I’m grateful that Nova talks problems though with me. I’m pleased that she is finding their feet (well…) at the new swim club. I’m grateful for long phone calls from old friends and for words like ‘benign’.
The work grumpiness from last week has fallen away and I’m feeling quite positive. Possibly I’ll flip back next week. I’m grateful for a wonderful date day with Kat; getting out into nature. I’m extremely pleased my basil is going well and indeed that I have a little plant to look after. I am looking forward to eating it.
The kids are grateful for school discos and the end of term. I’m grateful for a lovely quiet walk back from the disco with Nova. Also for water pistols and their first water fights of the year. Kat is very pleased with a new wetsuit.
I’m grateful for submitting my SHEA documents and for the lovely thoughtful references I got to include.
I’m really enjoying that I’m going into work less (also, that I’m going in at easier times). I’m also very pleased that the timetable for next year has been (broadly) agreed and that I (currently) have a slightly easier time of it.
Some less grateful stuff - I’m stuffing from a certain grumpiness at work. I’m waiting to find out who our new boss will be, and the outlook for the next five or ten years doesn’t look amazing. I’m feeling very overweight. Indeed, since Leo was born I have gained weight at a fast weight than them and Leo is now six.
However, this week I ticked off difficult work, I sent vulnerable emails and I got generous replies. I went climbing and swimming, biking and running. I played new games with the kids. I spent the day in a wonderful library having ideas about next year’s teaching. Elsewhere I came up with ideas for other things. Kat and I have been spring cleaning various things from calendars to pantries. I’ve cried at films and got through at a book that has been on my shelf for years. I finally got my raspberry pi up and running. It’s been a really good week.
I also found £1 in a locker at swimming, so that was lovely. Nova has won some sort of award in school and Leo read to me from a book today in a wonderfully clear way. Kat made me a salad using leaves from our garden. I have arranged to visit a museum with dear friends.
Incredibly in all of this I have been quite grumpy most mornings, and a good number of the afternoons.
]]>Well, Leo was 6 yesterday. It was wonderful. I love you so much son, and I’m so grateful for everything you are and everything you are working hard to be.
My favourite things about you are the way you talk “Excuse me I have an I-dee-ah!”, your laugh, and the way you still admit to wanting to be cuddled to sleep. Love you always.
]]>
I spent a good chunk of today at the NEC for the National Cyber Security Show and, indeed, wandered into the general Security Event, the Fire Safety Event and the Workplace Event as well. In practice they all rather faded into each other. It turned out to be one large event with several different brands attached to it.
Nova had expressed a very clear expectation that I would bring home freebies. In the end she is going to have to make do with a yo-yo, some notebooks and a selection of pens.
In general I found it quite depressing. There were a lot of large stands selling what looked functionally like the same thing: software that monitors security and has AI built into it in some nebulous way. There were occasional interesting things tucked away in the cheaper stalls at the back, but not really enough to justify the effort of updating my lecture slides afterwards.
Helpfully, the NEC is almost exactly the right place for me to stop on the way to my parents’ house. I am actually writing this from there now. I have already put up some pictures and tomorrow I have some cupboards to fix. So I am trying to get into the habit of checking whether there is anything interesting on at the NEC when I am planning a trip home anyway. Opportunist but I think that I would have been disappointed if I’d have made a special trip to the NEC for this one.
I was more tired than I should have been today and ended up needing an extra stop on the motorway. There have been too many late nights recently.
]]>The Q&A one I delivered as a Q&A itself, because otherwise I would have vanished in a puff of hypocrisy. I think that one went better. Partly that is because the format did some of the work for me, and partly because it is a more honest way of talking about teaching. Teaching ideas are usually a bit messier than conference talks pretend.
The event itself was officially called “Education Exchange: Practice, Pedagogy and Futures”. Naomi Winstone gave the keynote on assessment and feedback in the age of AI, there were parallel sessions all day, and a lot of the programme was about the practical end of teaching: assessment design, feedback, AI, accessibility, student confidence, simulation, belonging, and the various ways people are trying to make higher education work a bit better.
There was a fairly good turnout. I think there were close to 100 people at the keynote, and the sessions I went to seemed to have about 20 to 25 people in each room, which is enough to make the conversations feel real without making them unwieldy. On the other hand we have rather a lot more teaching staff than that…
In general, it is much more show-and-tell than academic conference. I do not mean that as criticism. It is full of people who have made an effort with their teaching recently and want to tell to other people about it, and those people are inherently interesting to talk to. Not only that - it means that all the people who are likely to try something new, and who might need a hand from a like minded person in another department, meet each other.
Thanks to the organisers for putting it on.
]]>
I may as well record it here to see if there is much change over the years.
These are the older prescriptions I found in my SelectSpecs account.
| Eye | SPH | CYL | AXIS | Inter. ADD | Near ADD | PD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Right | -0.75 | -0.50 | 80 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 63 |
| Left | -1.50 | -0.50 | 115 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Eye | Horizontal Prism | Base Direction | Vertical Prism | Base Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Right (OD) | NONE | IN | NONE | UP |
| Left (OS) | NONE | IN | NONE | UP |
| Eye | SPH | CYL | AXIS | Inter. ADD | Near ADD | PD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Right | -1.00 | -0.50 | 80 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 63 |
| Left | -1.50 | -0.25 | 107 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Eye | Horizontal Prism | Base Direction | Vertical Prism | Base Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Right (OD) | NONE | IN | NONE | UP |
| Left (OS) | NONE | IN | NONE | UP |
| Eye | SPH | CYL | AXIS | Inter. ADD | Near ADD | PD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Right | -0.50 | -0.25 | 80 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 63 |
| Left | -1.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Eye | Horizontal Prism | Base Direction | Vertical Prism | Base Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Right (OD) | NONE | IN | NONE | UP |
| Left (OS) | NONE | IN | NONE | UP |
This week I’m grateful for:
This is a bit materialistic isn’t it, on the other hand I also think it’s good to like what you have.
I’m grateful for spontaneous swimming trips followed by Pizza Express, I’m grateful for playing peg-based guessing games with Nova and snuggling up with Leo. I’m amazed that Kat and I managed to get through a whole film in one sitting last week. I’m grateful for fun away days with work and being home in time to see the kids. I’m grateful for finally sorting out the accounts and the end of term. I’m extremely pleased with myself that I could fix our automatic blinds with a soldering iron.
]]>Some years ago I bought a notebook for the kitchen:
We started transferring the recipes we used a lot into the notebook (literally cutting them out of books or printing them from websites) along with various other notes for family recipes. You can see Kat’s neat handwriting but causal relationship with amounts next to my unreadable yet precise recordings. We call it the family cookbook.
It’s been both extremely useful¹ use and also wonderful to see on the shelf; it is, after all, all of our favourite foods.
However, we’d reached a point that the cookbook was getting difficult to use and I was constantly flipping through it looking for a nugget that I knew was in there somewhere. Recently I sat down to properly write it up as “Family Cookbook version 2. It’s now organised it into sections with a table of contents, pictures, references, and all of the things that make it a document rather than a collection of notes.
When I printed it out, it ended up about 40 pages long. It’s got lots of space to be covered in more notes, and lots of space to have more things inserted into it and I look forward to making the next version in a year or so. It’s already had Nova’s first experiments with pancakes
⁰ This was itself quite a leveling up - cookbooks are inherently for people who can already do quite a lot of cooking. ¹ I can also use it to lookup the temperatures of the ovens, the weights of various kitchen containers and so on.
]]>I’ve been working too much recently. When I went up to full time at RHUL recently I had a group of students at another university that I didn’t want to abandon and so the last few months have been full of work. That’s NOT entirely true, while there are a few students that turned up and I quite enjoyed working with, I was a bit worried by money, and kept the extra days for a few more months than I probably needed to. It was a poor decision from a health and family perspective. I’m almost out of it now, but it’s been dumb.
I’ve NOT been sleeping well. I go to sleep fine but then I lie awake from 4, 5 am. Cutting out caffeine didn’t help.
My father has quite advanced dementia and, while I have been going up more regularly, I have been too far away to significantly support my mum (and sister) in this care. This weighs on me both in terms of a general guilt, and in terms of all of those unresolved feelings that one has when they have had a difficult relationship with their father.
I’ve gained a lot of weight. 94kg recently. Good odds that the stress and the sleep are contributing factors.
All this is quite negative but generally the negative things are the things that I have to get out.
]]>I’m grateful: