On my way to work today, I unexpectedly got a call from the math secretary. She has NEVER called my personal number, so I was freaked out by that already. But then she starts talking: "Paul? There's this horribly annoying, loud, repetitive beeping coming from your office. It's been going on for the last 15 minutes. I was wondering if I could go ( Read more... )

My last post sounds maybe more pessimistic than I am. I do feel periodically overwhelmed, but in between, I have felt refreshingly on top of things. I applied to a travel grant (I probably won't get it, because every grant has become all the more difficult to get now with the economy, but you never know and regardless it's still something to put in ( Read more... )

It smelled like someone had just heated up clam chowder in the faculty microwave before I went in there to heat up my own lunch today. Unfortunately, my lunch was liver and onions so that room smells pretty repulsive right now.

Maybe this is immature, but today I was looking at the course schedule for next semester and noticed the following funny oddity: The math & stats department is offering a course called Statistical Methods for Undergraduate Research, which has an accompanying laboratory component. That component is abbreviated in the course schedule as STAT METH LAB

I dropped Christian off at the airport this morning. He's heading to Oaxaca as we speak, on his third leg of delayed flights. Speaking of delays, we got to taste the peak of Hartford rush hour this morning, made worse by some rain. We managed to avoid some bad congestion thanks to the HOV lane, but it took me over 2 hours to get to Smith in the end ( Read more... )

This weekend was our second weekend in the past month that was filled with social activities. It was so much this time, that it spilled into Monday ( Read more... )

Yesterday evening was the department potluck at the house of the department chair. We got to meet spouses, and everyone got to meet Christian. We had good conversations with lots of people and I even got a math conversation going with the department's group/number theorist. We brought this squid and tomato sauce with penne dish that I had made ( Read more... )

I went in today to help out with the session for first years so they can know which level of calc and stats to take. In the process, I got to meet all but two of the faculty in the department. Thankfully, I've recovered to a good extent from being sick yesterday.

I went to the new faculty orientation today at Smith. It was a whole day event from 8:30-6, so that meant I had to get up super early to arrive there in time. Consequently I didn't get enough sleep last night and throughout the event I tried to hide my lack of energy and have tons of coffee. Well, it sorta worked into the afternoon when I really ( Read more... )

Went to Smith today. I got keys to my office, reset my login info for payroll (they annoyingly asked for your PIN number, even though it was a combination of letters and numbers, and then disabled your account after too many incorrect logins), and got a parking permit. My office computer was useless since the wired network wasn't functioning and it ( Read more... )