It seems like the end of the month is as good a time as any to take a look back to see what’s happened. Especially since this rebirth of the blog happened about a month ago.
The biggest happening of the month was my trip to Vancouver. Big trips like that always loom large, since it kills basically three weeks of the calendar: the week before is spent preparing; you miss the 5 days of actual travel; and the week after is spent catching up.
Actually, I take that back. The biggest happening of the month was certainly the election. I have no more coherent thoughts about that, other than holding out hope that things won’t turn out as badly as they seem like they could be at the moment.
Quick updates on more run-of-the-mill things:
- Reading. I’m still (slowly) working on Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I usually get more reading done when school’s out of session; here’s looking forward to that.
- Writing. Oof…I’ve written lots of cover letters; does that count? I have some writing I’m thinking of revisiting, but all of the regional theory conferences are far away from this year. (Looking at you, Music Theory Southeast in Ft. Myers, Florida.)
- Teaching. As I said last time, the semester is coming to a close, like it or not. I have grand plans to rework next semester’s course, so we’ll see about that once this one is officially in the books.
- Contract work. I don’t think I’ve written about this here (and won’t now either, really), but I’m doing some work for Norton publishing (digital learning things). I sent off another chunk of that today, so we’ll see what they say.
- Cycling. I need to write a real post about cycling, but my November was pathetic: only 38 miles in total. I’m going to chalk part of that up to SMT, part of it up to being busier than usual, and part up to the fact that I don’t have appropriate clothing for cooler weather. (Excuses, I know.)
- Computer things. In addition to the work for Norton, I’ve been working this week on the next issue of MTO, plus some work retrofitting older, mathy articles. I also did a bit of tweaking on this site (new fonts! footnotes!), and have written a fair bit of other nonsense to make my life easier: a minor mode for Emacs1 for editing MTO files, and some random Perl for munging SVG data for Norton.
Looking forward to December, the biggest things coming up are (a) the end of the semester; (b) my birthday2; and (c) Christmas traveling. And with any luck, some more writing here.