Strings, Rings, and Other Things

Kim and I just got back from a very pleasant trip to see my family in Nebraska over Christmas, which means that it's time for me to buckle down and work hard for a few days. I've got my mid-tenure review portfolio due on the first day of class: the results at this point are purely for my information, but doing a good job so I can get the best possible feedback is tremendously important. (I should probably prepare for my new classes and submit this research paper, too.) It's fairly stressful.

I'm confident that I can do a good job on it: the stress factor comes mostly from time pressure. As I think I've mentioned before, Kim and I leave next weekend to go on a cruise with Jonathan Coulton and a bunch of other cool geeky people. That's awesome (and we promise to tell you all about it, except that we've opted not to pay exorbitant rates for internet on the boat so you won't hear a peep out of us until it's over), but it does mean that the odds of me getting much work done after this week are low. (I could finish a few things up on the boat, but I'm pretty sure that would detract from the quality of both the cruise and the work.) But I'm really looking forward to the trip despite the stress.

Finally, in the "wanna-do" category, I've been trying to figure out how to get a bit more physical activity in my life. While in Nebraska, I visited my old Karate instructor Tim Snyder. (If it means anything to you, our style, Koburyu, is part of the Uechi Ryu family.) It was great to catch up with him, and as I watched a bit of a class I kept finding myself twitching with the urge to join in. My years practicing karate were one of the few times that I've managed to get real exercise on a regular basis, and it was also one of the first activities that convinced me that I could have real success in the physical side of my life, too. Frustratingly, my knee issues mean that a lot of the activities there would be a Bad Idea™ for the foreseeable future. So I'd like to find some injured-knee-friendly activity that can capture my interest as much as karate did. (My teacher pointed out that he has knee problems himself, and that there may be ways of modifying our kata and other exercises to work around such issues. I may look into that.)

Ok. With all that babble out of my system, maybe I can buckle down to work now. Right after lunch. :)

Kim and I are on a lovely trip to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving, staying with her mother and visiting lots of family on both sides. On our way here, we shared a plane from Detroit with a number of people heading to a family reunion in Baja California. They were all wearing bright teal T-shirts with "Family Reunion: Cabo 2010" on the back and their own name on the hip (one older woman was "Dora Sanchez", for example).

The thing that really struck me, though, was the big text on the front of each shirt, which read "The Dirty Sanchez's". Innocent that I am, I just learned that term from Felecia Day's song "These Are the Things I Adore" in "The Legend of Neil" last year. I wonder who came up with the name for the reunion... and I wonder if Dora and her husband (and the rest of the family) know what it means.

Kim and I had a fun Halloween, though a lot of it came together at the last minute. We started the festivities with a trip to "Halloweekends" at the Cedar Point amusement park in Ohio along with some friends from Alma. Some of the haunted houses there were pretty neat (Club Blood was well done with good atmosphere, and the Toy Factory was alternately creepy and uncomfortably funny). The outdoor "scare zones" weren't so much creepy as they were startling or, um, insulting. (I was followed through part of the "Fright Faire" by a medieval-looking zombie who said that with longer hair I could be one of the Monkees, since I was the whitest thing he'd seen since the moon went behind the clouds.) I'm told Cedar Point has some good roller coasters, too.

The downside of that trip was that we got back mid-afternoon Saturday, and we weren't entirely ready for Halloween yet. We'd done the essentials: Kim had already bought candy, and we carved pumpkins Thursday night:

( Halloween pictures and details behind the cut... )

We were completely taken off guard by the number of trick-or-treaters. Our house is apparently in the very middle of the most popular trick-or-treating spot in the county: kids from the whole region come to our street. We'd been told to expect something like 300-400 kids during the city's official 5:30-7:30 trick-or-treating hours, so Kim bought about 575 pieces of candy to make sure we were safe. We gave them out one at a time, and Kim ran out at 6:38. Seeing the situation, I'd run out to the store a few minutes earlier to resupply; we opened back up at about 6:45, and I'd say we ended up giving candy to about 700 kids by the end of the evening. (We actually gave out more like 775 pieces of candy, but I started doubling up for the last 20-30 minutes when it was clear that the rate of kids was dwindling.)