We’re doing another fundraiser! Don’t panic, like the last one, this will be fairly unobtrusive and you can ignore it altogether, but if you like us, please do drop a few dollars in the tip jar.

We are obviously going to have a Halloween theme, with scary stories and a Halloween-themed game. Check out our fundraising page for the details!

The events have already begun. We’re gathering Fall- and Halloween-themed photos at Affinity, and reader submissions are requested. You’ll be able to view all the photos in our fundraiser in the gallery. Send in photos of the Fall colors, of your kids in their costumes, of spiders, whatever makes you think of this time of year.

I stepped away from my computer for just a few minutes, went a few paces outside my door, and got blasted by the actinic rays of the sun, my lungs were scoured by a breath of fresh air, and then I went blind by these glaringly bright trees everywhere.

Don’t worry, I fled back inside and am back in my safe, dim room reading electronic submissions from students with the brightness of the monitor turned down, preciousesss. The lightses are too brightses, they is.

On a busy day with lots of intermittent distractions, I have to admire Le Guin’s writing schedule.

The thing about the teaching day is that it’s broken up into short blocks sprinkled throughout the day, so blocks of time in which you build up so momentum don’t happen — you get short intervals which you have to spend getting ready for the next one hour chunk of something completely different. It could be better, if we had something like a 4 hour block of teaching, and a 4 hour block of research, but nope, everything is interleaved and we’re trying to mesh with every other faculty member and student needs.

Maybe someday, if I live long enough to retire. Except I notice Le Guin doesn’t include much spidering in her schedule, so there’d have to be a few differences.

Every semester has a worst day of the week, and for me this term it’s the dreaded Thursday: lab, my writing class, committee meetings, sometimes a senior seminar, and as always grading. Lab this time around demands a 2 hour prep ahead of time, as well.

I kind of like Mondays this term. I’ve recovered over the weekend, I’ve just got one big cell bio lecture, and labs don’t start for me until Tuesday. I can plunge into a Monday still fresh and optimistic, but I’m afraid that has totally worn off by Thursday.

Oh hey, I’ve also got to tend to the fly crop and the spider colony today. I hope you all appreciated the fly I sent off to Utah yesterday. I just told it to go west and find the biggest shithead you can smell, land on it, and teabag it for the cameras. The spiders are on the way to lay eggs in his ears, I hope the timing is good so they hatch out on election day.

Hey! Attention, consumers! I need to give you Important Informations!

I used to be like you, tired, worn out, full of aches and pains. It used to be a regular feature of my life that one joint or the other would flare up and start misbehaving. I’d injure myself rolling over in bed. I’d plan my summers around my annual knee eruption, which I could do nothing about but suffer. I’d think, well, this is just life, this is what getting old feels like, it’s just going to get worse and worse until one day I shatter my spine by breathing, and then it’ll be over.

Last spring, though, I had a routine check up with my doctor, and he mentioned casually that, you know, a lot of Minnesotans, we of the Northern climes, have vitamin D deficiencies — the vitamin you can synthesize with sunlight — because while we do have plenty of sunshine, we tend to huddle indoors all winter long to avoid freezing to death, and some of us have jobs that are performed under fluorescent lights even in the summer. I think he may have noticed my pasty-pale complexion and had reason to suspect I was one of those subterranean creatures who shun the light and live like mushrooms.

So I’ve been taking vitamin D supplements every day, and I just want to say…I think it worked. This has been my most pain-free summer in years, and I haven’t had a single knee or ankle or other random joint explode on me even once! It’s a miracle!

Anyway, just drop my name or use promo code…oh, wait, I don’t have a promotional deal with Big Vitamin, so never mind. These things are fairly cheap and seem to have made a big difference for me^*.

It’s also given me exuberant hair growth and a minor derangement of some sort, but that’s a small price to pay.

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^*Possible confounding variable: I did a lot of summer research outdoors, so a fair bit of walking and far more sun than usual. That might have helped.

OK, also, major dietary change. My wife and I have thoroughly embraced the Mediterranean diet, so a bit of keto (but not over the top), lots of fish and olive oil and green vegetables and eggs. Possible slight contribution there.

Yeah, and I’ve lost 25 pounds or so since March. No way that could have done anything, right?

Oh, and I’ve been avoiding filthy, disease-ridden humans for half a year. Nah, that couldn’t possibly have any health effects.

It’s the little bottle of vitamins, yeah, that’s the ticket! But seriously, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’d been running a vitamin D deficiency for several years, so it’s probably a good idea to have corrected that.