Yesterday: A Miscellany
Feb. 5th, 2016 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellow1. My Inner Minstrel amused himself, much of yesterday, by trying to sing "Harper Valley PTA" to the tune of "Ode to Billie Joe". This is... disturbingly do-able.
2. The department has decided to begin putting out a twice-yearly electronic newsletter, and I've been appointed to the committee. (V and W are the others.) We met yesterday to kick around ideas for content and structure, and came up with a fair number. Should be an interesting task. We (probably) need to have it mostly together by early April, to give the higher-ups time to review and (one hopes) approve it.
3. One of the e-books I've been reading on the bus is Raymond F. Jones' The Year When Stardust Fell (1958); it belongs in the same general category as Stirling's Emberverse series, but it's very much a product of the '50s in plotting and style - no wannabe Numenoreans here! I finished it this week; not a bad example of the cozy catastrophe genre, but nothing special. (Huh - for some reason I thought he was D. F. Jones, who wrote the Colossus trilogy; they were rough contemporaries, but not the same person. This Jones is probably best known for This Island Earth (1952), which was made into a film in 1955.)
4. I also had a chat, yesterday, with my Mass Mutual agent. I pointed out some concerns I had with the distribution of funds in my account, with which she agreed, and we worked out a more satisfactory setup. She also suggested I put some of the extra (post-mortgage) funds I have into a Roth IRA. I know nothing about this, but she'll be sending me some information soon - basics and options.
:sigh: It's only the fourth week of the semester, and I'm kind of tired already. We're up to the Greeks in one of my math history classes and to Desargues in the other; in the differential geometry class, we just wrapped up the basics of curve theory, up to the Isoperimetric Inequality, and will start on surface theory on Tuesday. In late February, I have to take a one-day trip to Bloomington for an articulation conference. ("Articulation" refers to the coordination of courses and course content between different schools and colleges in Illinois, to make transferring credits, for example, as straightforward as possible.) The day after that is the annual math contest, so that weekend is pretty much locked down.
I keep wanting to just lie down and get another few hours of sleep....
2. The department has decided to begin putting out a twice-yearly electronic newsletter, and I've been appointed to the committee. (V and W are the others.) We met yesterday to kick around ideas for content and structure, and came up with a fair number. Should be an interesting task. We (probably) need to have it mostly together by early April, to give the higher-ups time to review and (one hopes) approve it.
3. One of the e-books I've been reading on the bus is Raymond F. Jones' The Year When Stardust Fell (1958); it belongs in the same general category as Stirling's Emberverse series, but it's very much a product of the '50s in plotting and style - no wannabe Numenoreans here! I finished it this week; not a bad example of the cozy catastrophe genre, but nothing special. (Huh - for some reason I thought he was D. F. Jones, who wrote the Colossus trilogy; they were rough contemporaries, but not the same person. This Jones is probably best known for This Island Earth (1952), which was made into a film in 1955.)
4. I also had a chat, yesterday, with my Mass Mutual agent. I pointed out some concerns I had with the distribution of funds in my account, with which she agreed, and we worked out a more satisfactory setup. She also suggested I put some of the extra (post-mortgage) funds I have into a Roth IRA. I know nothing about this, but she'll be sending me some information soon - basics and options.
:sigh: It's only the fourth week of the semester, and I'm kind of tired already. We're up to the Greeks in one of my math history classes and to Desargues in the other; in the differential geometry class, we just wrapped up the basics of curve theory, up to the Isoperimetric Inequality, and will start on surface theory on Tuesday. In late February, I have to take a one-day trip to Bloomington for an articulation conference. ("Articulation" refers to the coordination of courses and course content between different schools and colleges in Illinois, to make transferring credits, for example, as straightforward as possible.) The day after that is the annual math contest, so that weekend is pretty much locked down.
I keep wanting to just lie down and get another few hours of sleep....
