I hope you all had a pleasant holiday—I had the strange experience of having all three kids come back to our house for the weekend. We’d just gotten rid of them all, and here they were, hangin’ about, being normal people, having a quiet couple of days together.

It’s a good thing none of the kids have kids of their own yet, or I’d start feeling all patriarchal, and we can’t have none of that.

Anyway, everything is getting back to normal now.

Did you know that if you decorate your Christmas tree with squids and octopuses and cuttlefish, like ours:

…that on Christmas Eve, you’ll be visited by Santa Squid?

We have our nets and harpoons and great big barrel of formaldehyde waiting by the fireplace, in hopes that the Tentacled One will stop by.

We’re also expecting all three of our kids to be here for Christmas dinner, which will be groovy. Right now, the house is resounding with the traditional sounds of Christmas, the gunfire and zombie growls of Black Ops on the home theater system.

Merry Christmas to all of you, too!

I want a prize. I just submitted the grades for two of my three classes this term, including the big intro biology class with two lecture sections. No one gave me a beer when I mentioned my classes were done…I need one now.

OK, so I have to finish the one last class — but that one had the take-home essay final. I want a reward now, not tomorrow when I finish that pile.

Fine, be that way. I’ll get back to work on the papers, right after I get the driveway and sidewalk cleared (we’re in the middle of a big snowstorm predicted to drop 5″-7″ of snow on us by the morning). But I better get that beer when they’re done, this time.

Last final exam for my intro biology class has just been turned in.

Somebody gimme a beer. Now.

It’s the last day of finals week here at UMM, and lucky me, I have two exams scheduled back-to-back today…so I’m about to go into the classroom and proctor away (the most boring task in all of teaching), and I don’t emerge again until at least 3:30. But then the semester is done!

Except for the grading.

The awful, horrible, daunting stacks of papers that must all be graded before I can live again.

If you don’t see me again, it means the grues got me.

This will be an anxious week. It’s the last week of classes, I have piles of stuff to finish grading and get back to the students, and the students themselves are looking more than a little stressed. The last labs in my development course are falling apart thanks to animal intransigence and the incompetence of shippers. We have two job candidates visiting this week, and I’m on the search committee. And the end of my book writing project is in sight, with just the last little bits of polish and duct tape needed to make it all hang together. As usual, the universe has converged on this one little moment of time to maximize my personal tension.

So expect long periods of silence here, punctuated by brief eruptions of tooth-grindiness and fury. Trolls, lie low if persistence is a goal. Outbreaks of drama in the threads will be met with a combination of neglect and exasperation (oh, so nothing will change there, at least). Goats may spontaneously combust.

I am seriously looking forward to finals week when my tasks will be reduced to administering the last few bits of classes that got off to a bad start, and nothing else. But first I have to make it through this one.

You probably already heard that Christie Wilcox won the $10K blogging scholarship — I helped by plugging her most excellent blog as a worthy entry.

Now she has very nicely returned the favor by sending me a large care package from Hawaii with many tropical delectables. Unfortunately, some of them, like the boxes of chocolates, are not on my diet, so I can’t eat them…but there’s something else I can do, and that is offer them to any of my students who drop by during my office hours today, from 9-10 and 11:30-2. What a deal: bug the prof, get a piece of candy.

And thank you, Christie!

At last, I am safely home after an excessively long and annoying trip back from Skepticon. One of the pleasures of these trips, at least, is meeting ferocious Pharyngulistas who are otherwise just fierce pseudonyms on a page, and who usually turn out to be fun and interesting human beings. Here’s one nice photo of some familiar people:

From left to right, that’s:
Mattir, Tone of Death
cicely, Death’s Imaginary Friend
Reality Enforcer, Spawn of Death
The Floating Cheerful Head of PZ
Blake Stacey
KOPD, Death’s Chia Pet supplier
Jules, Bride of Death
Rey Fox, He who has nothing to do with Death

Now it’s almost noon here, and I’ve got a frantic quantity of work to catch up on, and a whole long evening of administrative duties.

So, yay, my plane arrived safely in Minneapolis last night at 1am, and then we had to drive to Morris for three hours, in the snow. Guess how much sleep I got last night? And now I have to scurry off to teach a class about something or other, I don’t know what. I’ve spent the last few hazy hours getting ready to teach.

You don’t really expect a new post here yet, do you? I haven’t even bothered with breakfast yet.

Later.