Busy ignoring you

Wow, I can't believe how long it has been since a post. Here's the news.

First, I haven't been posting because this is my vacation. I've been notoriously bad about using my vacation time for myself. Of course when we came home from Rusk, there was never time to stop, something always needed to be done. Then we bought a new house. Then school started up again.

During recent breaks I've worked on my speech therapy software. I did some computer work for the speech clinic at Truman. I've installed new computers for the Math and CS division. I've kept busy; really busy.

It's not that I mind being busy. I love having a project to work on, and I often move from project to project. But this spring I was really burned out. Not using my vacation for vacation had really added up. So when summer came, I was resolved to use some of it for me. I was determined to do what I want to the greatest extent I was able, and to not do what I don't want as much as possible. Last week I managed to become bored, so I feel I've had some success. The timing is good because I'm actually teaching during July, so in a way work will resume.

My summer project has been to learn about investing. My free time is consumed reading books about investing and the markets and finance. I've never been all that interested in any of that stuff, so I was surprised to find much of it fascinating. There've been good math questions (and yes, they are going to show up in my future math classes). I've spent a lot of time reading proxy materials, and annual reports, trying to size up companies and their management. It's surprisingly hard. It's no wonder to me now that most investment portfolios can't match the S&P 500.

I've done a little bit of fun programming. I've decided that Javascript is the unsung hero of computer languages. It's way better than you might think.

Linda continues to go to therapy on Tuesdays. Somehow she is getting a kind of reputation with her current therapists for being a slacker. How these rumors get started I have no idea. She bikes, we go out once a week to walk on campus (about 1/8 mile), she uses the parallel bars at home, she does activities around the house. It's really quite a lot.

Ellie is doing swimming lessons. I think she's starting to be sated though. When the water is cold, she's just as happy going to school as swimming. At the beginning there was hardly any way to get her out of the pool.

For Father's Day, I took Ellie to the pool in town. It just happens that fathers got in free, and I was cool with that. Ellie had been nagging me to go for a while. We swam and then I went to visit with other adults there that I knew. I think that's the rule: if we go swimming, then the adults get to socialize.

I had no idea how much a hour of swimming with 8-year-olds could do. On Wednesday, Ellie had for the first time put her face in the water while swimming. By the end of Sunday under the tutelage of kids, she was swimming 5 feet entirely under water. I was stunned. I should dump her in with kids and leave her alone more often.

Today we went to Iowa to see my new nephew. He was cute. We tried Subway on the trip instead of McDonald's. As usual, the accessibily was about 90% there. Inside, it was great, one of the best restaraunts we've done yet, but there was an inch-and-half lip to get inside the building. No way to do that without real help. Still, we'll probably eat there again anyway.