Talks

I just got back from a conference yesterday evening and my morning project meeting was cancelled, and now my lunch meeting has also been cancelled, which means I get to work from home! This is good because I am still recovering. It was awesomely fun, but I dragged myself down too much by staying up too late, getting up too early, never resting, and then fighting off a virus that's still lingering with me.

Because the conference was only about a 5-hour drive away, we chartered a bus and 21 of us traveled that way. It was so much fun to do it like that. We got a lot of chances to talk and play games and we even took some time on Thursday to do some transcript analysis. We were 4 professors (2 couldn't make it), 3 post docs, and the rest grad students, plus one of the post doc's husband and baby. They're all great and I feel so grateful to have such a vibrant, connected community here.

Now that I'm back I have 4 more speaking invitations than I had a week ago. Two of them are to give colloquia, and I'm excited to do them. One of them is at a university in the pacific northwest close to my family, so I'm thinking of trying to bring the kids and hopefully Jake and making a little trip / reunion out of it. One of them is in North Carolina and that one is exciting precisely because the invitation was issued from a giant in the field who I respect a lot. One of them is to a small invited conference, to act as a discussant on a paper and to lead a working group. That one is in Georgia and I feel compelled to go because the invitation came from another giant in the field, and the people who will attend will probably be all the right people for me to be spending time with. And then this morning I got an invite to give a keynote for the NCTM regional conference in Assilmar, CA in less than a month.

On the surface, sounds pretty impressive, right? A keynote? (Definitely a first for me). But no, it is not actually impressive because the only reason they want me to do it is because Mentor, who was scheduled to do it, had to cancel. So basically they emailed me saying, "Hey, the guy we really wanted can't make it, and your name came up as a good replacement." Uh...thanks? I'm not sure what to think about that. Jake would probably object to me taking another trip so soon. I'm not sure whether to do it or not. If it were closer I'd probably just do it, but it takes practically a day to travel out there anyway, which is tough for a 2-3 day trip. Meh.

The kids appeared to have had a great time at the indoor water park while I was gone. They have been telling me about all of the slides they went down, the colors of the slides, which ones twisted and turned, which ones were dark inside, and so forth. Jake said everybody had a nice time. It's good to be back with the kids and back with Jake. On the bus the grad students asked me about work/life balance and everything about that, for me, kept coming back to Jake and how solid he is and how that makes everything I do in my work possible. (Will he be solid enough to agree to let me go out to CA in 3.5 weeks? Time will tell...)