I had a working meeting with a couple of co-authors for another book we're going to write for NCTM. The first book just came out, and now I'm slated to do two more with different people, and one of them is so nebulous and ill defined and kind of out of my area of expertise anyway that I sort of wonder why I'm writing it. But I have some ideas, and so do my co-authors, and it looks like we're going to get together in late May for a couple of days to try to hammer out an outline. The only problem is that they both live far away so this means travel, again...I don't even want to think about telling Jake. I'm trying to convince my co-authors to fly to my town instead. Since they're very nice people they seem pretty open to that.
The panel that I gave with a couple of other people about how to publish in a particular journal went so well that it looks like we're going to try to write it up into a little article, which is a great idea. I'm psyched about that.
A more senior professor at a different institution chatted with me for a while and started praising my work a lot...this matters only because now I can put him into the category of letter writers. Phew! It looks like this guy will be a good person to get a letter from. Every time somebody says something good about my work I get this feeling like "Oh! Wow, so you don't think I totally suck? Holy cow! I'm going to mentally file you away as a potential letter writer now! This is great!"
My mentor saw another senior person chatting me up and immediately thought of this guy in terms of letter writers too. He was on the same page as me: "Maybe we should have [famous guy] write a letter...but I'm not sure. Do you think he likes your work?" "I don't know," I said, "I'll need to send him a draft first and feel him out. I'm wary." My mentor replied, "Yeah, so am I. Be careful."
Speaking of my mentor, here is the best thing of all. One night we went to a reception for my old grad school institution. So anyway we went and talked to everybody and so forth, and there was this one lady there who had an iPad. So we were playing with it and admiring it, and my mentor, who had had a couple of beers by then, suddenly said "You know, I just got notice that I have $1500 from the secondary project fund that I have to spend by the end of May, and I can't spend it on salary, it has to be equipment. So how about I get us a couple of iPads with that money?" And I said "Uh, YES, that sounds like a GREAT idea!" and then started jumping up and down. How cool would that be?
Later we went to dinner with some other colleagues and one of my old grad school friends, who has 10-year old twins and she kept talking to me about how much better and better and better it gets, which was super awesome to hear. Seriously.
It has taken a decade of attending conferences but now I finally feel like I'm at a point where I feel like I belong. It's kind of hard to explain.
On another night I got to catch up with one of my very best friends from grad school, who still lives in San Diego, as well as my sister, who is the sweetest person ever. So much fun. Even typing this, that I had fun doing these things, leaves me a little guilty because I feel so guilty for being out of town. Jake says that Nora has been asking for me constantly. Being away is such a huge luxury but the pull to get back home is always very strong, like I'm doing something bad by being gone. And so off I go, now, to get on that plane.
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