Thursday is the day I?ve cleared to help Cat with Baby Dal. I?ve found that it takes discipline on top of no regular responsibilities to keep the day clear. Today, I had an ad hoc meeting that was scheduled for 11 am at Radford. Since I was already going to be in, I told my students that they could make appointments to see me in the morning. One of them took me up on the 8 am slot so today ended up being a half day of work for me. This would have been OK except I forgot to tell Cat about it. Last night she told me that I?d need to take care of Baby Dal in the morning so she could get some student recommendations done. Ooops!
Cat ended up writing those recommendations when I came home after my meeting. We walked down to the coffee shop and I carried Dalton around in his sling while she did her writing. When she was done, she emailed the recommendations off to a secretary somewhere who presumably took care of the rest. It?s hard not to love wireless internet.
Dalton slept for the entire time I carried him. He would sometimes fuss when I sat down so I pretty much walked around or ?danced? with him in one place. While it wasn?t particularly ?productive? time for me, I was still able to get some things done. I found a nice high table where I could comfortably write while ?dancing?. I?m giving an exam in General Chemistry tomorrow and I was able to take it to test the length. It took me fourteen minutes while juggling a baby. My usual rule is that I need to be able to complete the exam in one third the time students have for it to be the right length. They get fifty-five minutes so 18 minutes would be about right. I?m either getting better at taking my own exams or this one?s going to be a bit short.
After the exam proofing and recommendation writing were done, Cat and I sat down for a game of Scrabble. This is never a pretty sight. Cat has a significantly larger vocabulary than I do. In everyday life, I obscure this truth through the liberal use of a contraption recognized as a Thesaurus. In Scrabble, our differences are accentuated with Cat using words like ?Ibex? on the triple word space while I struggle to place common three letter words in the middle of nowhere.
The game actually started out pretty well for me. I was actually in the lead for the first five turns. Realizing that this couldn?t last, I contemplated starting the coffee shop on fire while she complained about ?bad letters?. At the first sign of smoke, we would have had to flee. I sure I could have conveniently knocked over the board while simultaneously grabbing the score sheet. From there, it would have been easy to declare myself world champion and refuse to ever play the game again.
However, before I could initiate my plan, Cat exceeded my score by placing the word ?zee? on a double word square. My response was, ?Zee is a word?? Apparently it?s the spelling of the word for the letter Z. Why Z is spelled ?zee? instead of ?z? is beyond me.
This last weekend, we drove up to Washington DC to visit friends from graduate school. One of our friends, Brian, is a professional photographer in his spare time. If you were at our wedding, he and his wife Anduin did all the pictures. Today?s picture was taken by Brian while we were visiting. I think it?s fantastic. It?s so good that it facilitated an ?I?m a Dad event today.? I actually removed the Transformers icon that I was using as my desktop background and replaced with the aforementioned picture.
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