoarse, I'd gone through two bottles of water, and I still ended ten minutes early.

And, of course, since it's my alma mater, I get to see my dissertation adviser every week, and of course he said since I was going to be there once a week we could work together (that means, I work, he reads and comments) on the two papers left to be published from my dissertation. Then he told me I need to do more research, then he told me I need to leave my current job and come to AMU where the tenure requirements are much stiffer but the teaching load is much lower, etc. etc. etc. The basic "why aren't you following my plan for your career" guilt trip. Sigh. I love the guy, but boy does he know how to pile that guilt on.

Okay, time for breakfast and then some much-needed reading. Still have an exam to write for tomorrow, and some homework assignments to grade. Fun stuff! Gack.

Oh, and one complaint. The manager of the campus bookstore sent out a reminder to all faculty and staff this morning that book orders are due for the spring quarter. Not ten minutes later someone from my college forwarded that same e-mail to all faculty and staff. WHY? Good grief, we get enough e-mail, why do we need copies of what we already got?

Argh.

Kid just e-mailed me back. He "feels he is being punished". Oy.

Peruse the Peruvian Princess' Photos

Here.

The Movie Curse

One of my favorite movies has been on television twice in the last month. I have tried to watch it both times. Each time, I've gotten a phone call from one of my two oldest kids with some sort of bad news or problem. Tonight I saw it was on again, and thought that maybe watching it wasn't such a good idea because of what's happened the last two times--but I figured that must have been a fluke. Sure, it happened twice, but still could be a fluke. Nope. Got a call from Son about a distressing problem he is having at work.

So I'm not going to tempt fate and watch that movie anymore even though I really enjoy it.

So long, The Replacements.

Random first-day-back stuff

• I have a physical next Monday at the ungodly hour of 8:30 a.m. (what was I THINKING?). The doc is going to yell about my weight. Maybe I could starve myself between now and then, and lose 5-6 lbs but he doesn't ever tell me I did good when I do lose some so what is the point?
• I had leftover Thai noodles and an orange for lunch, after which I was still hungry.
  
• BossMan stopped in and said the proposal I wrote for the grant training was great, he loved it, and that he put me down for seven courses. I thought for a terrifying second that he meant seven courses per quarter! That means he is giving me two course releases, without me having to write an internal grant proposal for them, so I can do more research.
  
• I counted up and I am supervising MS projects for 8 computer science students, 3 mechanical engineering tech students, 1 professional studies student, and I'm on the thesis committee for an industrial engineering student.
  
• I finished tomorrow's lecture for stats and half the data mining lecture. I spent a couple hours searching for the lecture notes I did last quarter on support vector machines, and finally found them. That lecture didn't turn out well last time, I hope I do better this time.
  
• The faculty meeting scheduled for today was canceled but we still had the search committee meeting which was very short. Yay! BossMan said not to worry about Monday faculty meetings that conflict with my Alma Mater U class, and asked me what I needed to be able to go to the conference in May where I am a session chair. Yay!
  
• Came home around 4:30 and we just finished dinner--basmati rice, chicken and veggie stir fry. Tea is on the fire and I have Hershey's antioxidant chocolate square for dessert. Youngest Daughter is lobbying me to make more snow trees (almond spritz minus the green food coloring because I don't have any). Maybe after I have my tea and chocolate...
• The bulb burned out in the light that hangs over the entry. It's too high for me to reach so I will have to stop at the homestead and borrow a stepladder from my dad.
• Eldest Daughter is in need of some extra prayers and love. Makes me sad that I am so far from her, because she could really really use a big hug from her momma. It's hard.
  

The break ends, and on being kid-sick

Tomorrow the academic year starts back up, grinding its gears at first and then (hopefully) settling down into a steady rhythm that lasts until May. The (too-short) break between Winter and Spring quarters doesn't really count as a break; it's only a week long, and that's just a hiccup in the grand march toward Commencement.

This year, I have an extra challenge (why, oh why, do I do these things to myself?) because I have agreed to teach data mining at Alma Mater U this spring. So I'm juggling semesters and quarters at the same time. I hope I don't go crazier than usual.

My class here in UniTown is depressing me because they are not THINKING about what's coming out of their data mining attempts. Nor are they thinking too hard about what their inputs are. Still in love with accuracy and time-to-completion numbers, they ignore the startling fact that their initial model of a two-class dataset doesn't get ANY instances of one class correct. None. Nada. Not one of them thought that was unusual enough to write about. Argh.

Eldest Daughter has discovered the post-Christmas blues, triggered by taking down the tree. It was a lovely Christmas, and like all of them, gone too soon. I miss her, and Son, immensely even though I just saw them. You'd think that time together would sustain me through the next long stretches of kid-less time, but it doesn't. I am ED- and Son-sick. I don't play the lottery, but I would consider it if I knew I could win enough money to bring them back home for good.

Kitty Son and Kitty Mama just had a laser-pointer chasing game with Youngest Daughter. Kitty Mama knows where the red light comes from, but Kitty Son is basically clueless. He kept batting around himself on the sofa, thinking the light just MUST be somewhere close by. Aww, poor kitty! We had a good laugh, though, at his expense.

Time for bed, for tomorrow I must work.

Violence in Kenya impacts churches from my denomination
From http://world.ag.org/kenya/index.cfm:

Kenya AG church burned with people inside
January 2, 2008

In the aftermath of the disputed Kenya presidential election results, the violent rioting has now impacted the Kenya Assemblies of God.

According to reports, mostly women and children had taken refuge from the rioting in the Eldoret AG church. On Tuesday, a mob surrounded the church, doused it with flammable liquid and lit it on fire, accusing those inside of voting for President Mwai Kibaki.

Kenya AG Superintendent Peter Njiri reports that at least 50 people died in the blaze and about 80 were hospitalized with severe burns. “Most of the victims were members of the church,” Njiri says.

Since the post-election violence began, nearly 300 people have been killed, as ethnic clashes erupted. In addition to being burned alive, people have been shot, beaten and hacked to death with machetes.

“This is entirely a political conflict that has unfortunately inflamed tribal prejudices,” explains AG World Missions Communications Director Randy Hurst. “What needs to be remembered is that the Assemblies of God has church members from all the major tribes, who not only live in peace, but worship together in the same congregations.”

President Kibaki has called for the opposition candidate, Raila Odinga, to meet with him and publicly call for calm, but Odinga refuses to do so until Kibaki admits he did not win the election. Odinga is also calling for one million people to come and march in protest in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, on Thursday.

AG East Africa Area Director Greg Beggs, who lives in Nairobi, spoke with Hurst earlier today, expressing his deep concern about the opposition’s march to Uhuru Park in Nairobi, asking people to pray that the march does not erupt into more violence.

In the midst of the rioting, innocent individuals and families are suffering as stores have closed or have been completely depleted of stock.

“Right now the urgent need is for food,” Njiri says. “We have two AG churches in Nairobi with more than 500 displaced AG people camping in them.”

According to Hurst, AG World Missions has already disbursed aid from the Suffering Church fund to provide food for the next few days.

Mike McClaflin, AGWM regional director for Africa who is presently in Togo, West Africa, states, “We would be grateful for any contributions our AG churches or believers could make to help relieve the suffering in Kenya.”

Currently, Kenya is one of the fastest growing Assemblies of God fellowships in the world, with more than 10 churches being planted every week in the country. To date, there are almost one million members in more than 3,100 local congregations.

To donate to the Suffering Church Fund, go to http://world.ag.org or call toll free 1-866-470-9514.

She's back!

With awesome presents and a couple loads of laundry. It's really wonderful to have her home. I'll post some of her pics when she gets them uploaded.

Youngest Daughter has landed!

She came home bearing lots of gifts and lots of laundry. Now that she's handed out the former, it's time to do the latter. Guess who gets to do it? :-)

Happy New Year!

Youngest Daughter just called from DC, and she is heading to the airport for the trip home. Yay!! I have missed her, LOTS. So have the kitties. KittySon has been meowing like crazy, and has had a serious case of the rips--running crazily all over the condo, chasing his mother, and generally being Mr. Underfoot (and Mr. InTheDryer).

That means it's time for me to get moving; have to drive to HomeCity since she is flying into that airport. It's snowing in the Lake Effect Cities, although not too much, and since I am avoiding the toll road (tolls went up a considerable amount effective today) it will take me longer to get there.