This webcomic was just too sad, and it reminded me of my childhood a little bit. Only it wasn’t my father, but my grandfather. And he’d drive me over to the Eagles Club and tell me to wait there or play on the sidewalk while he had a few drinks.
But he never gave me a couple of dollars to get some pop while I waited. That kid was so lucky.
Sorry about the earlier confusion, but it turns out the interview on Lutheran talk radio this morning was recorded and broadcast in the afternoon. But you can listen to the archive now.
They seemed nice. I hope they didn’t pull a Ray Comfort on me; let me know if the recording has me praising Jesus and professing my love of the Lutheran church.
Also, I’m done with classes for the day. Time to stagger home and vegetate.
Calendars are abstractions I ignore until I actually slam into the events listed in them. My teaching schedule has back-to-back lectures on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Today with that radio interview, I have been talking non-stop for three hours. And on Wednesdays, I have lab immediately after my last class. This isn’t hump day, it’s splat-face-first-into-a-brick-wall day.
One of my students kindly gave me a gift of tea on the first day. I’m going to slump down into an exhausted heap after this is all over, and try to soothe my poor overworked vocal cords with something wet.
Summer “vacation” (yeah, right) is over, and today I go back to the grind. I’m teaching cell biology and cancer biology this term, as well as an independent study course in science writing, and as my calendar shows, it’s going to be a very busy semester.
Or maybe they’ll surprise me & it’ll be an interview with Idris Elba
But as a last weird fling, remember that I’m going to do an interview on Lutheran Talk Radio at 10:30 Central. I have no idea what we’re going to be talking about, other than this book thingie I wrote — you think they might be sympathetic? — so maybe you can tune in to their streaming audio and listen as I get spanked by a crack team of Lutheran theologians. You want to hear that, right?
It’s very strange. Classes start tomorrow, and I’ve got a tough semester ahead of me with both our core cell biology course and an upper level cancer biology course…and I freakin’ know what I’m doing. Syllabi are all laid out, my lectures are all planned, and I’ve got my first assignments loaded into the blunderbuss, ready to be fired out at the classroom. It’s like I’m organized or something, when usually I’d be bouncing off the walls, panicking at all the stuff I have to get done at the last minute. Is this what it’s like to be an old teacher?
So I’m going in to work this morning. I have to fuss over fish, and I do have one planned meeting with my new advisees, but otherwise, I think I’m going to tidy up a student lab, clean up my office (it looks like a library walked in and exploded right now), and sit back with a cup of tea. Weird.
I might get anxious because I feel too relaxed for the day before classes.
At least I’ve got that interview on Christian talk radio tomorrow, right before my first class, to get me jazzed up and wired. I don’t want to be too mellow when I start lecturing.
I’ve been agreeing to interviews right and left lately — go ahead, try me, I am so easy — and I just agreed to appear on a show called Issues, Etc., Wednesday morning at 10:30 Central.
It’s Lutheran Public Radio (I didn’t know there was such a thing!).
The show is subtitled “Christ-Centered Cross-Focused Talk Radio”.
This could be really interesting. You’ll have to tune in; I have no idea what direction the interview could take, and I love the uncertainty.
I’m spending my time indoors with video gear and microscopes, but the students are out on the lake in a pontoon boat.
I think they got a better deal.
This morning at Itasca I’ve set up a photomicrography station — I brought up my nice Wild M3C with a phototube and a meh video camera, so the students can take pictures of the plankton and other stuff they dredge up from the lake out there. So I sent them off to do the fun stuff, while I buckled down to assemble all the gadgets and connect up all the cables and test out the software. I gave myself an hour to get it done, because there’s always something that goes wrong.
Nothing went wrong. Click click click, all the pieces went together and I was done in a minute. I guess now I’m going to have to take a walk or something until the boat gets back.
Whee! The lake is full of monstrous critters! Here’s Chaoborus, or the phantom midge.
How about a mayfly?
Mississippi headwaters
I think gravity is back to normal. You never can tell with all this wildness around me.
A conversation we had: now some of us have been at both ends of this river. Consensus view is that the food is much better at the other end.
And about 50 students. We shall struggle to survive in this wilderness.
Itasca Field Station
Not shown in the photo is the cafeteria to the right. Yes, we shall survive.
