Monthly Archives: August 2010

A Reason Hubby’s Plan to Go to Med School

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isn’t totally freaking me out comes from Discriminations.

Assume the life expectancy numbers are correct. (They’re best estimates, and may be understated.) Six years added to a 40-year working life represent a 15 percent increase, the equivalent of nearly two extra months of work a year. That’s a lot of economic potential, especially when you multiply it by 79 million baby boomers.

If we don’t retire as early as 65 (or perhaps ever), then the MD makes sense.

If we need to retire at the age our fathers did, we are SOL.

Grandfather’s Story Leads to Mass Grave

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CNN has the story which caught my attention.

“This is a murder mystery from 178 years ago, and it’s finally coming to the light of day,” Frank Watson said.

The brothers first heard about Duffy’s Cut from their grandfather, a railroad worker, who told the ghost story to his family every Thanksgiving. According to local legend, memorialized in a file kept by the Pennsylvania Railroad, a man walking home from a tavern reported seeing blue and green ghosts dancing in the mist on a warm September night in 1909.

“I saw with my own eyes, the ghosts of the Irishmen who died with the cholera a month ago, a-dancing around the big trench where they were buried; it’s true, mister, it was awful,” the documents quote the unnamed man as saying. “Why, they looked as if they were a kind of green and blue fire and they were a-hopping and bobbing on their graves… I had heard the Irishmen were haunting the place because they were buried without the benefit of clergy.”

When Frank inherited the file of his grandfather’s old railroad papers, the brothers began to believe the ghost stories were real. They suspected that the files contained clues to the location of a mass grave.

It seems like they are taking it a bit too far. One skeleton looks like it might have been shot? What about the other 56?

But it sounds interesting, nevertheless.

World’s First Feast

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Discovery has an article that says that the first proof of a feast took place in Israel 12,000 years ago and featured 71 tortoises and three aurochs (cow ancestors). Apparently it was celebrated to lay a female shaman to rest.

According to the study, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the grave consisted of an oval-shaped basin that was intentionally cut into the cave’s floor.

“After the oval was excavated, the sides and bottom of the floor were lined with stone slabs lined and plastered with clay brought into the cave from outside,” said Munro.

Dielli

Why did the Soviet Union Fail?

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The Soviet Union didn’t collapse because of Reagan or Thatcher or missile bases or Star Wars: It collapsed because of Bulgarian blue jeans. The free market was trying to tell the Communists that Bulgarian blue jeans were ugly and didn’t fit, that people wouldn’t wear Bulgarian blue jeans — not, literally, to save their lives. But the Kremlin wasn’t listening, and the Berlin Wall came down.

from World Affairs Journal

2010 Darwin Winners

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The Math Curmudgeon has one that made me … something. Anyway, I thought it was worth sharing.

3rd Place
After walking around a marked police patrol car parked at the front door, a man walked into H&J Leather & Firearms intent on robbing the store. The shop was full of customers and a uniformed officer was standing at the counter. Upon seeing the officer, the would-be robber announced a hold-up and fired a few wild shots from a target pistol. The officer and a clerk promptly returned fire and several customers also drew their guns and fired. The robber was pronounced dead at the scene by Paramedics. Crime scene investigators located 47 expended cartridge cases in the shop. The subsequent autopsy revealed 23 gunshot wounds. Ballistics identified rounds from 7 different weapons. No one else was hurt.

I don’t have a Guns category, so this is going in Politics/Military. Because folks there often have guns or discuss them.

Momma

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Tomorrow it will be a full month since she died.

It seems odd that she’s not there. I still say my parents’ house and my parents’ condo. I still think of it as Mother’s.

Of course, I told my 19 year old today, “Here’s Gramma” while patting the urn of her ashes sitting in the window of the kitchen. I know my mom’s not really there, but…

When we were little and sick she would climb in bed with us. And feed us Sprite and popsicles.

She went with me to my high school graduation and helped me make it through that, even though I was sick with strep throat at the time. (We didn’t know until I got back to my medical microbiology class the next Monday.)

Mom answered the phone in the middle of the night and talked to me when I was sick or scared or just lonesome.

Mom would call just to talk.

Mom sat with me all night in the hospital, when my husband was too tired to stay.

Mom watched my son while I was in the hospital.

Mom took care of her mother for the last two years of Grama’s life.

Mom never met a stranger.

Mom enjoyed talking to people, and until the last three years, they enjoyed talking to her.

Mom didn’t hold people’s evil against them.

Mom was a prayer warrior extraordinaire. I hope the Catholics have it right and she can hear me. Pray for me, Momma.

My mother is in Heaven.

Shaming Teachers Into Good Behavior

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Right on the Left Coast talks of the LA Times “identifying good and bad teachers by name.”

Ouch.

RotLC says that if shaming the teachers gets them to make changes, it’s all to the good.

Yes. It is.

But maybe the reason they are looking at making changes is because this is the first time anyone has told them that their students are not doing as well in their classes as other students are doing in other classes.

I didn’t see that the teachers who were called out in a negative way were trying to shift blame. That’s good. I also saw that they were looking for ways to be better. That’s good.

Maybe they just didn’t know there was a problem.

Been there myself.

Mitigated Gladness

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I now have a full-time job.

That would have made me hop up and down happily. Or maybe not. Maybe it wouldn’t.

But it doesn’t now because while I have a full-time job, I will probably still be applying for a position at a new school next year.

Right when I would have been okay with being here for the long term, it looks like that is not going to happen. It looks like we’ll be leaving.

And that, too, would have had me hopping up and down for joy, except that the plan for that job is also to leave. Not in one year, but in two or three, possibly four… But most likely two.

And then, having hopped from one job to another, I’ll need to hop to a third. That will not help me get hired anywhere.

So I’m here, with a job at a school I think I will like, contemplating a job at another school, wishing that my life were more stable than it is.

Dang.

Maybe we can learn to live on less here. That would certainly be easier than moving. And there are more med schools here.

Not as Good as I Thought

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I received my averages for classes for the last three years, as compared to the full-time faculty and the other adjuncts. It is not quite accurate because I have been teaching a new version of the course that whole time and yet the advisors kept letting students who did not belong in.

Despite that caveat, it is still depressing.

I have a lower success rate by 22% than the ft faculty. I have a +.8 GPA in my classes though. How does that work?

Mid-life Crisis

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I quit teaching full-time to follow my husband to a place he could get a job and I ended up staying home to teach our sons full-time.

Last year our youngest son began doing all his work as a dual credit student at the local community college.

I always assumed I would go back to full-time teaching when the boys left home.

That does not seem to be the case.

This past semester my husband agreed to move to another city, if I was offered a job. I wasn’t. The job is available again and I have been asked to apply. However, now my husband is happy with his work and school situation. Now he doesn’t want to go.

So I am not sure what to do now. I might be able to get a different kind of job and leave teaching. It won’t leave me the free time I have had (or potentially free time) but it would be full-time and give me a sense of belonging.

We’ve been here 10 years. In that time I’ve had a few friends that I met for lunch and talk, maybe three. However, no one really close. The closest of the three is moving to California.

I don’t feel like a total failure.

Despite the fact that my sons say they would never homeschool their children, I believe I did the best I could for them. I think it was the right choice, at least at the beginning. My sons know I love them.

I did eventually finish my PhD and, despite the fact that I haven’t been hired full-time, I have gotten three good compliments from bosses on my teaching.

So I don’t really know what to do.

I don’t want to teach all over town if it is not going to lead to a ft position. I don’t like to drive that much!

I need to pray about this and make some decisions. It’s a bit late to quit for the fall, unless I have a full-time job, but I need to not go into spring on autopilot.

A Vision

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Today it seemed to me that God pulled back the veil between here and Heaven and showed me my mother. I did not see her face, so I don’t know what she looks like in Heaven exactly. However, I saw a leg, up, in movement, and a silk skirt, long and full and more demure than my mother tends to wear, but beautiful.

The skirt was like a flamenco skirt, but light colored and shot with color.
flamenco-skirt-2 dressforflamenco dot com

Obviously this example is much brighter.

The pose was just the legs, was turned the other direction from this picture, but similar, with that swishyness of the skirt.
flamenco ibabuzz

Dancing is what I thought after I saw the still image.

Even if it wasn’t a vision, I love the thought of my mother in heaven dancing.