A Short, Blunt, Human Pyramid

The end of the semester and the end of the year always bring up a host of thoughts and reflections. Today, while I proctor my General Biology students' final exam, on a cold, dark December Saturday, I'm remembering that occasion when I was living in Nebraska where I happened to catch Terri Gross interviewing Toni Morrison on "Fresh Air" .

I did eventually read God Help the Child, when dealing with a summer case of COVID that kept me locked up in the back bedroom. And as before, time spent reading Morrison's stories was worthwhile.

I'd love to ask Toni Morrison that question. She was not one to shy away from difficult subjects, but in a lot of ways she didn't have a choice, either. And she still stands out to me as someone who figured out that a powerful voice can have persistent impact over the full span of one's life.

I should listen to that interview again. I have conflicting feelings about what teaching entails. I don't always get to know the full impact of my actions on students. And there are many aspects of teaching that are tedious and unrewarding, that require time and mental energy that could be allocated elsewhere. (but let's just ask, would I really be satisfied by something like bus driving, which is a job that is demanding in completely different ways?)

I was talking with some rowing teammates the other day about the bicycling class I teach every spring, about how it can be an amazing experience for many of the students just to learn how to change a bike tire.

I didn't really know how to change a bike tire, when I was in college. I knew enough to understand that bike tires needed to be kept full of air. I had one particularly embarrassing occasion when I attempted to change out a tube by myself, but then lacked a pump, so I wound up at a bike shop in Somerville, MA where one of the mechanics was less than pleased when the (incorrectly) newly installed tube exploded. That mechanic was ultimately exceptionally generous about helping me get back on the road. But really, how was I supposed to know?

A precursor to that episode was that at some point in high school, my brother was given an opportunity to take a basic bike repair class through REI. I was never given the same opportunity, and I really don't know the reason(s) why not. Perhaps I did not seem to be as much of an aspiring bicyclist as my older brother. Perhaps my parents asked and I declined. Some of the backwardness of how I learned to fix bikes is a part of why I try to teach bike repair skills now.

I don't really want to be riding my bike everywhere from some position about the injustice of it all. So I'm not sure I can motivate myself to consider going back to France again just from the standpoint of being present on the behalf of the global status of women. But I'm still not sure how else I might think about the undertaking, if I were to go and attempt it again. There's a lot about randonneuring that can be very selfish, so if I keep doing it I want to be conscientious about it all.

I feel like I have a lot of things to think over right now, as 2025 comes to a close and I start looking ahead to 2026. Many of them are connected and complicated.

-Do I want to prepare to go back to France yet again, for one more round of the Paris-Brest-Paris in 2027? If so, I'd better plan on some long bike rides in 2026. In the very least annikusrex and I have plans to ride bikes from Albany to Montreal in June, hooray!

-There's a big conference happening this August in Germany, a meeting that only happens every 4 years, of the International Union for the Study of Social Insects. This is a pretty big deal to attend! Can I afford to go, both with regards to time and money? I should start planning for that now, to help keep costs down.

-Another conference opportunity just came up, for a section meeting of the Entomological Society of America, taking place in a neighboring city 45 minutes from here. This conference is a huge opportunity for my research students, but because of budgetary constraints I will likely have to pay out of pocket for it for myself. In the big picture, however, it's more important for me to go to this conference with my students than to do the full suite of annual rowing activities. So I need to prioritize around that. But seeing as I now own Petrichor, I really should just focus on doing my own thing more when it comes to rowing during the on-water season next year. A big step for that has been figuring out how to solo-launch Petrichor. I'm *almost* there.

-I also need to get an application together for partial funding to go to Arizona next July for some ant fieldwork, also bringing research students with me. The most tricky part of the trip is that it's unclear for how long my students will be able to join me in Arizona. But I should be realistic about how much time I need to spend there. At least a month, in and around Tucson this time. There is a lot we can get done this summer.

-But it can't come at the cost of getting other academic work finished and out the door.

Anyway, 2026 is looking really busy, in many good ways. There are also some family things that are going to require some time and attention, mostly related to S's family. Complicated. A lot on my mind.

6 degrees Fahrenheit when I woke up this morning, which is, granted, better than the 2 degrees originally predicted.

It just takes so much energy to breathe during my bike commute, even with a balaclava.

I am thinking it might be nice to upgrade from ski pants to ski bibs for these sorts of temperatures.

And I should probably look into some double-walled ski goggles at some point, too.

The cats have been very snuggly lately. After a whole lot of diplomatic negotiations, they have figured out that Martha gets the leg spaces, and George gets the armpit spaces. While I was Zooming with S last night, Martha crawled into the Leg Cave, and George got into his spot. After the Zoom, however, I needed to get up and wash some dishes, so I had to try and extricate myself from the cats, as one does.



Anyway, this is far more entertaining than talking about all the rest of the grading I'm procrastinating from, or how cold it is (again).

During dinner with a friend the other week, the friend mentioned a new-ish time management self help book called Four Thousand Weeks, where apparently the premise is about thinking about how much time one might have alive on this planet, to then think differently about one's priorities and what one does across that time.

Would you say it's good timing or poor timing to have a topic like this book come up, in the context of several weeks where first a Physics colleague died suddenly (didn't know him very well, but other colleagues and students have very much been affected), then our school's beloved lacrosse coach fell down stairs at home and died, then a colleague with terminal cancer died, too?

I'm really not sure.

But I don't feel like I have much else to report at the moment.

I did convince my rowing teammates to, once again, participate in a contest where we all rowed 6000m on the rowing machine and then ran a 5k, for a range of definitions of "ran." It took me 34 minutes to jog-trot the 5k part, heh, which made me think of several of you because really, this is the one time of year I ever attempt to run a 5k. Apparently that was 2 minutes slower for the run than the last time I participated in the Holiday Hustle, in 2023. My erg time was also slower.

But the running route was lovely, because of the recent snowfall.

Then I came home and tried to fix the garage door's doorknob, which had lost its set screw and came apart right when I was trying to leave to set things up for the rowing event. It was much easier to deal with during daylight hours, at least.

Then groceries and cooking, and now Martha is curled up in my lap, so I suppose I should just try to finish mending this first cycling jersey.

I mostly just need to organize my thoughts about what to tackle next, projects-wise.

I'm so glad to have this view out of the window while I am working. It doesn't photograph well but it gives me something to look at while thinking.



I'm also glad to have the new heating pad in the chair as a cat decoy, because it is helping to keep the cats from constantly crawling all over me all day. Now they only periodically crawl all over.

Cats get themselves into some interesting pretzels sometimes, while napping over the course of the day.



I'm amused by the snow that landed on top of the disco ball especially.



George checking out the snow when I briefly reopened the catio:


The video is more entertaining:


Today I'm back in the office. At least my office also has a window view, although it's limited and not as nice because of being in the building's basement and facing a parking lot. The roads have all been plowed, so we're back to salty winter slop. I need to figure out a better bike chain lube strategy for this winter. When I ride in this stuff, I have to stay diligent about rinsing off my bike after every ride, but that washes the lube off the chain. So maybe it is time to investigate waxing, after all.

People here in Albany, NY have been feverishly checking the weather and school closure lists since yesterday afternoon. When I headed over to rowing practice, my institution hadn't canceled anything, and everything was quiet and clear. Promptly at 8 am, while I was finishing a cup of coffee with teammates at our favorite local coffee hangout, the snow started.

My institution still hadn't called it, so I started to head towards campus. By the time I reached the end of Van Rensselaer Boulevard to turn onto Route 378 by the Albany Rural Cemetery, it was snowing hard enough that I could barely see where I was going (glasses-on *or* glasses-off), and I wasn't relishing the thought of climbing up and then flying down curvy, narrow Schuyler Road while not really being able to see and in increasingly slippery conditions.

So I pulled over and messaged my students to let them know that we'd be pivoting to video instruction. It wasn't even so much the immediate conditions as the thought of how much worse things were likely to get for the eventual trip home.

I'm pretty sure my students are fine with this decision. I'd messaged them yesterday anyway, to tell my commuting students they should use their best judgment about whether or not to come in to campus, and to note that we'd pivot to video if classes were canceled.

And so I'll spend the rest of the day at home, with some Zoom meetings interspersed, playing the Lofi Hip Hop channel and grading student papers while the cats snooze on their heating pads.

This heating pad is a new acquisition, but a little catnip seems to have persuaded George to give it a try.





Cozy AF in here. Dunno why my institution thinks it's a good idea to have students and employees out on the roads today.

...were laundering the shower curtain, and harvesting worm dirt from the worm bin.

This is the first major harvest since I built Worm Bin Bench II. We've been adding and adding stuff to it, and by now it has (had) so much worm dirt in it that it really needed to be harvested. In the past, when harvesting worm dirt out of the old bin, I would bring the bin outside and carry out my work on the back porch steps, in bright sunlight. This bin is a little too big for that sort of thing, and also it's cold out there, so I had to come up with a new method: scooping dirt into a plant tray to sort it out then and there.

I think the hardest part was tracking down a hand trowel to scoop the dirt with. I eventually found one that has a wood handle that was stuck inside a bag of potting soil that was sitting out next to the outdoor compost. The trowel was exceptionally rusty and slimy, but those things didn't really matter for this purpose. I should probably get a nicer trowel for home use one of these days.

The new method worked well.



Well, with one small exception: it attracted the curiosity of the cats.





That, by itself, is fine, except that Martha decided she wanted to see about walking along the top edge of the open lid. That, by itself, also turned out to be fine, if mildly precarious, except for when she went to leap off, and the physics of the situation dictated that the lid came flying down. Thankfully, I anticipated that happening and caught the lid before it smashed into anything.

I gave a bunch of the houseplants all a generous helping of the freshly harvested worm dirt. Hopefully they like it. History suggests they will.

Other than that, I have mostly been grading student papers, or procrastinating from grading. The cats have been helping. Witness:





I suppose it's fine to have a relatively uneventful weekend. That won't make me enjoy grading papers, however.