Summer's End 2019

This post is basically a tradition since 2013. Meaning it also ran in 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018. (In 2016 I wasn't teaching.) But to reiterate, the end of August is the true end of the year, no matter what the Gregorian Calendar claims. That's teaching life. Of course, this year I'm a little delayed, because it's not easy to find free time any more.

Turns out, when I'm not with little Alexandra, or doing teaching-related things, I tend to be relaxing by watching online videos, or doing edits and reviews for the websites I contribute to... this blogging site is even lower in priority than trying to catch up in my webcomics. But to answer the big question, I was ready to go back to work, if for no other reason than to get a chance to adjust to this next stage in parenthood.

So, what happened last year? It's taken a month to compile, and even now I'm still filling in the gaps on October 5th. (If I didn't post the intro to end September, I'd have lost the motivation.)

The main thing over the past year has, of course, been raising a daughter. From taking her on the train (Thanksgiving), to planes (March Break), to a boat (summer), she's been well travelled. My reading has consisted of things like "Baby Sign Language" (from November). My home upkeep has involved baby proofing. A major point of stress last June was finding Alexandra a daycare.

It's all good, her smiles are genuine; she's now my desktop background.

Oh, she also had her first swim classes, was invited to her first birthday, and had her nose clogged enough to necessitate turning bathrooms into saunas for a short stint at the end of February. But hey, this post is meant to be about me, so let's hit the usual categories.

WORK RELATED

At the start of last year (again, September), I tried to implement a "math puzzle of the week". By second semester, this had turned into a puzzle of "the month", but at least it still existed. I also had to handle the Student Achievement (Drysdale) awards early on, in addition to the usual dealing with math contests all year. (It involved being a sponsor and doing a runoff vote in November.)

First semester, I was only on a morning schedule, to support my wife and daughter at home. This also helped me to do some MAJOR revisions to the 3M course at the time, hitting a regressions unit early, before periodic functions. Essentially mixing things up a bit at the start so students had to consider the individual relationships. (My other course was data; I did some updates there too.)

Semester two, when I was full time, there weren't enough 3U textbooks for both my classes plus the other one running. So I supplemented with a PDF version, including making individual files of the 3U text questions I was assigning. (I ran into quota issues, because apparently google sites is completely independent of actual storage in the cloud or something.)

We had two consecutive snow days to end Semester One, necessitating the creation of a powerpoint that my MDM students could critique. (I couldn't even get into work on the second day.) I used my paid day off to finish March Break later, so that I could be there (in France) for Alexandra's 9 months day. We also lost one day per semester to a tornado and a massive snow dump respectively.

We did two performances at school, "Seussical" in early March, for which I did the usual line counts along with act comparisons early on, and then I helped with a number of February rehearsals. (I also brought my daughter to the final matinee performance, and she behaved really well.) The second performance, "Almost, Maine" in May, I helped out with as far as the show run (and Cappies), but wasn't involved with rehearsals.

OAME 2019 (the annual math conference) was local to Ottawa this year, and I was part of the registration group. I did get to one session Thurs, two on Friday and two on Saturday. (I also took a bookshelf on a bus.) I'm still the COMA secretary. Since I mentioned it last year, I just checked my Cubic Formula song and it's at 5,643 views... I haven't made time to respond to the few additional comments it's received.

I did another holiday math parody, but let's put that in Hobbies.

UPKEEP RELATED

We had to replace the Furnace in August (last month), after returning to town and finding a big puddle of water in the basement. (It was the AC control board, but there was also a crack.) The big TV has been moved upstairs, I think in late 2018. I managed to shred a bunch of old bills and things to tidy my office in the summer.

The only other housing item of note happened after March Break, when the others were still in France. I moved all the empty boxes under the stairs into the garage, moved my boxes of old binders to underneath the stairs, and moved a chunk of my office (including my old Windows computer) downstairs into the alcove where they had been. Including the large bookcase of anime items from the main room.

This was all part of the baby proofing, the remaining bookcases were bolted to the wall and chemicals got locked away. There really wasn't any time for much else; the cedars outside have officially died, and some spots on the hedges don't look great either, but they're low priority for me.

Me and Anne-Lise have made it out to a few movies when her relatives have been available to look after the little one. Mostly Marvel ones; the other movies were Wednesdays with the little one.

HOBBY RELATED

Much like last year, went to CanCon in 2018 (for less time than prior years) and blogged about it 10 months later. Went to Anime North in 2019 and was on a panel about History of Anime Fandom (also blogged about that trip). This led to be being interviewed on a podcast in August ("Zannen, Canada"), as that event, coupled with my old "Sailor Mercury" interview, makes me reasonably interesting.

Most of my writing this year was for the "Time Travel Nexus" - my "Drawing on Time" column. I wrote reviews for "Bill & Ted Save the Universe", finished my BTTF run (with "Hard Time Served"), did three "Jughead: Time Police" columns... and then 14 columns for "Steins;Gate". (Most covered two episodes. The first stood alone but then the trilogy was one episode. The "episode 25" OAV and Movie were separate columns. Each column averaged about 2,000 words.) This also necessitated doing timecodes for screen captures.

I've switched back from posts there every two weeks to monthly posts again.

HEATHER BRIGHT
Commission from Mouds_art

"Time Untied" had been sitting at around 52,000 words from 2018. It gained another 30,000 words or so, over 25k coming from last November's NaNo. The last time I worked on it was the end of January/start of February. I did get commission character art at Anime North, so it's in my mind. The "Ink & Insights" results had the judges suspect it was a sequel. Speaking of, an old thread on RoyalRoadL came back from the dead, and I still get some links to "Time & Tied" from there.

I participated regularly in the "Comic Tea Party" (formerly of StArt Faire) on Discord Thursday nights, until it ended on May 23rd. It moved to a week-long format, and I haven't carved time out of my schedule for that. Kind of spent so much time reading the new comic of the week that I wasn't keeping up with the others I liked. Hope to get back to discussions though.

I haven't worked on my own "Any ~Qs" webcomic at all. I did manage the usual holiday parody in December, including some art. I wrote a new parody at the end of August to debut in my classes ("Only When We Train"). And I did write a stand-alone story about the characters for the "AlphaworldZ" website in July. I have an idea for a 2019 banner but haven't gotten around to creating it. My run on Tapas concluded at the end of June with 11 subscribers.

On the serial website side, "Chanced Erasures" (Epsilon Story #5) continued from entry #6 through to #14. There was also one image art created for it in January, and a "Behind the Scenes" post at its conclusion. The site then shifted to "Balancing Act", the old Virga story that was 50k+ words. That has required several edits, which started at the end of January and continued through to mid-August, turning it first into a 4-Act, and then a 6-Act story.

A number of other words were added there. In particular, the Trixie-liking-James plot thread was morphed.

On THIS blog, the 500th post occurred ("Off Target"), which involved editing an older offline story to have a more PG-rating. I decided I didn't have time/interest in creating something from scratch.

To have a couple of images for it, I also used my Wacom Tablet for the first time back in August, meaning the first time I went all-digital with nothing "hand drawn". There is also a random R story from years back that's into it's 8th iteration, with more added to it on occasion; I suspect that won't see the light of day but it amuses me.

I completed my OAME 2018 recap in late Sept 2018; my OAME 2019 recap has been transcribed electronically but still needs some formatting and other work. There has also been all of my "Parenting" posts (replacing "Teaching"), some silly "Doki Doki Literature Club" poems I posted to Lotus Prince's videos (as he was playing in February), and for live RP our group got through a session of "Tales from the Loop". (Trek managed one session after.)

I put together two videos, one before my daughter's birthday to celebrate her first year, and one after, to commemorate the birthday itself. Mostly still images with music. And I have a skeleton of a story for my daughter's origin, which I need to flesh out and add images to.

I'm actually somewhat heartened by this section. I didn't think I'd managed to do much at all.

MISCELLANEOUS

Our TV connection seems to be intermittent, it fried some time in January after the "Doctor Who" New Years special and before "Discovery: Season 2" (so I never got to watching the latter). I wonder how cable survives these days, I don't have time for it. I switched to watching the "Daily Show" online, and stopped entirely after being away for the summer.

I was forced by Bell to upgrade to a flip-phone (sim cards are the latest thing, they don't support earlier stuff). Initialized it all before Anime North so that I could keep in contact with my wife. Still rarely use it. (My dad had to upgrade their car phone too.)

My pedometer bracket broke and had to be duct taped. It finally fell off and was lost forever in the airports when we went home for Easter... my parents bought me a new one for my birthday then, so there's barely a day missing in the record. There was a gap in the stars streak but I don't remember when.

During the three weeks in France/Channel Islands for my in-laws 50th wedding anniversary, I was able to catch up on some of my online reading backlog. I also read the "new" Hercule Poirot book "Closed Casket" by Sophie Hannah when offline. And one of my pictures of the Guernsey cow (that I got for my daughter) won their tourism promotion for July, so we had some neat items shipped to us, that was unexpected.

I've bought more yuri, some of which I've had time to read. ("Kase-san" & "Gakuen Polizi" hells yes, "Yuri is my Job" & "After Hours" ok, "Nameless Asterism" & "Bloom into You" not bad, "Citrus" no.) For comics, "Jughead's Time Police" is back, and "Life is Strange" has a continuation. And I attended a Dad power evening workshop in May which I guess goes here rather than in Upkeep?

Also, I cook most of the dinners (do meal planning) at home. Which I guess makes sense since I tend to do the shopping too.

WHERE TO NEXT

I want to post the math stuff from last year which is nearly done but needs TIME to be hammered into the final version of posts. Then I want to get Alexandra's Story finished up. If all that can happen in October, perhaps a return to "Time Untied" for November's NaNo is in order, and I have people wondering if I'll do a math holiday parody for December already. (And will I get the 2019 banner done before 2020?)

All that is going to eat up my free time until January. In particular because I'm dealing with the MAP 4C course, updating material from four years ago, and am remaining full time... I also seem to be part of a cross-curricular lesson study.

If we assume everything comes together for February 2020, and I'm caught up? Who knows. I do hope to actually graph out my stress metres to see if there's patterns I can use going forwards, it's part of the reason I'm still doing those. Not sure if it'll happen.

Honestly, as long as things keep working out on the family side, I think I'll be happy overall. And that's all I think I'm going to say this year. If you have any tips for me, PLEASE let me know. If you have any particular questions about teaching or parenting, I'll see what I can do? Thanks for reading my mental rambling.