I Like Them French Fried Pertaters

I am obviously the weak link in the family! The kids get sick and whatever it does to them, triple the time and intensity for me. Then Jake usually avoids it all together. I would totally be the one tied up and eaten right now if we were all stranded on a desert island and had to survive due to our fortitude, or whatever. Yeah, that doesn't make sense.

I still have to write my math dept. talk for Friday. There's pretty much nothing I want to do less than to give that talk. I had much more positive feelings about my pre-tenure talk this past Monday.

The introducer who introduced me before the talk briefly mentioned the type of work I do and where I graduated, and then mentioned a couple of awards I'd won, and how I work with teachers. And the he closed the introduction by telling the audience that I'm a mom of 2 and a wife. Seriously???

(I'll leave it as an exercise to determine how many dudes are introduced as a father and a husband.)

Somebody asked me to be on his doc student's prelim committee. He did the asking by calling me up at home, on the phone, on my landline, at home, and asking me. He votes on my tenure case next year. I said yes. But I said that I really didn't know anything about his area. I can't remember exactly what this person's research is about but it has something to do with China and language minority students. I don't think it has anything to do with math. To be clear, I don't really know anything about language-minority students in China. But whatever. When you're on a prelim committee you read and judge the student's lit review and see if it's any good.

Except apparently not in this case. The student has since started asking me to meet and telling me I need to produce a question for him to write on. Because apparently the way a prelim committee works in this case is that the members produce questions and then the student has to write like a 10-page paper on each question. But the problem is, I am not in his area. How on earth can I write a competent question about language-minority students in China? As I told the student, I could certainly write a math-related question (not about China, or about language-minority students), but it doesn't seem fair or educative to make the student review a brand-new area of literature outside of his expertise. So I have asked the major professor what the deal is now, twice over the past week, but haven't gotten a response.

Maybe I'd get a better response if I called him up at home.

This morning Milo disappeared for a while after breakfast and came back downstairs fully dressed! All by himself! He was wearing camouflage pants (backwards) that he'd gotten out of the laundry basket, underwear that I think was clean, yesterday's socks, and a fuzzy north woods type of sweatshirt. And a baseball hat. Totally awesome. I didn't say anything about the backwards pants, instead letting him wear them backwards all day long because I didn't want to do anything to put a damper on his obvious joy at having gotten dressed all by himself.