OK, so apparently my trip to PG was entirely food focused, but in my defence the day time was filled up with work and I had work I had to do in the evenings too, so pretty much my only non-work time was dinner!
Also, as I mentioned previously, the people were super friendly, which made the trip pretty great.
And now I’m four days into my seven days at home before I jet off to Halifax for a conference for four days and then I get a few days of vacay in Ottawa to hang out with Sarah and Dave who I haven’t seen in far too long! Now I just need to make it through three more workdays where I need to accomplished about 27 days worth of work… including writing the presentation I have to give at the conference! Wish me luck!
So, 2019 is more than one quarter of the way done. I’d say “where has the time gone?” but I know exactly where it has gone – it’s gone into the teaching of the way too many courses that I’ve been whining about. Happily, all I have left of that is to mark the final assignment for one course, the final exam for another course, and mark the two final assignments for the third course. So really, I’m practically done!
Which means I can soon turn my sights to doing stuff around the condo that I’ve been itching to do (and which makes up like half of my list of goals for 2019). There is painting and building and installing and organizing on the horizon and it’s going to make me SO HAPPY! Also, if anyone has any tips for painting and building and organizing, I’m all ears!
I am also excited to set up my balcony herb garden again (and I’m sure the kitties will be delighted to have fresh catnip back on the menu). And also I need to clean out the frog tank and re-stock it with new frogs, because all the previous frogs passed away. So if anyone has suggestions for frog names, I’m all ears for that too!
I also want to do something creative – perhaps more sewing classes? Or jewellery making? I really, really want to take a stand up comedy class, but the next offering of the course I want to take starts when I’ll be in Halifax for a conference, so I’ll have to wait until the summer for that one.
And then I guess Scott and I need to figure out what our next trip is going to be1. We’ve been talking about wanting to go to Japan, but haven’t made any concrete plans. Any suggestions (for either a Japan trip or suggestions of other trips we might want to consider), I’m all ears for that too!
Hopefully I will actually get around to blogging about our Scotland trip and our Palm Springs trip before our next trip! [↩]
The elevators in my office building are very, very slow. It’s only a 7 storey building, so I’m not sure why it takes eleventy hours to get from the ground floor to the floor on which my office is located but it does. You often have to wait several minutes for the elevator and it’s super annoying when you just want to get to work – or you just want to leave! The other day, as I walked up to the elevator and the doors were closing, I pressed the button to get the doors to re-open, knowing that if I didn’t it catch it, I would be stuck there waiting for several minutes. Someone from my office was in the elevator, saw me press the button and *pushed* the “close door” button. I mean, the doors were closing, I pushed the button and they started to open again, and she pushed the freaking “close door” button and the doors started to close again! So I pushed the button again, and the doors opened and I got in. And this person does this big exaggerated sigh at me. I was stunned. So I said, “I really didn’t want to have to wait 5 minutes for the elevator to come back.” And she’s like “Well, I just wanted to get going.” Seriously. She didn’t want to be delayed by 12 seconds, so I should have to be delayed for 5 minutes! I figured I won that round, because she actually ended up costing herself more time by not just letting me get in the elevator the first time I pressed the button.
One of the two elevators in my condo is broken, with just a sign telling us “We are waiting for parts to be shipped to us to fix the elevator and we have no idea when they will arrive.” So there’s also a bit of a wait for the elevator when I’m at home. But funnily enough, I’ve not had anyone try to close the door on me. What’s more, I’ve had some variation of this conversation several times since the one elevator broke down:
Me: Thanks for holding the elevator! I can’t believe what a big difference in wait time it makes having just one working elevator.
Other Person: Yeah, it really does. On the plus side, I’ve met so many more of neighbours because it seems like there’s alway someone else in the elevator with you!
“I get to meet more of my neighbours!” is *such* a New West thing to say.
So I wrote the above two parts a few days ago and hadn’t had a chance to post them… and then the elevator situation at work got weirder. Yesterday, the elevators would not come to the floor my office is on. They would go to all the other floors, but not mine. I may have been listening to too much of the SAYER podcast, but I’m pretty sure I have offended the elevators – probably by complaining about how slow they are – and now they are plotting against me! And then today the office admin person sent around an email saying that they were aware of the broken door handle on the first aid room and maintenance had been called to come and fix it. So basically the elevators are out to get me and they’ve sabotaged the first aid room so that when said elevators attack, there will be no way to save me.
Yes. I’ve definitely been listening to too much of the SAYER podcast
It’s mid-March. Which means it is, mercifully, more than half way through the semester for the eighteen billion courses that I’m teaching right now. I mean, I love the classes that I’m teaching – one is statistics, another is data and research management, and a third is program planning & evaluation1 – and my students are awesome. But oh my gawd that is a lot of balls to keep in the air at the same time, along with my regular day job and various other sundry things I do.
Two of the courses run the full semester (one online and one in a weekly night class), but the other one is a half-sized course that runs over two weekends (Friday and half of Saturday one weekend and then three weekends later, half of Saturday and all day Sunday). I taught my first of those weekends on the first weekend of March and it was totally flashback to my MBA, which ran on a similar cadence and occurred in the same venue. And also the feeling of sheer exhaustion.
Right now, every day is go to work, possibly go to the gym or play hockey or teach a class (depending on the day), then spend the night marking assignments/creating assignments/develop course material and activities/making slide decks/reviewing online discussions and responding to students. Unless it’s a Saturday or Sunday, in which case I get to skip the “go to work part”. Every. Single. Day.
But I’m more than halfway there. I’ve completed week 10 of 15 weeks for my two full semester courses and half of my classes for the weekend course. I’ve only marked 6 of 14 assignments/tests, so there’s still a fair bit of work to do on that front, so I guess I’m a bit less than half done on marking and a bit more than half done on teaching.
I did, in fact, have that belated birthday party I talked about having. I decided that since I celebrate Bethmas Eve, Bethmas, and Bething Day, it only makes sense that if I have a party after my actual birthday, it’s Orthodox Bethmas. The party was fantastic, if I do say so myself. I’m so lucky that I have so many wonderful friends and I love it that even though lots of my friends don’t know each other, everyone enjoys chatting and making new friends with my other friends. There’s also some of my friends that only know some of my other friends from having met at my various birthday parties over the years, so they get to catch up – lol! I also discovered that two of my very close friends, each of whom I have known for well over a decade, have never actually met each other! They seem to have just not had their paths cross before – even when they’ve both been able to make it to one of my parties, for example, one of them had come early and the other hadn’t come until later, after the other one had left.
Rather than doing an elaborate house drink for my birthday party, which I often do because I love mixing cocktails, I decided to go with the simple Moscow Mule. This choice may have also been influenced by the fact that I had a bottle of ginger liqueur that I bought in Portland ages ago with the intention of using it to make Moscow Mules but hadn’t. At any rate, they were very popular.
Dr. Dan, and his grad student, Nic, visited for a while. It was great to see them, as always (I only wished I could have spent more time hanging out!). They got to come to my birthday, which was awesome, and Dr. Dan even guest lectured in my class at the JI!
I completely blew my weightlifting personal record (PR) that I set on my birthday out of the water. As you may recall, on my birthday, I back squatted 77.5 kg (171 lbs). By the time that particular program ended two weeks later, I back squatted 85 kg (187 lbs)! I also set PRs for trapbar deadlift (100 kg or 220 lbs!) and what I think are PRs for bench press (42.5 kg or 94 lbs) and barbell overhead press (26 kg or 57 lbs), but I’d have to look back at all my old programs to be sure.
We had a full day planning meeting for the Canadian Evaluation Society BC chapter executive last weekend and I have to say, I’m really lucky to work with such a dedicated and creative group of people. We’ve got lots of exciting plans for this year!
Work is crazy, as always. And that’s probably enough said about that!
On Thursday, my friend Alicia took me to see a performance of Much Ado About Nothing by an all female cast at the Cultch. It was hilarious! I’ve never seen or read Much Ado About Nothing before, so it was fun to get to see it without knowing what was going to happen. All of the actors were brilliant and the venue is so intimate – it’s quite a different experience than seeing places up on a tradition stage in a big theatre. It’s running until Feb 16 – if you can, I highly recommend you go see it!
In nine days, Scott and I head to Palm Springs for week. Given that the forecast for Vancouver for the next two weeks is highs around 0 degrees, I think that the Palm Springs forecast of highs in the teens sound pretty appealing. We are flying Swoop from Abbotsford to Vegas and then driving from there (because cheapness). It will be really nice to get a little bit of break (where by “break” I mean “doing course prep pool side rather than wrapped in blankets in my condo”)
Anyhoo, I guess this has been enough of a break for today – time to get back to my marking!
Hey, remember that time I agreed to teach all of the courses in the universe this semester, in addition to my day job, while saying “this is a terrible idea and I’m going to be so freaking exhausted for the entire four months of this!”? but then also “but they will pay me money and that mortgage doesn’t pay itself!” Well, it turns out that I was right on both of those counts. Since December (when I started working on all of this stuff in earnest), my calendar has been jam packed with course prep, teaching, and marking for three courses:
One course is an online stats course that I’ve been teaching at the Justice Institute since 2011. After having taught it eight times already, I’m pretty happy with the course and only need to make minor tweaks to the course material. The majority of my work for the course is marking assignments – so I put it into my calendar when those are due to make sure that I get through them as quickly as possible.
My second course is also at the Justice Institute – late last year, they asked me if I’d be willing to teach a class on data and research management (using Excel as a tool for managing data and doing some data analysis). This class is on campus – right in my very own town!1 – and it’s a night course – so I actually can teach it despite having a day job. I’m a huge nerd, so this is actually stuff that I really enjoy. Plus, the JI lets sessionals in on the pension plan (which no other school that I teach at does) and I’m down for some extra free money.
And then the opportunity to teach a Program Planning & Evaluation course at UBC over a couple of weekends in March arose. I’ve taught a Program Planning & Evaluation course a few times and while this one I’m teaching in March is shorter (1.5 credits instead of my usual 3 credits) and it’s a different audience (people in leadership roles rather than those earlier in their career), I have all the content I need for the course – I just need to streamline it, create assignments better aligned to the audience and the duration and structure of the course schedule, and devise some learning activities around that content2 – all of which I have underway. The course is at the downtown campus, which is so much more convenient than having to trek out to Point Grey!
Anyhoo, all this to say that this has been me since mid-December and will continue to be me until the about mid-April:
I’m going to also write a quick posting about all the various things that I haven’t posted about in the last month, but I’ll do that as a separate posting because I imagine most people stopped reading this boring posting several paragraphs ago.
So much better than trekking up Burnaby mountain to teach. [↩]
Active learning is always great, but when teaching half and full days as I will be in this course, it’s a necessity – no one wants to hear me lecture for 8 hours! [↩]
Also, I’m super freaking strong, as you can see in this video where I back squatted 77.5 kg (or 171 lbs, for those of you prefer the old timey units of measure) – a new personal record for me – today:
a solid workout at the gym (including the aforementioned back squat PR)
going for a walk on the Quay
catching two new Pokemon that I didn’t have before
perusing a thrift store and finding a skirt with POCKETS! Plus two nice shirts. But mostly POCKETS!
playing with the kitties
a video chat with my mother, sister, brother-in-common-law, niece, and nephew, who were enjoying a birthday cake and birthday wine (except for my niece and nephew, of course) in my honour! They even sang happy birthday to me and I got to virtually blow out the candle2.
Of course, Bethmas celebrations really started yesterday, on Bethmas Eve, as a friend took me out for lunch, then my team at work took me to dinner at Nuba before we went to the Canucks game, which we’d decided to do as a team building event, since several people on my team had never been to a hockey game before.
Bethmas celebrations continue tonight as Scott and I are going out for a nice steak dinner.
I’m contemplating having a belated birthday party at the end of the month. I was going to skip the birthday party this year, mostly because I’m stupid busy with all the classes I’m teaching this semester (in addition to my day job and my many extracurriculars). But it looks like Dr. Dan will be back for a visit, so I’m thinking maybe a party is in order…
I took the day off work because who wants to work on their birthday? Especially if their birthday is on a Friday! [↩]
Apparenlty when my sister and I were kids and our family went to EPCOT Centre there was an exhibit we saw that had a family that virtually celebrated someone’s birthday and there was a hologram cake. I have zero recollection of this – the only thing I remember from that exhibit is the hydroponic lettuce. [↩]
Since knew I was going to be in Ontario for Christmas, we put up the Christmas tree in mid-November to allow me time to enjoy it before I left. But since I was crazy busy up until I left, I haven’t gotten around to blogging about it until now. Though the Christmas tree on its own probably isn’t worth blogging about, as it looks pretty much the same as every other year, except with new ornaments from Hawaii and Scotland. Which I appear not to have taken a photo of before I left. #fail
But then for Scott’s work Christmas party his office went to a ceramics place and painted little ceramic Christmas trees, so now we also have this tree to adorn the condo for the holidays:
And here’s the big tree:
As per usual, Watson enjoys chewing on the branches, and Crick likes to map on the velvet tree skirt. Happily, Watson hasn’t been interested in knocking ornaments out of the tree or trying to eat light bulbs like he has in the past.
To empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
Wikimedia Foundation mission
I use Wikipedia all. the. time. It’s a wealth of information on a huge number of topics and it’s my go-to place to learn the basics on pretty much anything. And it’s clearly a go-to for many people, as it’s one of the top 10 websites in the world! And because it’s completely ad-free, you don’t need to worry that information is being spun, censored, or altered to placate advertisers.
But even for something like Wikipedia that runs primarily with volunteers, there are still costs that need to be covered. Like the cost of servers on which Wikipedia lives, and the cost of software to run it, and legal costs, just to name a few.
And there’s where Wikimedia comes in. It is the nonprofit that supports Wikipedia, as well as other knowledge projects. And the way to ensure that Wikimedia’s work to “give access to knowledge to everyone, for free, forever” succeeds is for those of us can to kick a few dollars their way.
Wikimedia is an American non-profit, so as a Canadian, I can’t get a tax deduction for donating to them, but I think the work they do is important enough that I’m willing to forgo the tax deduction! [↩]
As I’ve mentioned before, my charitable giving “strategy”, well, doesn’t really exist. I typically end up giving to charity when someone I know is doing a fundraiser, like a fun ride or the Ride to Conquer Cancer. Some years I get a lot of asks and end up donating to a variety of charities. But this year, I haven’t seen any asks like that from family and friends. I’m not sure if people have become tired of fun runs or if everyone is just asking on Facebook instead by email and I’ve missed them all. So in the interest of actually doing some giving, I decided to do my own version of the 12 Days of Christmas, featuring one charity per day that I’ll give some money to.
Today I’m starting with the one ask I’ve actually seen from people that I know – specifically, the trainers at my gym. As I have mentioned before, the people at my gym are the best people ever and here’s yet another example. They encourage gym members to donate to the Purpose Society, which is a social services agency located about a block away from the gym. And the trainers have to lift a kilogram for every dollar that is donated. So if we donate $1000, they have to lift 1000 kg! (Not all at once, of course, but enough reps with enough weight so that they’ve listed the total).
The Lower Mainland Purpose Society for Youth and Families is “a community-based multi-service organization that delivers a continuum of programs to children, youth and families.”
Today I turned 
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