(no subject)

[aryanhwy]

Over the weekend one of the post docs in our department, Leigh, and his wife, Jill, both had their birthdays, so to celebrate they invited everyone over on Saturday for a boat ride, pot luck dinner, and outdoor movie. They rented a boat (which held about 18 of us) for two and a half hours and we were motored around the canals of Amsterdam, even out to the IJ for a bit. That was such a lot of fun. You get such a different view of the city from the water. There's all these little decorative bits on bridges that you only see from below, and all the streets look different, not to mention the fact that we ended up in parts of the city I don't think I've even been to on land. And there really isn't anything like being boated around the city with two guys playing guitars and another playing a didgeribone made out of PVC.

For dinner, Leigh and Jill made bean soup and then all the guests brought things. Joel and I made two loaves of bread, from the slow-rising recipe that has to be start a day in advance. The second loaf came out of the oven just before we left, so we wrapped it in a towel and even three hours later when we finally sat down to eat, it was still warm. It got rave reviews. Leigh and Jill's apartment has a garden out back, so they set up a laptop with a beamer and a projection screen, dragged a bunch of benches and chairs out, and we watched The Party. Oh my goodness, that is one of the funniest comedies that I have ever seen! It was a riot. It's the sort of movie that if my circle of friends had discovered in college would probably have become something of a cult classic among us.

Next week it's September already. Summer will be over, we'll have our 2 year anniversary of moving, and classes will be starting again. Joel is the grader for his supervisor's master's course on logic for computer scientists, and I'm the grader (and twice substitute lecturer) for my supervisor's core logic course (a required course for all first year master's students). I'm really looking forward to that. I really thoroughly enjoy the hands on aspects of teaching, and yes, that does include grading. And I'm looking forward to sitting through the course again; Joel and I followed it our first year here, and it's what actually got me off on medieval logic in the first place, and I know that there is quite a bit that I will be able to appreciate much more, with two more years of background material behind me.

I'm relatively satisfied with my summer. I had a couple of projects on my list of things to finish, one of which actually did get finished (and a month in advance! It's not actually due until the beginning of October), a paper which was supposed to be due in May but didn't get finished (but it didn't matter, because enough other people missed that deadline so it got pushed back to December) got finished in July, and my big translation project while not finished yet is almost there. I'm down to just two pages (out of 56) which still have untranslated Latin on them. Again, this was something that I don't really need to have finished until November or so. There were a few things I'd hope to make further progress on than I did, but to make up for it, there are a few things I hadn't been planning on at all which turned up and were productive. I have a very vague and rough outline for the chapters in my dissertation (which helps stave off some of the "oh my goodness, I've only got two more years left!" terror), and nothing whose deadline is coming up too soon which is not near enough to being finished. And I got quite a bit of work on my non-logic projects done this summer, so overall, I'm pleased at how productive I was and I got a rather nice vacation over the last three months. I can always tell if it's been a good summer when I am looking forward to the school year starting again. It's not really the same now that I'm not taking classes myself, but that's one reason why I'm looking forward to being a teaching assistant for that course this fall, because then I do get a bit of the whole school routine going. I think part of the reason why I love the whole structure and rhythm and institute of school so much is that I didn't spend the first 12 years of my schooling in such a system. Even though I'm now entering my 10th year of post high-school schooling, I still get just as excited about the start of the school year as I did the first semester I took courses at the local two-year university, my senior year of high school. There's never really been any doubt about it: Academia really is the life for me.

Comments

[ursula]

I think someone I went to high school with may be starting the master's program in logic in Amsterdam-- if you meet a girl named Nita from Oregon, say hi for me?

Also, hey, I have 2 years left, too! I guess we'll be able to stress about jobs together.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

Cool! If she is coming here for the logic program, I'll definitely be meeting her since she'll be in my class.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I think it turned out that Nita decided not to come here, because she couldn't get funding (I asked my supervisor, who is also in charge of the master's program, about her).

[ursula]

Oh, well. Would've been a neat coincidence.

[shaunacarrick.livejournal.com]

And that is exactly why we like you so much - you and your academic mind work well with the finicky bit of book heraldry extremely well.

Congrats on getting so much done so early!

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

I'll second both points. Congratulations on getting stuff done, and you do make an excellent herald. Thank you for shepherding the Shire's heraldry through and for shepherding me into greater heraldric confidence.

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

It's really nice to hear about someone who had a nice summer. Thanks for sharing.

I really miss going back to school in the fall. I'm tempted sometimes to start another program, but since I'm still paying for my last degree, that's just not possible.