Loooong week

This has been one of those weeks that wouldn't end. It was the first week of classes, so I had students piling into my office to discuss the schedule changes I'd hoped they'd make over break at the start of the week, a new course and a course with a new book to prep for, meeting back to back MWF, an AI case (academic integrity - never fun), and on Thursday, my pre-tenure review dossier was due. It came in at 199 pages. That's NOT to say that I wrote 199 pages all at once, since quite a bit of it was just compiling stuff I had, but still. On Tuesday, I discovered that somehow about half (i.e. 100 pages) of it was having some weird template issue, and so about every third line was either a different size or a different font. Which doesn't sound like it'd be hard to fix, until you understand that the packet included things like exams with funky characters and stuff, so it wasn't like I could just select all and set it all to the same font and size. Thank Dog I had a back-up from Friday. Ultimately, it was a big cut-and-paste extravaganza, as I debated whether or not to fix the content or to fix the formatting.

Yes, I know Word has a "compare" function that would have made it easy to find two days of changes. Unfortunately, Word won't compare master documents. I could have compared subdocuments, but only about 20% of my text was actually in subdocuments. Note to self: either (a) never use subdocuments again (thus not having a master), or (b) keep absolutely all of the text within the subdocuments.

Anyway, I got it done, I got it printed, I got it hole punched, collated, typed tabs and got them into dividers, and dropped it on my chair's chair at 6pm on Thursday (no one having said anything about WHEN on Thursday it was due), with some pithy note about leaving her a little light reading...

The only thing that I don't like about the finished document is that I accidentally set the margins to mirror, thinking I was going to print it 2-sided, and then I decided that might annoy the promotion committee, so I didn't, but it means my left margin is different on half of the pages. It's only a 1/4 inch, and we just got a department-wide email asking us to reduce copying, so I just left it.

I should have given back some graded pharm chem homeworks today, but I told them that I'd had a 200 page (ok, I exaggerated) document due the day before, and that they'd just have to understand. Now I have two sets of pharm chem and a set of organic chem homework to grade this weekend. At least its the first week, so my lab section hasn't turned in any work, or else I'd have even more work piled up.

Pharm chem seems to be going well - I'm enjoying having a class full of people who are (at least mostly) there specifically because they thought it might be interesting.

We went for dinner on campus tonight. Dalton ate ice cream and part of an apple, and two bites of potato-cheese soup. (Actually, I'm not sure it was two bites - it might have been one.) There's a reason we don't go there very often - ever since he figured out they have ice cream and that you can just walk up to the freezer and get it, it's been all over.

Playing in the kitchen

More post later, but for the moment: thanks Gram and Grandpa!

Block Towers

It is a great deal of fun to watch Dalton progress in various skills. Something I recently realized is that he has become quite adept at putting block castles together. The building on the left was pretty much his creation.

Thanksgiving Sales

I've never really gotten into the Black Friday thing. This Christmas, however, there was something I wanted that was going on deep discount (a little cheaper than ebay) at Michael's.

Carol and Jim bought me a Cricut for my birthday this year. It's essentially a programmable machine that cuts shapes out of card stock. We've been cutting out letters and shapes, giving them to Dalton with a glue stick, and he has been making cards for the grandparents. For Dalton, it's mostly about the glue, but he enjoys the letters and shapes as well.

Given how much Dalton enjoys arts and crafts, I was thinking that we would have him make our holiday cards this year. Cricut has a couple of different cartridges that facilitate the cutting of holiday shapes. I wanted to acquire one of these for our card making experience.

So Cricut has a real racket going. First they charge you an arm and a leg for the original machine. Then they continue to hit you up for pricey accessories and consumables. The worst of these are the font and shape cartridges. These things are basically software upgrades for the machine. They list for $90 each. The sell for $90 at Michael's most of the time and they are excluded from most sales and coupons. They run $65 at Walmart and $30-35 on ebay. I'd been dusting off my ebay account to purchase a holiday cartridge, but hadn't yet put in any bids when Cathy suggested that Michael's would have some sort of sale for Thanksgiving.

It turns out that Michael's first sale was on Thanksgiving with the doors opening at 6pm. The cartridges were running $30 each. I arrived at 5:50pm and was 7th in line behind young to middle aged women all talking about Cricut cartridges. Over the next ten minutes, the line extended behind me into the parking lot. This led to a building nervousness that I might not get that holiday cartridge. I was definately wondering how orderly the entire process would be.

As it turned out, everyone was good natured and friendly. While I did end up with a bloody nose, it didn't bleed all that long. They had plenty of the cartridges and I did get one with holiday shapes as well as one that does animals and one that has a font with lower case letters for teaching Dalty.

If you read this post, you're likely to recieve a card hand made by Dalty (with some help) in the near future.

No comments?

So one of our "numerous" readers told me today that she'd tried to make a comment on the blog and had gotten an error message. I've changed the blog settings for comments, although honestly, not having to deal with random errors is part of why we moved the blog over to Blogger, so I don't know what to say. In any case, her email has me wondering - are we getting no comments because (1) no one is reading, or (2) no one cares to comment (not even "aww, cute!"), or (3) everyone who has tried to leave a comment has concluded that it is broken.

So which is it? Use the comments section to answer, ok? ;)

Dressed like a traffic cone...

Dalton and I were in Joann fabric yesterday, mostly to look for paper for making cards, which is a current popular activity. (Mostly he likes applying the glue, but sometimes he even puts some Cricut cut letters in the glue. You'll get to enjoy his output when it comes time for us to send Christmas cards, some time in mid January.)

They had fleece and patterns on sale. We were admiring some cute fleece that I thought would make a cute sweatshirt. We bought a pattern (I wasn't sure I could do a hood freeform) that included a pattern for overalls. So then Dalton wanted overalls. OK, I said, let's pick out some fleece for making overalls. He chose orange. Really really really orange. The label said "tangerine", but tangerines aren't this eye popping bright.

You can tell that we live right nextdoor to Hokieburg. There were no issues whatsoever in finding bright orange thread to match it, nor in finding bright orange buttons, nor in finding bright orange seam binding.

I made the overalls in a 3T size. Brought them upstairs for Dalton to try on before I did the finishing and discovered that (1) they were too long (no surprise), (2) they were much too wide, and (3) our son is all torso, as evidenced by snugness in the crotch.. If I make him another pair, I'm going to use the 2T pattern and just extend the torso part a bunch. I took this pair in a bit (and extended the straps) before finishing them, but Dalton is going to have to eat quite a bit more pie before he'll be in any danger of outgrowing these overalls in width before height.

So as near as I figure, Dalton's ready to go work for VDOT. He's got the overalls, he's got the bright orange, he's ready to go!

Visiting with Gram

Dalton has had a wonderful visit with his Gram. Today they made miniature apple pies, one with a teddy bear on top. All was good until it became time to EAT it, when he became hugely upset because poking it with a spoon caused it to become "broken". Hugely upset. So upset he couldn't eat it. Tim says the title of this post should be "Dalton learns that you can't have your pie and eat it too." He's probably right, but it is too late now. Better luck next time, Tim.