Semester officially started

Well, with the bit of very good news I had yesterday, I feel much more eager for this semester.

Yesterday was the first day of classes; both my MWF classes are small (14 people each - that includes the 8 am PI section that people were afraid wasn't going to "make"). Today's class is a bit larger - 19 people. A lot of people in that class who have taken other classes of mine, and for some of them, I believe this class is merely an elective to fill credit hours and not required, so I'm going to take that as a vote of confidence.

I've also figured out something about the bee project I'm planning, a way around something that had been stymieing me. So if I decide to go forward with it (the one challenge: ideally you are in the field observing your bees multiple mornings a week, and I teach in the summer, so I really would only have Friday and Saturday mornings - though there are a couple weeks in May between classes when I could elect not to travel and observe full time), I've figured out how to get bees to identify. (It's NOT just "honeybees" and "bumblebees." There are many different bumblebee species and there are also carpenter bees, and then there are all the halictids and possibly some other groups.) I was afraid I'd have to go out and sweep-net bees, and while I'm not terrified of bees any more like I was as a child, still, I don't relish having to come that close to HANDLING them. (I was actually considering asking around if someone knew a beekeeper that I could borrow a bee suit from, or at least one of the veiled hats and sets of gloves). Instead, I can use what's called a "pan trap." Yes, you wind up sacrificing the bees who fall in the pan trap - but then you have voucher specimens, which are an important thing.

Really, what I SHOULD be doing is rewriting my rejected paper (though I could do that now, before the weather turns warm) and figuring out some kind of logical conclusion to the soil-invertebrate study, if it's going to be impossible to do a burning treatment on the site where I had been sampling them. (I had been sampling for a baseline measure, and was hoping last year to apply a burn treatment, but couldn't get a crew together).

But new projects are always more exciting than old ones, that's always been a fault of mine. I remember my graduate advisor a couple times gently steering me away from a "but I could get a small publication out of it!" projects and back onto the track of my dissertation research, which is what I should have been working on.

But anyway. Right now my main focus is teaching, that's what I'm paid to do. And something I enjoy.

So, once again, as per my personal tradition, here's the Academic Festival Overture to welcome in a new semseter:




And one other small bit of good news: the outfit I put on this morning was one which really kind of requires a belt (after more than a week of not wearing one). When I fastened the belt, I realized I had fastened it, without thinking, at one hole tighter than I did the last time I wore it. As tedious as the mostly-vegetable diet gets to be, I think it's the diet my body needs - in addition to losing fat off my middle, I feel better and feel healthier. I wonder if people vary in their vitamin requirements and mine just happens to be higher? I've never been good about taking multivitamins with any sort of consistency and I know many doctors say it's preferable to get nutrients from a  healthful diet, at any rate.

Also, my blood pressure has been lots better. I don't know if that's the diet, the little bit of weight loss, or my body adjusting to the medication, or some combination of all three.