Wednesday evening things

 * Still not quite done picking up allllllllll the stitches on the Cardigan for John. I really dislike picking up stitches but it's gotta be done. Then it's a few rows of garter, the button hole row, and a few more rows.

I still haven't contemplated attaching the buttons (the last step). The yarn is too thick to sew them on with and sometimes wool yarn gets cut by button loops over time. 

What I think would be best would be to get a matching skein of floss and use that, but that will require a trip to Michael's; Wal mart seems not to carry floss and that's the closest thing to a craft supply store in town

* That said: I might go tomorrow or Friday. Yes, it's still terribly hot, but I feel less bad than I did earlier in the week. And I might need a distraction for my brain

* Tomorrow is my annual fasting blood draw. Even though I've never turned up anything scarier than "low vitamin D," I still worry given the family history of a couple things (none of which I am showing symptoms of; most likely it will be another set of boring results but boring here is good)

* And I admit, I wasn't feeling great Monday and Tuesday and this morning. I don't know if I got a "no-no" food (sometimes some of the spice mix some of the Mexican restaurants here use on beef does it; I don't know if there's too much cumin, or if there's celery seed, or what) or if I had a little virus (which, actually given the symptoms seems more likely). I felt really bad when I first got up both mornings, improved over the course of the day, but had NO appetite. I chalked that up to the heat but also wondered if something was really wrong with me (not wrong enough to try to move up my appointment). Now I'm glad I waited; things were more normal this morning (still had some abdominal discomfort) and by this evening, food sounded good again (I had cheese ravioli for dinner, and the rest of a can of pears that I had bought on one of the days when I couldn't think of what to eat)

So hopefully I'll still be fine in the morning, and will be able to get a late breakfast after my blood draw. (There are a couple pretty good all-day breakfast places here, and I might just go and see if I can get a waffle, on the grounds that rich sweet food is probably going to have the least affect on things AFTER my blood's been drawn-  I am not supposed to eat after midnight)

* I did talk with my department chair about dealing with the AI cheating I suspected last year in one of my classes, and we came up with a way (well, it was what I was expecting I'd need to do) to cut into it (changing how I have them work on some of the assignments. I mean, on the one hand - if someone wants to cheat through and not learn the skills, that's on them, but on the other hand, if people go out to try for jobs and a lot of them seem incompetent, it reflects badly on the department. And a lot of the stuff that people are using LLMs to cheat with are the basics that people will need to know on their jobs, and also things like how to write a coherent paragraph. 

I don't know. Another part of me wants to throw up my hands and say "the cheater people have won, there are no jobs left for these kids, what's the point, might as well let them cheat" but then again that also rankles.

I don't like these times. And I don't like that the honest kids may get run over by the cheaters (because the cheaters seem slicker and also get the work done faster)

* Summer is almost over. I didn't have much fun but I did get a lot of fieldwork in, and I did give a presentation somewhere, and I updated nearly all my lecture materials. I could still take some time early next week; it's supposed to be a few degrees cooler than it was THIS week.