<\/a>
<\/a> photo<\/a> credit: brianwallace<\/a><\/small>
\nThree different not-in-Morris people were kind enough to ask today in one form or another if I was dead. To quote one<\/p>\n

\nAll OK? You’ve been soooooo quiet.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Many, many thanks for asking. It’s nice to be missed :-).<\/p>\n

And yes, all the big things are OK, even if some of the details are a little stressful at the moment.<\/p>\n

My wife and son are still amazing people, UMM is still home to some incredibly cool folks at all levels, and institutional corn dogs at the Student Activities Fair remain one of my favorite start-of-the-school-year rituals.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I’m still scrambling with some school stuff like syllabi and planning — I’m seriously crap at almost all of the mechanics of teaching, which makes my career choice unfortunate at times. (At least I like my job, though, which puts me way ahead of lots of folks.)<\/p>\n

Computer Science at UMM is also really swamped because a search failed and we’ve got 3 faculty doing what 5 faculty (actually 6 people, two of which were half time) were doing four months ago. We canceled a couple of things, and moved a few other things around, so I think it will all work out fine, but it’s a challenge.<\/p>\n

And on top of that, it turns out that I have arthritis in my neck that is causing my vertebrae to poke at my spinal cord in ways that express themselves annoyingly in my left arm. I got a steroid shot in my neck last week up in Fergus Falls that was (I think) helping. Unfortunately I pulled an almost-all-nighter night before last doing course prep, and may have undone much of that progress. Damn. It would be useful if I remembered that I’m no longer 18 at key moments… On the neat side, though, I’ve got the MRI images, so I have lots of cool pictures of my spine which I can give to Len Keeler<\/a>‘s physics course on medical imaging. So there will be a bunch of physics students marveling at what a complete mess my back is, and getting college credit for their trouble!<\/p>\n

So in short, everything big is all still fine. Some of the details are a pain, however, and that tends to draw energy from all the “optional” pieces of my life (blogging, Flickr, people who aren’t standing in my office door looking confused or unhappy or just glad to see me again). Hence a fair amount of Twitter, but very little that moves any closer to the paragraph form.<\/p>\n

Sorry, and thanks for asking. Hopefully things will settle down in the next week or two. If you can’t find me in my office, I might be taking a nap on the couch in the computer science lounge.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not dead, just swamped. It might get better. Please?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17,25],"tags":[91,361,359,873,360,257,156,225],"class_list":["post-871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-education","category-family","tag-blogging","tag-computer-science","tag-corn-dogs","tag-family","tag-medical-imaging","tag-students","tag-teaching","tag-umm"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p90sy-e3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":186,"url":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2005\/06\/27\/scientists-create-zombie-dogs\/","url_meta":{"origin":871,"position":0},"title":"Scientists create zombie dogs","author":"Nic McPhee","date":"27 Jun 05","format":false,"excerpt":"Alex just let me know that scientists have created zombie dogs. 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