Summary of a few weeks in early January
As you will have noticed if you are reading this, I haven’t posted anything in a while. I was doing most of my posting during breakfast.
However, during break and after Christmas, I started using my breakfast time to read Diana Gabaldon’s latest two books – A Breath of Snow and Ashes and Echo in the Bone. I’d read Breath of Snow and Ashes before, but I had never gotten around to reading Echo in the Bone. I had decided that I’d better read Breath of Snow and Ashes before Echo in the Bone. They are huge books and quite engrossing. Thus, my blog posting fell by the wayside.
Summary of events:
Break was really rejuvenating. I had time to sleep in and read books (aforementioned) a little bit. I also watched some movies, something I hadn’t done since the summer. I missed my chance to see Harry Potter before it left the theaters. Texas Seestor and I were trying to coordinate time to see it and just never managed to do that before it left. Oh well. I’m sure someone will buy it on DVD when it comes out again and I/we can borrow it.
I spent a BIG chunk of break trying to design my Genetics labs and write the lab manual. I’m using some of the lab exercises that I’d done in MN, but I’m trying to use some of the labs that have been done HERE in previous years too so as not to reinvent the whole wheel. I managed to write up the first three weeks of lab exercises before the binder needed to be printed for the students. They’ll get the rest as I finish editing/writing the others. I did look over all of the exercises for the semester very carefully, and I tried to coordinate them/time them with lecture topics. That can be rather challenging, since the info they need for about the 4th week in lab is chapter 19 in the textbook and I had hoped to go through the textbook mostly in chapter order. But I’ve got a plan; now, I’ll see if it works.
The first lab this week was half good and half bad. I had intentionally planned for the first part of lab (1st exercise) to be a “fun” one. And I think that it was. I’m bummed about the second half, but it was one that I’d borrowed from the person who taught it before, and that doesn’t always work very well. I think that they will still learn something from it.
In other news, my mac hard drive began deteriorating those days when I was prepping the lab manual; this was about 1 week prior to the start of classes. It was functioning, but randomly freezing and would require me to do a hard reboot. I was visiting Texas Seestor and family when I tried to reboot it and it wouldn’t reboot properly a couple of times in a row. My iPhoto wouldn’t load either. When I told Texas Seestor and Trainwreck about the issues I’d been having, TS convinced me to make an appointment with the Genius Bar at the Apple store in the nearby mall within the hour. THANK GOODNESS she insisted. It turned out that the hard drive was failing (it had 470+ bad sectors in it). It was working well enough for me to take it home and transfer all of my school files onto my school computer, but I didn’t shut it down for fear that it didn’t reboot. That ended up being a lifesaver, because when I shut it down before taking it into Apple to be repaired, it wouldn’t reboot again.
They would have replaced the drive in the store, but I told them that I’d had spotty performance on my DVD drive (officially called an optical drive) and USB port (one of the two). It got shipped off to the place where they do more intensive repairs. It came back with a new hard drive, optical drive, logic board, and optical cable. All of this was while it was still (just barely) under its 1 year warranty so everything was free. Labor alone would have been $310. Believe me, when I found out I could buy 2 more years of warranty, I jumped on it.
When it came back, we used my external hard drive to put everything back on it. It looks exactly like it did when I did my last back-up a day or two before the diagnosis. Time Machine, the back-up program for macs, is really amazing. Macs are cool. Having a place to go and get personal service without paying out the butt (like the Geek Squad at Best Buy) is worth any extra increase in cost, to me.
I go through all of this as a cautionary tale to back up your hard drive regularly. AND because it impacted my life quite drastically for the past couple of weeks. Working on my school laptop was really annoying – the screen is small, poorly lit, and the resolution is bad. It does what I need for lecturing, but I really don’t like working on it. Making powerpoints on it really wore my eyes out.
Otherwise, only a couple of other things occurred this month of note.
1) I got to see a high school performance of Les Miserables. It was really amazing. The friend of the family who had a role in it actually had a LEAD role and sung almost the entire second half of the show. He was just fantastic! All of it was really amazing. The depth of talent at the school is really phenomenal. Also, I’d never seen Les Mis before; I hadn’t realized that there is absolutely no dialogue – EVERYTHING is sung. Unlike opera, I could understand every word of it; their diction was also amazing.
2) Our school had a retreat right before the start of classes. I got to know another prof better who started this year who is relatively close in age to me (comparatively – she just turned 30 while I am 36, almost 37). Better yet, she is also single AND lives in my town! We are hoping to go out to supper together and/or maybe check out the night life in our town or in Austin. That will take some planning. But I’m excited to have the beginnings of a friendship here in TX. There are some potential people at church too who may become friends, but not much has come of that right now.
Speaking of church, I should probably get a few things done around my apartment before I head off to sing today. It is so easy for my place to fall into disorder; entropy is definitely at work.
Oh, and also thinking of church, with all of this computer mess, I was testing out various programs on my computer yesterday when I got everything reinstalled. In order to check my Flickr Uploader, I uploaded a photo of me that was taken for the church directory. I got a free 8×10 which I gave to Mom and Dad. The pic is on my Flickr account, because, it worked! yay! It is a good photo of me, I think.
I hope things are going well with you! I send a hug and or good thoughts in your direction.
