Tag Archive | baby
April 22, 2012  

Thoughts on Life – 4/22/2012 – A quiet weekend

It has been a quiet weekend, the last quiet one until the semester is over.  I will have grading to do by this time next weekend, and that push won’t end until I have graded all of it.  My dad came up to visit, arriving on Friday and leaving early this morning.  We did not do a lot, as we had been so busy all the way up to that point that we could not really plan much of anything.  Things have been so busy down there that we hope the quiet weekend was not a disappointment to him.  We did get a hold of our realtor and got to go see the house with him.  My parents have been a lot of help to us in the whole house hunting process, that it was nice to get him in there.  Otherwise, we did a bit of shopping, went out to eat a couple of times, and cooked a couple of meals here.

I just finished up another set of online office hours tonight where no students showed up.  Luckily, as we are now in full moving mode, I worked on clearing out some papers and other things that I would not need to move.  As well, I did some organizing around my desk to have everything nicely filed and ready to go.  We have not done a lot of actual packing yet, but we have been doing some clearing out of things, going through clothes, books, and other things to try and start culling material that is just not worth moving.

My wife is also in full design mode, working through ideas of how we are going to decorate and paint the various rooms.  I’m trying to keep up with the practical side of things, getting insurance, utilities, and other necessities together.  We are also in full baby preparation mode.  We went shopping today and started pricing out the things we were going to need to have for the baby.  We also looked at appliances and got a better idea of what we are going to be looking for in that range.  So, it was a nice scouting trip all the way around.

Anyway, just wanted to post a short one today, so there you go.

April 16, 2012  

Thoughts on Life – 4/16/2012 – End of another busy section of life

Well, I know it has been a while, but life just intervenes sometimes.  I just finished another 2-week grading session, as the two-thirds-of-the-way-through assignments came in.  The second set of assignments always goes faster than the first, simply because fewer students are left in class by that point.  It was a moderately successful section of the class overall.  I’m down about a 1/3 to a 1/2 in most of my classes, which is unfortunately normal.  I lost a lot fewer than that over the drop deadline, which was last week.  The reality is that a lot of the F’s that I give out are to students who simply do not do any work and yet do not drop.  I can’t say these exams and projects were any better or worse than usual, but it was a lot of essay grading, as I essentially had four 500+-word essays from each of my students.  It’s times like this that I truly know how much of a grading masochist I am.

Our house buying is proceeding along well.  We are looking to close in early May.  We are at the stage of working with a lender and getting the appraisal done.  It has been a lot of paperwork and a lot of decisions along the way, but we are happy with the way everything has turned out.  We have started planning what we are going to do and when as we move into the house.  We will paint, get new carpets, and put in the major appliances that are missing.  We also are going to do some tree trimming, have insulation blown into the attic, and install solar screens.  With our tax money next year, we are planning to replace all of the wooden siding on the house, as it is the original 1960s siding that was poorly taken care of in general.  We have also started thinking about packing and getting rid of stuff around here.  So, that moves along well.

And, the final piece has fallen into place.  We are having another kid.  My wife is 12 weeks pregnant at this point.  We had our second doctor visit and sonogram today.  It’s too early for the gender yet, but we have begun planning for some of the things we need (which includes the new house, of course).  We are currently working on some gender-neutral plans, but we’ll be able to finalize more once we know if it will be a boy or a girl.

So, that’s been my life over the last month or so.  I hope to get back into regular blogging again, at least until finals get here.