Light and Momentary

In Which My Inner Andy Rooney Speaks Out

People. It is August. August. It was 90 degrees here yesterday. Why are there pumpkin spice coffee beverages everywhere?  I want a steaming cup of pumpkin spice whatever about as much as I want a wool sweater.

The Starbucks homepage instructs me to welcome the return of a fall favorite. The Pumpkin Spice Latte is back in season, it chirps. Attention, Starbucks marketing folks: August is summer in the northern hemisphere. Pumpkins are not in season. If you wish to make it pumpkin season by fiat, I can't stop you. But I'll be the one knocking back an iced coffee, wondering who thought it was a good idea to put pumpkin in coffee anyway.

Red-Letter Day

Back in March I applied to present at a big conference this fall. They said they'd let us know by the end of July, and when I didn't get a response I assumed I'd been rejected. But the program for the event arrived in my mailbox, and there was my name in the list of speakers.  I am in the middle of finding out why I was never notified, but it looks like I'm giving a talk in one of my favorite cities later this fall. How about that?

Something I didn't know until I started grad school for the second time: any research project involving human subjects requires the approval of a university's Institutional Review Board.  This is intended to ensure that research is conducted ethically and that participants' rights are protected. You can do a study where you stick needles in people's eyes, as long as you make sure that it's really truly okay with them and that the benefits outweigh the risks.  The IRB will ask, Is this needle-sticking for the betterment of humanity? Is there a less invasive way to get the same information? Are these subjects going to sue the university after the needles are pulled out of their eyes and they have a chance to say, ICK that was really awful?

After I met with my committee in June, I began the process of seeking IRB approval for my preliminary research project.  It has been much slower than I anticipated.  I am only asking people to complete a questionnaire -- no needles involved -- but it has dragged on and on.  Today, finally, I got an email: formal approval is on its way! At long last, I can start collecting data.

I am a little, just a little, ambivalent about both of these things, actually.  I have had this little baby idea for a study for years now -- what if I'm wrong?  What if I embarrass myself at the conference, spewing misinformation into the room while both of the people who decided to attend the session roll their eyes at each other?  I suppose I know the answers to those questions: the reason we do research is to see if our pet ideas are right or wrong. And life goes on after embarrassments. Right? I'm trying not to let my anxiety get the better of me. This is what I'm going back to school for: to learn to do research, and to share new ideas with other people. Here goes, I guess.

Hasty thoughts about the first day of school

Classes started today and I am ti-erd. In my college journals I used to write that I was ti-erd, so tired I needed two emphatic syllables for it. Some people might just go to bed instead of writing about how many syllables were required for adequate expression of their experience of tiredness, but not me, apparently, because here I am in 2007 doing the same thing.

I am taking my third stats class this semester, as well as a class in my department. The stats instructor is from another corner of the behavioral sciences, a newly minted PhD with no teaching experience, and I am not sure he is a great fit for this class.  He said, "If you were hoping this would be a laid-back class, you hoped wrong."  He said, "In the past this class has <scorn>focused much of the semester on multiple regression</scorn>, but I plan to cover that quickly and move on to logit regression, binomial regression, ordinal regression, and other things too unfamiliar for CJ Most-Gladly to remember when she blogs about this tonight."

Then he gave us a quiz, on which I might have scored a 50% if the fates were smiling.

I'm laughing as I type this, though as I laugh I am thinking of Lord Byron and "if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'tis that I may not weep."  Because I am married to a math geek (tomorrow he will say, "who are you calling a geek?" and I will reply, "oh, pardon me, dear, I meant to say, 'a mighty mathematical mind,' of course"), I have a guess about what the instructor is thinking.  After you've had a certain amount of math, you lose perspective.  My husband, for instance, thinks that calculus should be taught in approximately kindergarten.  This week, counting by twos. Next week, the cylindrical shell method of integration. (I am reaching way back for that name, to my freshman year of college -- twenty years ago, when I was too young to get my ears pierced legally but was off on my own in the big city. Eek.) 

Anyway, I expect that grading these quizzes will be a rude reality check for Dr. Newly-Minted, because I compared notes with the other people from my dept. and we were all throwing up our hands in bafflement. And the class is mostly education grad students, who are -- oh, I cannot think of a diplomatic way to say this -- not renowned for their quantitative ability.  There is a reason the course has been narrowly focused in the past, I'm just saying.  It seems likely to me that Dr. N-M will reconsider his enthusiastic plans.  If he doesn't, I guess I'll be learning a lot of stats this semester.  Which is fine, she says with the merest hint of a quaver.

If anyone needed any proof of my husband's geek credentials-- I was telling him about my class and he said, "A semester? mostly on multiple regression? what a snore!" He nodded approvingly at the instructor's plans to cover more ground. Maybe the two of them should get together and compose a lament for a mathematically incompetent world, or revise the kindergarten curriculum to include matrix algebra, or whatever it is that mighty mathematical minds do when they meet up. I wouldn't know.

The boys had a half-day of school today, and all went well. Joe has been alternating superheroes lately -- sometimes he is Shadow Man, who lurks in darkness and leaps out with ferocious ninja kicks. More often he has been Kindergarten Man. I am fuzzy on the Kindergarten Man details (faster than a speeding eraser? more solid than a leftover soy burger?) but the name makes me laugh and laugh.

And that, I think, is it for me. How's by you? Any tales from the first days of school? Anybody want to guess at Kindergarten Man's secret powers? I'm just hoping he's unconnected to that other school superhero, Captain Underpants, because I could get quite the call from the school office if that's Joe's inspiration.

Post #100

...and I have only fluff for you, friends.

School starts Wednesday for both the kids and me, and I have been trying to get lots of things done.  I finished all my summer knitting projects (here is Pete modeling the sweater I made for a friend's baby (it is too small for him but I wanted to make sure I wasn't knitting on the wrong planet gauge-wise)).  I also made myself a cute little felted purse using this pattern with a couple of tweaks (like a zipper on top and an I-cord handle), exactly the right size for my checkbook, keys, and phone. (And I do mean exactly the right size. I have to slide the checkbook in just so. I should have stopped the felting a couple of minutes earlier.)

I plowed through my entire mending pile. Some of it, I confess, I threw in the garbage because I have come to think that my time is too valuable for me to spend it mending six holes in a turtleneck that three boys have worn since I bought it at a garage sale, especially when I can replace it for a quarter at the thrift store in my neighborhood.  I feel a bit like a spoiled American producing that convoluted and entitled-sounding sentence, but there you go.

Photo albums are caught up through the beginning of August, though they don't yet include vacation pictures.

My real life email inbox is empty, the checkbook is balanced, and the bills are paid.  And I made a buttermilk pie and a yummy bean dip for a potluck supper tonight.

I was feeling accomplished until I went to get school supplies.  Oh my word (says the spoiled American), it was a nightmare. We were going to get it done last week but I got hit with this strange attack of vertigo. I couldn't even turn my head without feeling like I was going to hurl.  Instead I went to Target tonight, and everything was picked over and tossed in the wrong bins.  They were out of solid-colored folders, a required item for kids in kindergarten. They were out of erasers. And fat crayons. And watercolors. And and and. I was trying to read three lists simultaneously -- I should have made a spreadsheet or something. I was thinking about Carmen, who went shopping for school supplies for five kids and took them along with her. I can't decide if that sounds more like courage or madness.

Anyway, this spoiled American is going to eat a teeny slice of leftover buttermilk pie and call it a night. Over and out.

Feast or Famine

I know! Three posts in one day! What is with me? But I love this picture of my hams in a sandwich.

Vacation Pictures

We rented bicycles one day and noodled around on trails by the lake.  The kids blew off some steam racing around; the grownups followed at a more sedate pace and had an actual conversation.

One rainy day I stayed home with Marty and Pete while the rest of the crew drove to Niagara Falls for the day, and Marty asked if we could have afternoon tea using the silver tea service.  His face in this picture says, "Why do people drink this stuff?" Pete, surprisingly, thought that his milky tea was delicious.  He finished Marty's as well as his own.

Lots to do this weekend after we came home.  Even Pete pitched in and helped. Too bad he can't fold the laundry quite yet.

Cleaning out the paper clutter tray

Over the weekend I was cleaning out the tray where homeless papers go to die, or at least to await their deaths, and I found a scribbly sheet of lined paper from a few weeks ago, when I turned 37 and felt thoughtful (read: felt old).  At first I was just going to file it somewhere, but then I thought, why not? what's a blog for?

I will never be any younger than I am today.
Let me never be any less patient,
Any less wise, any less kind.
Age is inexorable; growth is not.
Let me grow.

I am not yet accustomed to this age--
its trochees trip my tongue.
Let it be a year of grace,
a year to remember when I am old.
"37," I will say, "the year that taught me--"
--whatever you have have in store.

The face in the mirror will never be any less lined:
let it speak of lessons learned gladly.
Let it reflect more truly the Face
in whose image it was fashioned.
As lines proliferate, like an online map
when a user clicks "zoom in,"
let it show more clearly
a path unto your home.

Let's Talk About Packing

My husband has a Thing about packing light.  Now I am a pretty light packer by most standards, I think, but my husband wants luggage to be streamlined like Amundsen's while he was mushing for the Pole.  From his perspective I am like the White Knight, with extra can openers and parts for obsolete VCRs dangling from the sides of my pack. (NB: have never actually traveled with either an extra can opener or any VCR bits and pieces.)  I have to say he's outdone himself this time.  Six people, seven days, one suitcase, one backpack (ugly but with many nifty pockets), one waist pack.

I was planning to bring a small suitcase in addition to the medium suitcase, but Elwood said, "Two suitcases? Two?"  He lobbied for taking less clothing and doing more laundry while we were gone.  My plaintive sighs of "I don't want to do laundry that often on vacation" sounded like Scott saying, "What's a few more rock samples?" -- and we all know what happened to Scott and his rocks.  I thought we might bring along some jackets, because there's some rain in the forecast and we had planned to spend time hiking.  "Six jackets?" said he. "You want to take along six jackets?"  You would have thought I was suggesting we pack six filing cabinets on a trek to Ultima Thule.  I withdrew the suggestion.

So off we go, jacketless, with our absurdly small amount of baggage.  We'll be back in a week, wearing freshly laundered clothes.  Or maybe dirty clothes, because who wants to do all that laundry on vacation?  Tell me this:  are you a light packer or a kitchen-sink packer? How about the people you pack with?  Any tales of packing woe?