Posting Fail

Damn, I've gone more than ten days without posting. Sorry! I'll try not to let it happen again, but I'm still getting used to doing this regularly.

At the moment I have an excuse: I'm cleaning and purging my apartment pre-packing. It's miserable. I'm fairly satisfied that I've gotten rid of most of my personal belongings that I have no desire to take with me. I just have a box that I've been dumping souvenir-type stuff into since high school that I have to sort through so that it's not over-flowing. There's still a good amount of Kraig's stuff that he has to go through, and lots of jointly-owned junk. Especially excess kitchen equipment. Anyway, all of this is exceptionally boring and I don't particularly feel like remembering it.

In good news, my brother Tom and his fiance Jess are coming over this weekend to help us pack, because they are the awesome-est people EVER! Actually, I find that there are quite a few awesome-est people in my life at the moment, but they are among the awesome-est... We are going to hunker down with pizza and beer (sorry weight watchers) and dust, sort, pack, and label. Hopefully while listening to some sweet-ass tunes.

In other news: I went to a ballet class last night at Studio Ballet of Hudson. It was a great class and it felt really good to be dancing again (and in the studio space that I grew up learning ballet in, no less) but I am WOEFULLY out of shape. I really hope I can find a convenient ballet class in Chicago that's right for me: something laid-back and more technique/placement/organic-focused than the typical classical ballet classes one finds. I'm also thinking about checking out Gyrokenesis. The Pilates is working really well for core strength, but I'm finding it harder and harder not to use my large muscle groups while dancing/living in general.

Serendipity

Up until recently, I've liked to keep all of my various email in separate accounts. Well, now I have five different email addresses and it's just too much for my poor brain to remember what's gone to which inbox, so I'm cleaning house and moving everything to my gmail account. Another impetus for this is that I've finally gotten comfortable using gmail's filter/label/search tools.

I was just starting to go through my old hotmail account and unsubscribe from the various email lists that I no longer read. I used to reserve this account for "junk-like, but requested" email, but I never check it anymore anyway. The first email that I opened to unsubscribe from was my horoscope. I used to read mine daily. I don't know that I took it seriously, but it amused me to see if I could relate its predictions to my life. Here's today's:

"You are juggling lots of things today -- people, projects and more. That can be great, but for now, it's harder than usual for you to deal with things that are complicated. Try to just keep juggling!"

Spot on. Maybe I'll keep getting these?

Quick Post from Today

I have a very upbeat post in the works, but this is a quickie so I'll put it up first. I met my first crackhead today!

Kraig and I were approached on a subway platform by a very persistent crackhead today. At the time it was frightening, annoying, and infuriating, chronologically in that order. At first, I thought we were going to get mugged, then it was just the usual irritating begging for cash, and then he wouldn't go away! I think the thing that upset me most was the invasion of my personal space and the feeling that not only was I in no control of the interaction, but that it could potentially get nasty.

Well, it didn't get nasty. The train arrived, we scuttled onto a different car from where he boarded, and that was the end of it.

The funny thing about the conversation though was that even he, in his drugged out state, was surprised when I said that I did mathematics. Note to the mathematics community: when even crackheads think only antisocial dorks do math, it's time for a PR campaign!

PS- Thank you Dave Chapell for portraying crackheads with such accuracy.

Fingers Crossed

It's been a crazy few days! Kraig and I flew into Chicago on Thursday to apartment hunt and check in with future employers. Note to self: there are advantages of flying ass-early in the morning, to wit, minimal check-in and security lines. Apparently, lots of people like to fly on Thursday evenings around 8pm. Who knew?!

One fairly gross wrap a la airport concession stand later, and Kraig and I were buzzing westward, navigating a new subway system, and flopping unceremoniously into our really cute room at the Hotel Indigo.

On Friday we went out separate ways. Kraig had an interview and I headed north to Evanston for a meeting in the math department. I managed to catch most of an undergrad admissions info session. It's the sort of thing I was totally disinterested in doing while at Tufts, but I'm determined to be better informed this time. I did learn about how the university is organized into different colleges and a little about their degree requirements. Not bad stuff to know.


After that, Kraig and I decided to meet up to have a bite to eat before checking out a place that he'd found listed on craigslist that looked promising. We ended up going to a middle eastern restaurant close to the Loyola stop. The food was great and it seemed like they turned the place into a hooka bar or nightclub in the evenings. We were the only people there at 2pm and lounged around on a group of sofas while eating. We walked around to check out the neighborhood for a few minutes after that, and then checked out the apartment.

It was an underwhelming experience, to say the least. I think I'll go with the description our agent from Chicago Apartment Finders used today, and say that the area was "isolated" and not particularly "walkable." There wasn't any of that city feeling you get around productive shop fronts and lively neighborhoods. The apartment itself had been seriously over-hyped as well. We returned to the hotel room and I did some more poking around on craiglist to see what people were saying about other neighborhoods. What I found wasn't reassuring: the "hip, young adult" areas were either super expensive, or removed from public transportation. I started to get really anxious for the first time about finding a place to live. What if this place was the best we could afford?

Fortunately, we had an appointment with an agent through Chicago Apartment Finders this morning and after freaking us out by saying that our choices would be "limited" based on our criteria, he showed us five different units that all had something going for them. The first place we looked at ended up being our favorite, even though it did not have the one thing we thought was a deal-breaker    a second bathroom. The current tenants were packing up while we were looking around, and it was amazing how much stuff they'd managed to fit into that place! They were moving into a house that they'd just bought, presumably to have more space for their approx. 2 year old son to run around.

It's a perfectly classic Chicago apartment, as far as I can tell. It's the third floor of a three-story building in a cute neighborhood in Edgewater where the landlord lives on the first floor and the second floor is a guest flat. At this point we've applied and are waiting to hear back from the landlord, so I will forgo describing the place in more detail until then. I'm feeling much more optimistic about moving to Chicago now after finding this location and doing lots of successful wandering around tonight.

More about our evening tomorrow (later today at this point), because Kraig just gave me a "look." Gnite!

Drowning in a Sea of Paperwork

Disclaimer: if I were to post this on Twitter, which I wouldn't because a) it's way too long and b) I don't participate in the twitting, I think I would have to append the hash #firstworldproblem. There. You have been warned.

It's been a busy year and I'm exhausted. I feel like I've been dialed up to 11 since New Year's Eve. The very first thing I did in January, after recovering from a fairly significant hangover, was go to the Joint Mathematics Meeting in New Orleans. Seeing all of my various conference friends was fabulous, but the main reason for my going was to try to get a job, which did not make for a relaxing four days.

Fortunately, I got a job offer shortly afterward and, to my considerable relief, by February I was contracted up and knew what post-grad school life had in store for me for the next three years. The relief was immense. Now all I had to do was finish my Ph.D.! Oh... wait...

While a thoroughly unpleasant, emotionally fraught period of my life, finishing my dissertation was really not as bad as I'd expected. Nothing actually went wrong, I steadily progressed towards my goals, and even though I spent a solid 72 hours hunched over my laptop during the days preceding my defense, I successfully defended my dissertation on March 31.

With the worse out of the way and feeling more confident than I had in years, I spent the next few weeks editing my dissertation and submitted it on time in mid-April.

May brought the end of the semester and the usual extended office hours, extra review sessions, and exam grading marathons in the conference room. I also realized that with only two months left before my wedding, I'd better get on that shit!

Anyone who's had a hand in planning a wedding knows how tense and stressful it can become. I think that everyone has a different experience, but I would guess that at some point, everyone reaches a bit of a breaking point. I was determined not to let things get out of control. I'd keep things simple and easy and avoid the "bride mania." Yeah, right. Between teaching during the summer session at Tufts throughout the month of June and keeping track of all of the random crap for the wedding, I didn't have much time to think about how stressed I was getting until the week before the wedding. Everything was done, the last loose ends were being tied up, but I'd been on "GO" for so long that it was impossible to shut off. Sitting around waiting for time to pass so I could just be married already was probably the worst part of it. But time does have this habit of continuing on at a steady, relentless pace (unless you're traveling close to the speed of light, but whatever).

Finally, it was the evening of July 9 and I was married. I did my dance, smiled, and cut the cake. I even had fun, truth be told. Kraig and I spent the next few days opening cards addressed to his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Theriault, saying "good bye, thank you, and we'll see you soon," to lots and lots of family, and packing for our honeymoon. The honeymoon itself was a ton of fun. We spent 10 days in Puerto Rico hiking around San Juan, swimming in the bath-like water of the Caribbean Ocean, and keeping busy with all sorts of touristy activities. We then went up to Montreal for a long weekend to see the International Fireworks Competition.

And then, it was done. We were back to real life.

Now it's August and we're planning our move to Chicago at the end of the month. I've been trying to motivate myself to get some math done, but anxiety about the move keeps on making me get up out of my chair and either clean or eat. Because the wedding and honeymoon were taking up my brain for most of the summer, I've had to hunt through a few month's worth of emails to find the forms I need to fill out and the websites I need to visit to get myself set up to start at Northwestern in September.

Kraig and I are going to Chicago on Thursday to find an apartment. Fortunately for me, Kraig is an internet god and has been taking care of hunting down apartment listings. However, it leaves me with time to kill before I know how much I need to purge my belongings to fit them in our new place. Regardless of how much space we end up having, the old course notes are being returned to nature via the recycling dumpster. The books I have no intention of ever reading again are being donated, as are clothes that I will never wear again. It's a process that's both exhilarating and depressing at the same time.

With all of that going on, I haven't been able to force myself to do work. My plan for today was to head out to Tufts, bury myself in the library, and Get Work Done. That hasn't happened yet, but it's not even noon, so maybe it still will? I find myself strangely nostalgic for those weeks back in April when I was the most productive and focused on a single, well-defined task.

It also strikes me, and forgive me for waxing poetic, that my life has been mimicking the seasons fairly reliably lately: gloomy, cold, and soggy in the Winter months, followed by a burst of new energy and progress in the Spring. Summer was a mad rush of planting, growth, and lethargy    somehow, my lethargy manages to maintain a sense of urgency. How is that possible? I'm hoping that the Fall will follow the same pattern and I'll enjoy a nice, crisp bout of productivity before settling in with a cup of hot cocoa to enjoy a new landscape blanketed in snow and silence.

For the moment, however, I think I'll try a little harder to take advantage of the longer daylight hours.

Let's Try This Again

I never kept a journal when I was a kid. No, I lied. I tried several times to keep a journal, either on my own or as part of a school assignment. I always thought it was cool. It seemed like a good way to get over my semi-adversarial relationship with written words.

Sometimes I would forget to write for a few months and then hide the journal away somewhere so that I would stop feeling guilty about not writing. Other times, I would reread what I'd written, realize how utterly boring it was, and then hide the journal away somewhere so I would stop feeling guilty about how bad of a writer I was. Most of the time, I'd get too busy with other stuff and stop writing, and the journal would get berried under all of the detritus from the rest of my life.

My desire to journal has gradually shifted into a desire to keep a blog. Despite the new medium, I encountered the same problems as before. I used to have one on Livejournal. That ended poorly. Then I started this one and didn't keep up with it. This seems like an ideal time to try again. Since I love organizing stuff, here's a (bulleted!) list of why:

• I just finished my PhD, so maybe I'll have more time to write. Also, I've changed url (it was previously dancingmathgradstudent).

• I also just got married to my beaux, Kraig, of 5+ years. Maybe, 20 years from now, I'll feel like looking back.

• Last but not least, I'm moving to Chicago in about a month. I got a lecturing position at Northwestern, so off I go, chasing the academic dream! I'll be farther away from my friends and family than I've ever been before, and maybe this will be a good way to keep them updated on the day-to-day (or week-to-week...) events of my life.

So here I go, with good intentions and budding optimism. I would, however, like to solicit advise from those of you who are accomplished bloggers and journalers, about how to keep myself writing. Should I set goals? Do I need to pick a theme? Should I worry about being interesting? Is there a way to keep this from morphing into a series of drawn-out Facebook status updates?

What I made for Thanksgiving

22lb Turkey with homemade stuffing.

5lb ranch mashed potatoes. Unfortunately, Newman's ranch dressing doesn't work as well as Hidden Valley for this particular purpose.

Sweet potatoes with marshmallows toasted on top. Not sure of the exact quantity, but it was 8 large yams. To be fair, Kraig did the mashing and seasoning for both sets of potatoes.

Greenbean casserole. 4lb of beans and three cans of cripsy onions and cream of mushroom soup.

Homemade cranberry sauce. This was to die for. 1 bag of fresh cranberries, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 cup water, 2 tbsp orange juice, 1 tbsp each lemon and lime juice. Bring water and sugar to a boil, stir in berries and simmer until appropriately mushy. Mix in juices. This will come out rather tart, so add some more sugar if you like it sweet.

Orange and ginger glazed carrots. Recipe from the NYTimes. Kind of wishing I'd just made the traditional brown sugar glaze, but the fresh grated ginger gave it a nice kick.

Butternut squash soup. Recipe courtesy of Chris Towle. I actually made this a day ahead of time because it is seriously messy and keeps/reheats well. Fortunately, I'm getting more coordinated with the blender and did not end up with orange spatters all over the walls this time.

Apple Cobbler with vanilla ice cream. I'm using the recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, except that the original topping was SO boring, so I added extra cinnamon and some nutmeg. Problem solved :)

Kraig made gravy and I also had canned cranberry sauce and rolls.

We started the turkey at around 10:30 am and I was cooking pretty constantly until everything was ready around 4:30 pm. I spent most of the morning cleaning greenbeans and peeling the potatoes, and then started on the cranberry sauce, which needs to cool to room temperature and then be refrigerated. Things got pretty crazy at the end when we had both sets of potatoes boiling on the stove as well the carrots simmering, the apples cooking, the turkey coming out of the oven, and me trying to start the cobbler topping all at the same time. Conclusion: Kraig and I need a bigger kitchen with two ovens and a larger cooktop.

Everything was really delicious and I have a TON of leftovers :) Success! Now to NOT go shopping today.

Happy New Year!

I just had an interesting exchange with a student that has prompted my rumination on the topic of calculators. In summary, he had thought that it was my own perversity that students aren't allowed to use calculators on their exams. I assured him that it was a department-wide standard, excepting the more advanced classes that use MatLab or the like. He had also mentioned that he had discussed it with his mother, who is also a math teacher.

It makes me wonder where this reliance on calculators really comes from. Admittedly, lots of students have trouble with arithmetic. But I feel like it's because they rely on calculators so much.

Mid-semester Thursday Evening

Dinner is eaten, cats are played with, now time to work on my lecture for tomorrow. Maybe some DVR'ed Olympics if I finish that before falling asleep on my keyboard.

Tomorrow should be a good day: 9:30 appointment at Health Services to hopefully get something to help my face, followed by Roseann's ballet class at Dance Complex, office hour and then teaching at Tufts. Lastly, I'm meeting up with at least one, but hopefully two, of my bffs for shoe shopping and cosmetics hunting.

A food critique: I can only describe the smell of Trader Joe's frozen mixed seafood as "c***-ish," and not in a good way. Scratch that one of the list of dinner short-cuts.

Kraig surprised me with purple tulips today. A+

Fabulous (ultimately geeky) Quiz!!!

If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be Frank Warner's Foundations of Differentiable Manifolds and Lie Groups. I give a clear, detailed, and careful development of the basic facts on manifold theory and Lie Groups. I include differentiable manifolds, tensors and differentiable forms. Lie groups and homogenous spaces, integration on manifolds, and in addition provide a proof of the de Rham theorem via sheaf cohomology theory, and develop the local theory of elliptic operators culminating in a proof of the Hodge theorem. Those interested in any of the diverse areas of mathematics requiring the notion of a differentiable manifold will find me extremely useful. Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test

A few things that are stressing me out right now...

... so I can stop thinking about them because they are right there in front of me:

1) presentation Nov 14/15 that was once two months away and is now (less than!!!!) two weeks away.

2) figuring out the program that makes slides for said presentation.

3) unfinished bathroom.

4) general clutter and upheaval caused by the unfinished bathroom (for a while I couldn't get to my vacuum cleaner because the bathroom sink was in front of that particular closet. The sink has since been pulled far enough away from the closet to get the vacuum out).

5) $$$$$ (always).

6) making hotel and flight reservations for my cousin's wedding in December.

7) planning bf's birthday party Nov 20th. Mostly trying to figure out if it's worth the $$$ to rent the hall for the party, ie will more people show up than will fit in my apartment. Alternately, is it worth it to not have to stress about finishing the bathroom before then? I am leaning towards "yes" on both of these.

8) am I forgetting something that was stressing me out before and has now fallen off my list of things to stress about? Probably, but this list has out-lived its usefulness as a de-stressor, and will now end...

Success

So far this week I've made lentil soup, a meatloaf, and baked macaroni and cheese from scratch.

Caught a random episode (two actually) of Bones tonight and got to see David Boreanaz walking around pants-less in a button up. Pretty sure he was wearing briefs. Hells yeah!

Week 4

Just had a big wave of missing everyone. Wish I could take a month and travel around visiting people. Sigh... Thinking of you, mystery reader.

Sunshine Day!

It's sunny. I'm wearing a pink pleated miniskirt. The world is a happy place again :)

Rain, Rain, Go Away

I just thought of a beautiful analogy. It stems from my growing frustration with the quality of math education in high schools. I've come in contact with a large range of high school, middle school, and elementary school students lately while tutoring at Sylvan, and with every student I meet, I am less impressed. My overall impression is that these students are being taught by people who have barely begun to comprehend real mathematics for themselves.

My analogy: the mathematics that the majority of college graduates learn is comparable to learning to do a paint by number. There is no sophistication, there is no why, there is no reflection.

I don't blame high school students for hating math. I only liked it because it was easy and I liked patterns. They're being taught to fit shaped pegs into the proper holes by people who tell them that the red block goes in the second hole from the left, without mentioning that they have the same number of sides. I have seen so many lightbulbs go on once I explain something from the bottom up.

So for those of you who "don't like math," you don't know math unless you at least have a respect for the ordered beauty of pure logic.

It's also been raining for the past two and a half weeks.

World, world, go away...

I was finally over the flu. I'd spent a week catching up on my work and sleep, and was starting to feel halfway sane. I was on the way to take my first full ballet class since surgery, the paperwork for which I think has finally been straightened out after about a month on the phone with insurance companies.

Then the guy in front of me decides not to be assertive merging into the Concord rotary, stops halfway into an intersection, and I rear-end him while watching incoming traffic. Now I have more confusing paperwork to fill out and mail, and I end up with higher monthly car insurance payments. Like I'm not broke enough already.

Fantabulous. Just the way I wanted to finish off my spring break.

Spring Break!

Hey all,

I am finally on spring break and am very excited/relieved about it. This semester is a bit on the crazy packed side. I'm "taking" 4 classes, teaching a math class, teaching ballet, and, of course, trying to work on my research for my dissertation. When I say that I'm "taking" 4 classes, what I really mean is that I am attending the classes and will be doing a presentation for most of them. I don't do homework anymore, so at least I'm not bogged down with all of that. But the classes themselves take up a decent amount of time. And I do occasionally do reading for them.

I'm not upset to be busy again. It's how I spent the majority of my life up until a few years ago, and there is a part of me that functions best when I am over-scheduled and just have to keep going 24/7. I do like being able to sleep in, play with my cats, and generally chill out every once in a while, though.

I think my saving grace this semester is that I am not doing the spring Dance Prism show. I miss everyone, but I am really glad that I get my weekends to myself. And honestly, I don't like performing, especially ballet. It's stressful and the costumes always make me feel like I need to diet (sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, but on the whole, fuck that shit). My last year of college I really made an effort not to schedule things on the weekends. It gave me some time to myself, but mostly served as time when I knew I was free to do all the random stuff that didn't fit into a busy week. I think I need to make that my policy again; no regularly scheduled weekend activities.

I had my phone interview with the Johns Hopkins CTY program this morning, who I want to teach for this summer. I have no idea if it went well. I think so. They'll be getting back to me in a week or two. I really hope I get a position. I don't even care where at this point. Once I sat down and started planning the enrichment course I realized that I really really want a chance to teach it. I'm being considered to teach a class called "Individually Paced Math Sequence," which is exactly what it sounds like. I think the class basically consists of the students doing their own work while I walk around and answer questions. Not hugely challenging. I get 45 minutes every day to do "enrichment material," which is supposed to be something that they can all manage. I decided to do some very elementary group theory, which really is not as complicated as it sounds. Mostly they will be working with cutout squares, circles and triangles.

I am also going to Bates Dance Festival this summer. If I get hired by CTY, I will be away from home for a straight 6 weeks (3 weeks at wherever CTY sends me and then 3 weeks in Maine at Bates). My cats are going to be pissed. But I am super psyched about going to Bates. I don't care if I have to answer phones or whatever for the rest of the summer, as long as I have those three weeks in heaven.

So yeah, that's my life right now. Oh yeah, hip's doing well. I've been to a few dance classes but mostly I've been running. It's actually surprisingly enjoyable. Up until about two months ago, if someone asked me if I wanted to go running, I would reply, "Only if a bear is chasing me." The fact that I actually like running now is rather embarassing. Ah well, we all change as we get older. I have my first physical therapy appointment today at 4 actually. I really hope that I like the PT and that she doesn't make me do exercises that don't really help with what I care about. I suppose I should defer to someone whose career is fixing people's bodies, but the vast majority of physical therapists I've come in contact with have no idea how to deal with dancers. I have actually uttered the phrase, "No, my ankle is supposed to do that..." during a PT session where I was stretching out my thigh by holding onto my foot. They also don't seem to realize that my legs have to go all the way up/back/to the side. This office is supposed to be good for non-sport athletes (ie gymnasts, dancers). So here's hoping.

Theraband Care

When I googled "theraband care," I failed to find any websites with useful information. As a result of my own experimentation, however, I have found a solution that I would like to share.

I have a light grey theraband that I got in college that is now somewhat grubby and sticky. I tried washing it, thinking that the dirt and stuff on it would make it sticky, but that only made it worse (and did not get rid of the dirt streaks). The solution I found is to rub baby powder into the band - I didn't really have to rub the powder "in," just coat the band with a thin layer. I imagine that talc would work just as well. I get some powder on my hands when I use it now, but for the most part it's back to new. And it smells nice (no more feet smell!).

So there, hope that's useful...

PS- I get my stitches out tomorrow!

Gimp post!

Happy New Year everyone! Sorry I haven't posted for over a month. December was a black hole of busy. Nutcracker performances went off practically without a hitch, despite a plethora of sprained ankles (5 or 6 people, including myself?) and other various injuries. Kraig and I also spent about a week doing the family/friend holiday thing.

Since then, I had a party on New year's eve and surgery on the labral tear in my hip. So far so good: I am up and walking around and generally not in pain (though the band-aids that I keep covering my stitches with itch like hell!). I feel like I must be recovering quickly since my follow-up with the surgeon isn't until next Friday but I am already climbing flights of stairs with relatively little trouble and occasionally finding my leg in positions that I wasn't aware of putting it in. I'm still a little leary of rotating my hip open too far (think sitting cross-legged) but I've managed to rotate my knee open past the point where it hurt pre-surgery, and with no sharp pain. As long as there isn't much for scar tissue, I think I'm good to go.

I am, however, a bit torn about actually going to a PT for recovery. My sensible side knows that of course I have to go to a PT! One does after surgery! But then my thrifty, impulsive side reasons that it probably wouldn't be all that helpful: I havn't lost much muscle in my leg since I was only off of it for a few days, I already know a buttload of strengthening exercises, and I'm very aware of the difference between good pain and bad pain. Plus they are so freaking expensive, even with health insurance. Except for the lady who diagnosed my hip (she's moved to another practice a bit too far away), I have had only mediocre experiences with PT's. I figure that I will discuss this with the surgeon, he will tell me to see a PT, and I will make up my mind based on anything new he can add to my reasoning.

PS- I'd like everyone to give Kraig a big hug next time they see him, because he's been just wonderful helping me through all the post-op stuff. I was so out of it after surgery at the hospital, they didn't even bother talking to me anymore, they just told him all of the post-op instructions.

Whimsy

When I took Holly to the vet a lady there asked me if I'd been in an accident because of my excessive ace bandaging. I've eschewed wrapping my wrist since my ace bandage is too thick for wrists and I think that it is making my thumb hurt. I've decided that my thumb is more important than my wrist (or practically anything, since it's what makes opening doors possible. haha Gabby).


I usually press zero repeatedly until I get a person:


My ankle's doing better and with any luck I won't have trouble doing barre on Wednesday. It doesn't have a choice about dancing on Saturday and Sunday.