I am actually completely done with all of my grading, at last. Fall term 2006 is officially finished for me, and I got everything submitted a whole 9 hours before the deadline. Now I need to party.
Fortunately, my copy of The Physics of the Buffyverse(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Jennifer Ouellette arrived just now, so I think I’ll get wild with a book.
I come from good lower middle class family with a healthy respect for education. Most of my relatives from the generation prior to mine had rarely finished high school, let alone gone on to college, but they weren’t stupid people, oh, no — we were regularly told that a good education was a path to a better life, and all had a lively interest in the world around them. My parents both liked to read and were creative, alert people, but I will admit that the combination of unschooled intelligence and an omnivorous curiousity unhampered by academic conventions meant that the reading material around the house was eclectic, to say the least. I’ve explained before that I had easy access to lots of weird literature, and I read just about everything I could find.
That’s the prelude so you can understand how I found myself in the uncharacteristic situation I describe below, over 30 years ago when I was but a skinny nerd in high school, and how I could be so stupid as to hurt someone I cared about.
Ah, Christmas morning…with teenagers. Their natural sloth wars with their desire for the Christmas loot, and they compromise by getting up at 10:00 rather than noon—so it means that I get to sleep in and everything is calm.
Although I do confess to now and then missing the little guys pounding on the bedroom door at 5am and jumping up and down and squealing. Maybe if I started giving out better presents, like this:
I’m going to get a cup of coffee and put my feet up for a while — may you all have an equally placid, non-frantic Christmas morning.
Yes! This atheist family committed atrocities in preparation for the holiday. Here’s the gang undermining the true meaning of Christmas by decorating a tree while experiencing a complete absence of any sense of the sacred.
That’s Skatje in the coat and hat (it really isn’t that cold in here, unless it’s the chill from our icy hearts), Alaric adjusting the stand (or, perhaps, bowing to the darkness), and Connlann looking fairly normal, although of course his wicked soul does not appear in a photograph.
That’s not an angel on top; it’s a white Father Christmas figure that I think looks a bit like Gandalf, so it’s OK.
Now look at this: some of our friends sent over Cephalopodmas cookies! I’ve already eaten the one on top (it was Cthulhicious!), and I’ve been trying to prevent the kids from devouring the others. The rest have to be left by the fireplace as an offering to the Old Ones — they will be so thrilled when they get up in the morning and discover they’ve all disappeared, slurped up by the Great Tentacle.*
Many thanks to the Glasruds for indulging our quaint religious beliefs.
Tomorrow we’ll be doing other traditional godless activities: getting up early to open presents around the tree, cooking a feast for friends and families, consuming large quantities of turkey and cranberry sauce and lefse, and just generally having a good time.
Oh, and if you’re interested in some good Christmas music, try these ominous carols. Translating them into a minor key does wonders for them.
*Sacrilege! I just checked the platter, and somebody has consumed many of them. I wonder which one will be eaten last?
Christmas Eve is an excellent time for another edition of the Carnival of the Godless!
In my own strange Christmas Eve tradition, I’m spending this late afternoon sorting flies and setting up Drosophila cultures — I’m not even done with grading and I have to get to work on next semester’s labs.
Are you all as exhausted from the festivities as I am? I partook a little too heavily of the traditional Driving-Long-Distances-In-The-Snow-To-Pick-Up-Returning-Progeny-Whose-Bus-Was-Over-An-Hour-Late part of the celebration, which means my brain is turning over a little slowly this morning. I’m going to sit and sip coffee for a while, and read some Science…expect something on the phosphatized embryos later!
This one you’ve heard of, and maybe more of you subscribe to: the Dec/Jan issue of Seed. In addition to an article on Dark Energy, a review of the Year in Science, stories about Angela Merkel and Stephen Colbert and James Hansen, there’s the infamous feature on us sciencebloggers, and the very first entry in my new column. You’ve got to love a magazine that intersperses its articles with full-page photographs of venomous jellyfish. All they need now is a cephalopod centerfold, and the magazine will be perfect!
The latest Ask a Science Blogger question is one I’ve already answered, so I thought I’d just repost this unpleasant little vignette to answer this question:
What’s a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back?
But first, I have to mention that every scientist must have a nemesis or two, as has been recently documented in the pages of Narbonic.
Thinking about graduate school? Here’s a little story, all true, about my very most unpleasant experiences as a graduate student—and they all revolve around one person. It is a fact that you will find honest-to-god flaming assholes in positions of considerable power in academia.
Time to go get a beer at Drinking Liberally, ’cause the Fall semester of 2006 is all over but for the final exams and the grading and the tears. The last of the written work was turned in today, and now it’s just grading until my eyeballs evulse.
Here is a prime bit of end of term suckage, too: it is mid-December in Minnesota, and it is raining. Raining! If I wanted to live in a place with cool wet winters, I’d move back to Seattle.
