My sad and pathetic thanksgiving

I cancelled my Thanksgiving this year — I just have too much work piled up on me right now. So Mary went off to Madison to visit my daughter Skatje today — we had a small bowl of pad thai together for our feast, just before she left — so I’m home alone all weekend. I got all my grading sorted out into six stacks, though, and finished off one of the most difficult ones, so yay.

My dinner tonight was a bowl of rice, and I’m going to celebrate by kicking back with a glass of wine and something on netflix — anyone got any recommendations? It’s my one bit of fun for the weekend, so make it a good one.

Tomorrow: complete two stacks of grading.

Another frantic day

I’m still grading. I have to review my lecture for today. I have meetings scheduled. And then at 3 I’m scurrying out of my office to race down the road to St Cloud to give a lecture at the St Cloud Public Library at 7. Then zoom, straight back home to do some late night prep work for tomorrow.

But it’s a 4 day weekend coming up! Yay! I’m kind of desperately crawling my way forward to just finish up Wednesday.

Speaking in St Cloud

My travel plans are slowing down a bit, fortunately: Skepticon this week, then a break, and then I’ll be speaking right here in central Minnesota at St Cloud State University on 19 November…where, by the way, my oldest son attended college, so I have connections. So come on out to lovely St Cloud two weeks from today!

Oh, and to cap off the semester, it’s Eschaton 2012 in Ottawa. Then the world ends and we all get a nice rest.

Your assistance is needed

I woke up this morning with an awful, miserable head cold: there is a great wobbling blob of snot atop my shoulders today, and there are grisly, bubbly, phlegmy noises coming out of my mouth. It is not good. It is kind of gross.

So I would like you all to pray for me.

Oh, wait, no! That never works! Don’t do that. Instead, there’s only one thing that might give me some psychic assistance: money. Yes, a small pile of money would really help right now.

Only not for me. Send it to Skepticon. Would you believe they got a rude surprise this week? The venue is demanding an unexpected and rather excessive sum of money right away, or they’re going to cancel the whole event. It’s like learning that someone plans to steal Christmas, on top of having a brain that has turned into a flocculent, foamy fluid today.

Skepticon is in urgent need of donations, fast. Those crazy kids…it was suggested that maybe if they charged a nominal admission fee, like $5, that would be enough to cover the shortfall, but noooo…they’re sticking by their principles and insisting that this conference will always be free of charge.

So make a cranky old sludge-brained man mildly less dismal by throwing a few dollars at some idealistic young’uns, OK?

I’m home!

I made it back, scudding ahead of the oncoming hurricane! Actually, I saw no sign of it: everything was calm when I left Tennessee and North Carolina this morning, and all my flights were on time. I know some of the east coast people were seeing flight cancellations, but I think my timing was just right to be well ahead of it all.

I hope it all dribbles away quickly, but otherwise, best of luck to those staring Sandy’s landfall in the face…and better yet, best of preparation.

My day

Let me tell you about my day.

I’ve got a full schedule of labs, classes, and meetings today, and it’s advising week at UMM as well.

Late this afternoon, when my last class lets out, I’m bolting out the door and running for my car, and then in a squeal of burning rubber, racing for the airport. We had our first snow today. I estimate that I’ll arrive in Minneapolis sometime around the tail end of rush hour. I’m cutting it close.*

I’m flying to O’Hare. I arrive at about 10:30pm. My connecting flight to Nashville leaves at 7am. I have no idea what I’m going to do for 8½ hours. Maybe rewrite my talk.

I arrive in Nashville at 8:30am. I’m giving a talk at CSICon at 11:15am.

I’m explaining a difficult and fundamental topic in evolutionary biology: the role of chance. I just noticed that I have to do this in a half hour. I think I will be rewriting big chunks of my talk.

At 11:50am I intend to collapse somewhere.

The good news, though, is that finishing up my obligations early means I get to mostly relax and enjoy the weekend, and I really really need that. Except that I’m also bringing a stack of grading with me, and also have to prep a lecture for Monday (fortunately, the topic for that is regulation of cell division, and I know that stuff inside and out.**)

Anyway, all that just to let you know…posting may be light for the next 30+ hours. You can cope, right? Also, bonus: partying Friday and Saturday night, so maybe I can compensate with mildly inebriated posting (no drunk posting for me, I’m too old for that crap anymore.)

* But have no fear, I won’t compromise on traffic laws. I shall get there safely or not at all!

** Wait, I know everything in this class inside and out — I still suffer in fussing over all the details.

A reminder of my email change

In an effort to prioritize and clean up my flood of incoming email, a while back I announced an important change: I’ve partitioned my email so everything sent to [email protected] (my university email account) is handled on one machine, and general messages are dealt with at [email protected]. My university email account is intended ONLY for work email, so if you send stuff there and your address doesn’t end in “umn.edu” or “hhmi.org” or something similarly specific, it’s going to get shunted off into a slush folder and I’ll deal with it once I’ve managed all the other official stuff that piles up, i.e., probably about never.

If you send it to [email protected], there’s no guarantee I’ll get to it quickly, but at least it doesn’t get immediately drop-kicked into a deep dark pit of neglect first. So, really, if you aren’t one of my high-priority students, or a colleague, or a university or grant administrator, don’t try to contact me at the umn.edu address.

I’m only mentioning this because my umn.edu account’s black hole seems to be getting larger and larger, and I’m becoming increasingly reluctant to look in there and try to rescue any messages. I might never escape.

Hanging out in Texas

Talk among yourselves, everyone. I’m in Austin — I’m actually right in front of the Capitol steps — for the Texas Freethought Convention, after getting in after 1am last night. I just heard Aron Ra shred the religious, and Matt Dillahunty and Richard Dawkins and Sean Faircloth are coming up. It’s good to be in Texas, a phrase I’m surprised to have ever written.

It sounds like the convention is close to being sold out, so you’re too late for the afternoon/evening sessions, but we’re going to be right out her in public all morning.

Oh, look…a picketer!

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A terrible, terrible confession

I’m flying off to the Texas Freethought Convention in Austin tomorrow night. I see on the schedule that I’m delivering the Saturday night keynote, and that I’m in the company of Richard Dawkins and Aron Ra and Matt Dillahunty and Jessica Ahlquist.

My personal schedule lately has been raging chaos with obligations piled on top of responsibilities teetering on a foundation of work, and…

and…

Jeez, I haven’t even had a moment to think about what I’m going to say! In two days I have to give an hour talk that will make it worthwhile to hang about in an auditorium rather than going drinking. I am a bad, bad person.

But I’m really good at throwing a talk together on short notice. So I thought that what I would do is put it out to the Pharyngula commentariat: if you were in Austin on a Saturday night, and you had to listen to me talk, what would you want me to talk about? What subjects in freethought and/or science get you wound up, and would have you either pumping your fist or throwing beer bottles at the speaker (either extreme works)?

Leave suggestions. I’ll make up my mind so I can get the talk assembled on the plane.

Conspiracy Road Trip: UFOs

I haven’t had time to watch this yet, but I apparently appear very briefly in this program. It’s the usual thing — I spend a few hours talking, and it gets edited down to a few seconds.

I’m looking forward to it, because from my perspective I met those people and they were actually rather nice, but their beliefs about aliens ranged from mildly off the mainstream to rabidly weird and ignorant. I’ll be interested to see what emerged from all of the conversations — unfortunately, I’m still en route, sitting in an airport with a 2 hour flight and a 3 hour drive ahead of me, and then a pile of prep work before classes resume tomorrow.

Oh, yeah, and I’m feeling cranky. Probably just as well I’m going to be offline most of the day.