Veteran's Day

The joys of teaching!  Actually, in China we missed out on most of the random government holidays - so it was a real treat to wake up Thursday and not have to trudge off to school.  Those days of rest are an irreplaceable part of a balanced work life, because sometimes the weekend alone is not enough.

I needed the rest after burning the midnight oil on Monday, when I had to finish my quarter grades.  That was followed up by a failed attempt to construct a homemade conductivity tester on Tuesday morning for a lab - I proved I know nothing about circuits after shorting several bulbs.  Oh well, the kids had fun with hammers....testing if various elements were malleable or brittle.

Thursday afternoon Rachel and I went out for one last round of frisbee golf over at iit - Rachel nearly bopped an army guy in the head, while my errant throw caused an unsuspecting engineer to do a 360 and head back inside for his own safety.  I will use the excuse that we decided not to keep score, thus causing our attention to waver at times.

From there we wandered down to the new development south of 35th street - the former home of high-rise housing projects and current home to a mixed-income new construction development.  This visit was predicated by my attendance at a first-time home buyer class on Tuesday evening, when thoughts of low interest rates and tax incentive programs cast a spell over my more sober judgments.  We toured a 3 bedroom / 3 bath townhouse that reminded us quite a bit of the condo that my parents recently bought in Michigan.  It was not a "ohmygoshwehavetogettothebanktogetpreapprovedandbuythisrightnownownownow" moment, but it was certainly a great value if we wanted to stay in the same part of town.  I am sure this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this topic.

Today is report card pickup - so I will be meeting most parents for the first time.  Given how the lack of progress on their science fair projects affected many of my students' grades, I imagine many of the meetings will not be as pleasant as they could...

-alan