Thank goodness for Friday. I get to sleep in a bit. Friday's also my day to catch up on all the non-class-related work I need to do.

Gunner's getting big, and he's also getting rowdy. Here's one of the few times that he's sweet:

We had a sudden frost in early January that killed all the ficus and bougainvillea plants. I took this picture in the early morning after the sprinklers went off and covered the grass with a thick layer of ice.

Still teaching, and still exhausted. Nothing much new to report. I'm just chugging along. I thought finishing up my dissertation and defending was hectic, but nowadays I have almost no free time at all. That and the lack of good sleep has made my patience wear thin.

I'm starting to doubt my teaching now. I've started to get those "will this be on the test" questions, which usually means the students are feeling overwhelmed. I'm probably going to try to change things up a bit. Part of it is also my expectations of the students may be too high. As far as I know, they are all non-geology-majors. But I don't want to just dumb things down for them. I think I need to go slower and spend more time explaining the core ideas instead of trying to cover everything in the book.

I am freakin' exhausted! This was the first week of teaching, and even though I had Monday off, I'm still wiped out. It's a combination of creating all my lecture and lab content from scratch, getting up at 5AM for my 7AM class, and having to get up every 3 hours or so at night to let the new puppy outside to pee. Gunner's getting better at holding it, but he still pees in the house. The actual teaching is the easy part.

Fridays are my free day, so I slept in until almost 8. That was nice, but I need to work on my NRC proposal, due at the end of the month. I've got no time to relax.

I'm also getting into a bit of a financial crunch right now. You see, ASU cut me off from my GSRP grant once I graduated, so I haven't seen any GSRP income since the last week of November. I still get my little supplemental checks from Tom's grant, though, but they don't nearly cover two months of bills plus a trip to London. I've been pretty thrifty in January. I haven't withdrawn any money or used my debit card since we got back from London, but my bank account is steadily drying up. I've already asked Kelly to pay the whole electricity bill this month, and I just got notice today that my rent check for this month bounced (I had hoped it would go through before the other bills). I'm expecting a small reimbursement for my trip to Washington DC, but other than that, I don't get paid for teaching until February 2. I just need to scrape by until then.

I'm in Washington DC right now, for postdoc visits. Today I was at the Naval Research Laboratory, and tomorrow I'll be at the Carnegie Institution. I haven't had much time to relax until now, and luckily the hotel has free wireless.

Our new American Bulldog puppy, Gunner, has been such a handful this past week. But he's so cute!

British Natural History Museum:

Sexy malachite! Of course it's from Arizona.

Extinct dodo birds. It's sobering to think that we killed all these fuckers off just for fun.

Cool escalator!


Ah, Bradysaurus... an early reptile that lived about 250 million years ago.

Big Ben, right near Westminster Abbey and Parliament.

Kelly in front of Westminster Abbey. Can you spot her?

Crazy medieval chess set at the British Museum.

The Rosetta Stone at the British Museum

Happy New Year, Everybody! Kelly and I are back from London, and now we have a new family member. There are some pictures on Kelly's blog, and I'll post some later this week.