Pawley pix

Friday was our 5th wedding anniversary. :-) Can I just say? I think living in the same place has been good for us; way better than being 213 miles apart. We had a weekend packed with festivities, including: Ordering take-out sushi and watching the last few episodes of season 1 of Mad Men (I know, we're so two years ago Inviting friends and colleagues over for a dessert party on Saturday, at which we served apple pie, yellow cupcakes, and diet coke chocolate cupcakes (as an attempt to provide dessert for diabetic friends), fruit, and a few savoury items to clear the palate (and our fridge…
We found a new friend at the dog shelter this weekend. I have been "between dogs" since my family's beloved Psyche (our beagle who was attacked by the cougar) died of lymphoma in 2004. Here's Psyche on Christmas 2003 (and me with really really long hair): My husband has never had any pets, and I've been so busy that we've been working up to getting a new friend for a looooong time. We were looking first for living in the same city together, then feeling more stable, then not traveling over the summer. Finally the time seemed right, so we started visiting shelters to find a friend in need…
Okay. I've been back a week now, and am getting myself a little recombobulated, so now it's time to jump back in to blogging. Thanks for your patience while I've been offline. Our trip out west was phenomenal. As I've mentioned, my parents have a cabin north of Vancouver, and it's really the place we try gather -- holidays are nice, but really we all want to go to the cabin. My husband and I decided to drive because then we could visit friends along the way, and then we figured it would make less CO2 than flying to visit all those folks. We started in Indiana, and spent nights in Nebraska…
When I first started to go to conferences, I couldn't see what people saw in them. I didn't know anyone, I thought lots of the sessions were boring, and I found the whole thing overly stressful to deal with. Then I started making some friends who I would see at said conferences, and then started to figure out why people liked them. Since then, I have added an aspect to going to conferences. I'll go hang with my friend-colleagues (some of them having advanced to being full friends :-) ) most of the meals, but once in a while I'll sneak off and have dinner by myself. I did this tonight…
I'm in Amsterdam, we're having a great time, I'm totally jet lagged, and I have decided I love Dutch coffee. Thanks for the advice on things to do - my best decision so far was not biking. Here are some photos; I'll try to update them when we next get some cheaper internet time (20 euros in the hotel! Yeeps!) Tomorrow we leave for Delft and the work begins...
Okay, so I finally updated our family blog with what has been going on behind the scenes here at Chez Nous, and I will share some of it with you, through the power of copy and paste and with only a modicum of overlap. Voila, I present to you my last two weeks (only some of which is work-related)! We begin my update with: what happened two Wednesdays ago, namely that my department head has announced his resignation, effective July 1. I am hoping he has sent out an announcement to all those folks who should find out from him, and not from reading this blog. It has been a very emotional year…
Okay. As mentioned, I've been smacked down. I think I'm so deeply tired that it is going to take weeks to recover. I have to have some tough conversations with people over the next few days, not the least of which with my students, and I lack the energy to do so. But I also did a Good Thing: I went to my dad's retirement party. On the drive there, I just drove. It's about 280 miles from West Lafayette to Madison, takes about 5 hours depending on the traffic in/around Chicago. While I was there, I just sat, mostly. And took some photos. After the party, I continued to sit. I sat…
It has been a horrible week at work. Horrible. Actually, it started in the middle of last week. Suffice it to say I have had many behind-the-door conversations, real sturm und drang, and I find it completely unbloggable. Just no idea where to start. So until I figure that out, let me share the tiniest silver lining of this week: Asparagus from our local CSA guy. Our harvest basket starts next week. And Friday is the last day of class this semester. (If I can make it.)
I've noticed that a certain grimness has entered my colleagues' and my attitude over the last week or so. It's a "there is only (X) days/weeks left, we just have to finish" attitude, similar to what I anticipate marathon runners experience around about 24 miles or so. A just keep going, don't break down now, you are mortgaging your body with lack of sleep and too much effort, but keep going, you only have a little bit left, and then you can sleep kind of thing. Does that sound familiar? Well, to try to combat this attitude in myself, my husband and I took ourselves camping this weekend.…
It's maybe hard for some of us to believe, but it has been 2 years since the Virginia Tech massacre. Day of Remembrance activities in Blacksburg include a candlelight vigil, a memorial run, and an open house in the renovated Norris Hall. It's amazing for me to think about how we are two years on from this event -- in particular, because I interviewed at Virginia Tech the week before, and turned down their offer the morning of the massacre, right before it happened. It was surreal, almost too much to believe. Once I heard the news, I immediately emailed the folks I had met with, terrified of…
Our department turned 5 today. We celebrated it in song. Humorous verse, of course. ;-) This photo was taken by a graduate student in our department. Some of my photos below the fold.
Happiness is boots that makes one feel strengthened and tough when one wears them. Even better is wearing boots called "engineer boots" when one is an engineer. And perhaps even better again is that one buys such boots from here but significantly on sale, and for one's birthday, no less. A photo taken for Isis, among others.
Happiness is time to plant bulbs, even if you plant them indoors, and even if they were already sprouting in their paper bags in the fridge...
Happiness is vegetable seeds arriving, and 70 degree days that remind you you can plant soon. Click to embiggen. Even better is when those seeds are given to you by a farmer friend, so you have way cooler varieties than you would when you just bought them through the seed catalogue. Now, when is that last average frost date again?
Okay, so what on earth *have* I been up to, if not blogging? I'm catching you up (rather like the recitative bits in opera - dry, dull, but advancing the action, rather than arias which are beautiful but don't get you anywhere much) with some RBOCs... As previously mentioned, I had a trip to Washington DC for a symposium on engineering education research. I've uploaded some photos here if you want to see the outcomes of the sticky-note brainstorm (the funnest part of the conference!). I did get a pretty awesome dinner with some attendees: I submitted an IEECI grant, my first PI experience…
So I got back Sunday night from a workshop at Arizona State University on Engineering and Science Ethics Education. The goal of the workshop was to explore the possibilities for blending microethics and macroethics in graduate engineering and science education; we spent 2 days talking about the history of such efforts, what micro and macro ethics might mean in the context of scientific and engineering education and practice, and how we might operationalize these ideas into 4 formats: a 3-credit course, a 9-credit course, a lab-situated set of discussions, and some online formats. The…
Sorry for my blog silence -- I've been swamped in work, and then to top it off, I got sick yesterday and missed a day of work (!). I'm heading to Arizona State University today to go to a workshop on engineering ethics, and to visit my sister-in-law and her family, so the blogging silence is likely to continue on my part. Looks like ScienceWoman will capably hold down the fort - she's a super-poster! Until then, I've been walking around with a camera in my bag for the last 2 weeks with some random photos on it. It includes a photo of my office door, which is decidedly more bestickered…
The Scientiae theme for September is "my summer vacation." My first week of class started today, so perhaps this is a good way to remind myself of what I've done this summer. We had dinner early in May at a friend and colleague's house to acknowledge my husband's decision to step away from his tenure-track job. I went to a co-PI meeting in Washington DC for a grant we are hoping to get in mid-May - learned a lot, networked, and got all jazzed up to get the grant. Unfortunately, at the end of August, we're still waiting to hear. We have made progress in the meantime, however - we have…
I'm back in the Midwest, and after a debilitating migraine yesterday, back in West Lafayette today. I'm digging out of my email and trying to catch up on student work and mail and the new and interesting weed-based disaster area that is my backyard, and rather wishing I was instead back here at The Orchard in Grantchester CAMBS, waiting for divine inspiration like Rupert Brooke or Virginia Woolf. Without the early deaths, of course. I should have something new for you to read tomorrow, though. For now, back to it...
We've been in Davos, Switzerland for almost a week. I've been attending the Research in Engineering Education Symposium, and my husband has been hiking his little feet off. Before the conference, we had a gorgeous day of hiking, including past this meadow. The flowers are spectacular, as are the rest of the mountain views. At the end of this hike was a little restaurant, along with a bunch of cheerful Bavarians who bought us local beer and taught us the prost song. I'll blog about the conference (along with the NWSA conference from mid-June) once I get back to the States. Tomorrow we…