jimsjournal
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Well, my workout chart doesn't look very successful, but I completed that big project at work -- rewriting a course -- so that load is off my back. That's what had trashed my workout schedule... Sunday I was working at home in the morning -- with some interruption as most of Nancy's siblings and families who were in town for the weekend came over for bagels and coffee (and donuts and Nancy's coffee cake and cupcakes) -- in fact, I was even working during part of the time that they were here. I continued working into the afternoon and then packed up my laptop and went to my office (needed the bandwidth for transmitting multi-megabyte files) and worked from mid-afternoon until midnight. Thus, no workout on Sunday. Monday I was in the office working until around six, came home, was thinking about going for a run but I knew I only had a little bit more to do, just a couple of hours, but if I waited until later in the evening I might be too tired to finish, so I booted up the laptop and finished the formatting the last of the hands-on lab exercise instructions and that was it... And those two files were small enough (maybe 250k to 300k) that I sent them off over a phone connection. Of course, that meant no Monday workout.
Tuesday I was planning on a run when I got home from work but Nancy had an evening tennis match so I decided to fix an early dinner and then I'd go for a run later when she went off to play tennis. As I've mentioned recently, she was offered and accepted a teaching position in our district -- changing her one-way commute distance from a bit over 15 miles (of back roads) to about three miles -- and the official acceptance by the School Committee of the Superintendent's hiring recommendations would take place that night so she asked me if I would go to the meeting and watch just that part of it. So I went to the meeting (thinking I would workout when I got home) and, as these things do, it dragged on a bit and they eventually voted to hire the list of proposed teachers, with a couple of the committee members commenting on how impressed they were with the qualifications of the new teachers, especially in the areas of middle school math and high school math and science (Nancy's credentials are quite impressive, two master's degrees and two decades of high tech industry experience, mostly with Link Flight Simulation and IBM -- but some of the others had equally strong backgrounds, one with recent high school physics and algebra experience after thirty years as a senior scientist at the Navy Underwater Warfare College).... and I ended up getting interested in the topics being discussed at the meeting and stayed almost until the end. I got home in time to watch the last five minutes or so on television. Yeah, I'd forgotten that the school meetings are televised on our local cable so I could have followed the whole thing from my living room. Anyway, by that time I was just too tired to workout and instead got into my regular evening ritual of waking Jennifer up and fixing her a lunch and fixing her some scrambled eggs and toast and a fresh pot of coffee and sending her off to her night of stocking shelves in a supermarket.
Our manager took the department out to lunch today -- not a large gathering, there's just seven of us counting our manager: one administrative type and five of us who teach classes and also develop classes -- and one of the group ended up not being able to make it today. We had lunch at the Marina Grille, a restaurant located (as you might expect from the name) at a marina... on Goat Island in Newport Harbor. Goat Island is reached by a long causeway from Newport. [I was about to say "from the mainland" but of course Newport itself is on an island in Narragansett Bay.] It is a long, narrow island with a luxury hotel at one end and some luxury condos at the other -- in between those ends is mostly parking lot over looking a twenty foot drop on the bay side and non-stop marina along the harbor side.... plus a banquet hall, a very upscale grocery catering to the boaters and this restaurant. We ate on their covered outdoor patio, surrounded on two sides by moored vessels -- and I don't mean some cheap two or three hundred thousand dollar boats, these were true luxury yachts, big and white and beautiful, the kinds of boats that have paid crews (and, indeed, a white-clad deckhand was busy polishing the brass fittings and such on one of them), a couple of them large enough to make you wonder about using the word ship instead of boat.
I'm feeling very content tonight. I received a .pdf file (Adobe Acrobat) this afternoon from the folks who were taking my WordPro and FreeLance Graphics files and putting them into the official book building software, etc. The file contains the Instructor Guide that is the result of my work over the past several weeks. Now my partner on this project (who works in North Carolina -- we communicate by phone and email) and I will have to go over it and patch holes and fix errors, etc. -- except he will have to do a lot of this himself because I am now on vacation until next week -- Adam and Leah's wedding will be this weekend -- but I am very impressed with how good it looks. I printed out a copy to work with -- it's 719 pages (Ha! And you think I'm long-winded here!) -- the Student Guide will be the same material, except with the "instructor notes" pages deleted, so fixing this file will automatically mean the Student Guide material will reflect those changes. (I would guess that the Student Guide will run almost five hundred pages.) The lab exercises guide is still being formatted down in Atlanta so I won't get to see that until next Tuesday or Wednesday.
So I came home tonight, got in a workout while Nancy was out playing tennis (yes, she does do that a lot in the summer -- sometimes even twice a day), fixed an easy meal for the two of us (a salad of mixed veggies -- onions, red peppers, fresh green beans I had sauteed and then chilled in a basalmic vinegar dressing, added some chopped tomato, over a bed of red leaf lettuce -- followed by leftover chicken curry from Tuesday). Many nights it's just Nancy and me at dinner time (although I never know when I will suddenly be faced with feeding half a dozen teenagers) because Jennifer is asleep, Lia is off doing things, and this week Sean is at scout camp working on merit badges.
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