* I got the last few revisions done on the paper, and sent it back in to the editor, so that means most likely I'm done with it, and it'll be in published form around January (God willing, and the pandemic doesn't get worse - IIRC this journal does one issue a year and it's out in January). I even made the least-generous deadline - he had originally asked for it to be in by August 15 and I asked for a bit more time because of traveling, but because I worked hard before my trip and figured out how to fix a more arduous thing during my downtime, I got it done.
* I had talked about getting a reward for it? Well, last night I was browsing cute things on Etsy (my usual way of self-comforting these days - I try my best to avoid the "reseller" shops and buy from actual artists, though sometimes it can be hard to know and I wish there were a way to sort so you ONLY got actual makers). Anyway, there was an artist on there who makes plushie sharks.
Yeah, I know, sharks? But I like them now, at least in toy form - I bought a big Blåhaj shark for myself at Christmas time and I really like having it. (It is nice to hug. I find in the absence of people having something vaguely animal shaped to hug helps). Anyway, the artist ("Sewing with Whiskers") had a minky fabric shark that was black with rainbow "sprinkles" on it, and it was cute, and while it was fairly priced for something that takes time and materials, it also didn't cost the moon and stars (there are some *incredibly* cute minky plush on there that are like $250, and I can't justify buying it for me - yes, they take a lot of work and materials and the artist has a right to charge a price fair to them, but for me, personally, that's out of my budget for such a thing). Anyway, I gave in and ordered one. And realized this morning: okay, this is my reward for the journal article acceptance and also getting it revised in a timely fashion.
The artist said that the sharks could take a few weeks; some of them are made to order. But they must have had one of these already made up because it shipped today.
* I pulled out the long-stalled "Plentiful" (a Bernat yarn) pullover and restarted it. I kept decent notes of where I was and had kept my row-counter right with it so I was able to pick back up.
I also finished knitting the right front (the second of two) for the Pocketses vest during Zoom knitgroup on Saturday; when I have a bit more energy I am going to block the pieces and then all I need to do is sew it up, knit on the bands, and make the pockets. I'm glad this is done and it's kind of energized me for working on knitting again.
(I also finished a few small things over break; tomorrow I should start with photos).
One thing I want to do is dig through my yarn stash and start a few sweaters I bought yarn for that I never got around to doing - need to work down the stash. And there's also a slightly sympathetic magic for me - yes, we are having heat indexes of 107 F right now but maybe starting fall sweaters will help to bring it on?
* I talked to my chair today. She's not even masking in lecture (I still think I will) but is going to in lab, and she's not doing the Zoom accommodation I was considering. I am NOT going to do live-lectures-that-I-record-and-post like last year - if I have someone who has to quarantine and seems concerned, I'll broadcast the lecture live BUT tell them they have to "show up" on Zoom at class time. Because I am DONE with the extra work that involves. I'm hoping this fall is better than my apprehensions; I hope this "wave" crashes soon, though given the low vaccination rate in the community around me, I'm concerned. (I don't know what the uptake rate is among college people, other than my colleagues - as far as I know, EVERYONE in the department faculty is vaccinated; in fact, I got mine the same time as several other people). I am dialing back on my "out in public" time until the wave declines, but it's also deadly hot now, so being home in my airconditioned house (or over at work in a less-airconditioned office) is more desirable than driving around. Hiking would be OK, of course - outdoors - but it's not appealing when it's so hot, and actually is slightly dangerous.
* This is hard to read but here is one professor's account of teaching (online) through the pandemic. (DON'T read it if you're in an emotionally fragile place; it's hard to read.) I guess I was actually blessed in this in that I did not know anyone who had the experience of having to decide when to take someone off life support (I did lose two people I knew to covid; one never made it past the ER, the other wound up dying of pneumonia before they intubated him). I also don't know (at least, no one disclosed to me) of any suicide attempts from students. That would be a very hard thing to deal with, if someone disclosed that to you - none of us have training and while in better times you can get them to the counseling center (I did that once when someone who was newly on a particular medication said they were thinking about self harm; it turned out okay for them, they got the help they needed), it would be MUCH harder when nothing was open.
But I don't know. I don't know if the writer had it unusually hard or if I have been unusually fortunate. Yes, I had some terrible days, I had days when I thought I'd never see my mom alive again, when I thought I'd never be able to do anything other than scuttle out to the grocery pick-up and scuttle back home, I had days when I felt abandoned by everyone....but I made it through and some days even feel kind of normal now.
However, some of the things she talked about - the pain of teaching to blank squares on a screen, the lack of feedback, the worrying about whether your students were okay (I think I had a few close to the breaking point; I did my best to help them but as I said, I am not experienced in that area). And yeah, one thing I noticed: a lot of the rewarding things about teaching are gone in the weird online pandemic wasteland we were forced into on short notice, and a lot of the frustrating things about teaching were magnified (OH THE CHEATING on the online essay exams. Even if it was easy enough for me to say "I am sorry but this does not answer what I asked" when I was met with a block of copypasta based on one keyword from my question, it was demoralizing).
* I did make Thanksgiving Amtrak reservations, presuming we won't have some horrific new variant shutting stuff down. I will have to travel up a day early (=take a personal day) because there were NO roomettes or bedrooms the day I planned on traveling, but there were the day before. (And even in good times, I much, much, much prefer the privacy and quiet of a roomette). At Christmas I have a lot more travel flexibility so I can wait a little bit on that.
* I'm currently in the middle of "Gaudy Night, " which is really interesting (though some of the colloquialisms send me to search online - I did not know what being "gated" was, though I should have figured it out - I knew from context it was a punishment for breaking college rules, it turns out it is like being grounded (I guess: gated because the gates are closed on you going off campus). There's also a reference to "debagging" but I got that from context - we called it "pantsing" when I was in school (not that it happened a lot, though people talked about it.) It does both capture the sort of petty politics some educational institutions have going on under the surface, and also some of the issues of having a large group of very different women trying to work together. (Sometimes I think it's worse in single-gender groups, though I don't really have any evidence for this).
I'm also reading "The Woman who Smashed Codes" which is about cryptoanalysis but is also somewhat of a wild story - the first part talks about how Elizebeth Smith Friedman and William Friedman were some of the early, early codebreakers in the US BUT ALSO about how they started out at this bizarre institute run by a larger-than-life character named George Fabyan. (In my mind, when I cast this as a movie, I 100% picture Nick Offerman as Fabyan; I think he could pull it off). Fabyan is one part Teddy Roosevelt, one part P. T. Barnum, and one part....something else. He had bizarre enthusiasms and lots of money and few inhibitions. So he hired people to do things like try to find evidence in Shakespeare's plays that Bacon actually wrote them - and that Bacon slipped in code messages to let people know (as it turns out, there's no evidence of this, at least not in the way Fabyan's workers were looking for), but as we got involved in World War I, the whole institute pivoted towards serving the national interest. (Fabyan, I think, was less deeply interested in the service, but more interested in the fame and acclaim it would win him). The chapter I JUST began made reference to an information-scientist named Shannon and after reading a few sentences I went "OH! The Shannon Index guy!" (I use the Shannon Index in a lot of my ecological research; it's a useful way of getting an estimate of biodiversity of a site based on number of species and how many individuals of each species is present). It's a good book thus far and like I said kind of a wild story - I had NO IDEA Riverbank Laboratories ever existed, despite having lived not that far from Geneva, Illinois (and actually having gone to Geneva once).
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