No work this week

So it turns out that I'm getting the whole week off of work. The university decided to shut down for the week, it's not currently threatened by any fires, but there is also no logical reason to have people driving in and worsening traffic and risking more lives just for a couple of classes. The ironic part about all this is that being the faculty member who lives the furthest from the university I'm fully equipped to continue working as normal from home...well without the ability to teach though.

But that being said it's kind of hard to get any real work done. I'm finding myself really intrigued by the situation down in San Diego and that's distracting me a good bit. Plus I haven't felt like I've had a real vacation where I can do whatever I want in ages. Though if I'm smart about it I could at least get a few lectures prepared in advance and be ahead of the schedule when things get started again.

It's kind of funny to thing about it. Most people who go to college probably never experience their school being closed for even a day that wasn't anticipated. For myself this will be the second time that a university that I've been at has been closed for a week. The last time was due to the 1998 ice storm in Quebec, talk about polar opposites. And of course this time I'm the prof not the student, so I'm starting to wonder how they are going to deal with the lost classes and how I'll be able to teach them all the valuable knowledge that they need...maybe I'll just cut out the stuff I barely understand and call it day; so long electrochemistry!

Fires

So it's like a chinook eh?

At least that's what I thought when I decided to look up what a Santa Ana wind was on Sunday. See, I'd hearing about them in the news all day Saturday and it seemed like these winds were something special. Well, it turns out that they are. Technically they are the same things as a chinook, just really warm dry air that comes out of the mountains. Unlike chinooks, the name is kind of lame in my opinion, but they are also coming down out of the east, unlike from the west in Alberta. The winds really do get strong here as well, I was almost blown into the other lane while driving yesterday.

So if you mix those factors with the extreme drought conditions and highly flammable vegetation around here and you get a good chance for fires.

It was a bit shocking to see the amount of smoke coming over the hills as I drove to work yesterday. That turned out to be part of my reasoning for turning around before I got there. The other part was the huge area that was being warned for potential evacuations (which they did later in the day) that crosses the my route to San Diego. Ultimately the university ended up being closed by the early afternoon and it has yet to reopen as the fires get worse and worse around the city.

To get an idea what's going on down there check out this map that was setup by the local National Public Radio station. Frankly I think it's one of the best uses of google maps that I have ever seen.
View Larger Map

As for us, we're fine. There is one fire in our county, about 30 miles away, but it seems to be one of the ones that is more contained at this point in time, plus it doesn't seem to be as windy today, which makes things a lot safer. The stupid part about it is that this fire was apparently deliberately set. Some people are just fucking assholes!

Anyway, I just thought I'd let you guys know what's going on with us. Things here seem to be normal, I just happen to have a couple of days off work. And who said that there is no magical colours in fall in SoCal?

Ow

So in terms of riding schedule not much has changed, still only seem to find time for the one ride a week. It’s really quite sad seeing as I used to be able to get in up to 15 hours or more a week. But that was in the summer in Edmonton so there was much more daylight then. But the riding is good and I’m learning to ride smarter than I ever have before, not pushing my heart rate through the roof on every hill and managing to conserve strength and power for later parts of the ride. Saturday I did find a crazy hill to climb on the way out of Dana Point. Sadly I also learned that in California they only indicate if a road is a dead-end about 500 ft before it ends, I don’t need to point out how stupid that is do I?

The road can be found on google maps or earth, the view from the top was well worth the pain of the climb, you can see a few photos on google earth.


I in order to compensate for some of my lack of activity I decided to join Deirdre at the gym on Sunday. Our apartment complex has a small gym on the property and Deirdre has been there to use the treadmills a few times. So I figured I’d try to start doing a regular weight training program. My brother gave me a training guide for cyclists a few years ago and I’ve been using it in the winters to do weight work to keep fit. Of course being designed for cyclists the program calls for a good bit of leg workouts, with a lot of core muscle work as well (back and abs). Well, this gym was certainly not planned by a cyclist. Virtually all the equipment is designed to work your arms and shoulders. The one leg machine is part shoulder press machine and barely works well for the legs. But I soldiered on and did what few exercises were on my list. This included massive 60 pound chest presses! Yeah, I know, my arms are weak, but if there was a leg press machine I could have been doing about 600 pounds there. Essentially I’m the inverted gym junkie, no upper body mass, but lots of muscle below the waist.

Anyway the point of all this is that after doing the 3 sets of 20-30 reps my arms were feeling a little sore. The next day they were feeling fucking sore! I could barely even straighten them at the elbows. Of course the second day after working out is always the worst, though I did learn that I can do a great impersonation of a T-Rex.

I’m going to have to rethink this whole gym idea, I have a feeling that it won’t pay off the way I would like. So maybe I should invest in a good lighting system for the bike. Night rides are always a great rush, plus I don’t look so stupid wincing every time I point to a feature of a slide in class the next day.

Figuring out the culture

So I've been living in Southern California for a few months now and I'd never really had a quintessential moment that defined this place as truly different. Sure the fact that I was riding today and looking at flowering hibiscus and birds of paradise as well as other flowers I don't recognize, but that's all environmental, it's not cultural. You could probably find the same thing in Mississippi and Texas, and it doesn't take a genius to know that those places are nothing like SoCal.

But along this same ride I did see that one image that will forever define living in Southern California. As I was going along the bike path on the PCH there was a family riding toward me in the lane next to mine. All three of them, mom, dad and young daughter (about 9 or 10) were kind of all over the path, so I figured I should pay attention to them. Well just before I got to them they all got over in their lane, until the daughter swerved out into my lane and quickly back into hers. Now this is nothing new, I've seen it dozens of times, you learn to live with it. What was unique was why the girl swerved out of her lane, she was talking on her cell phone!

If that truly doesn't define Southern California culture I really don't know what does.

Teaching plans

So you would think that by now I would be at least slightly smart...well you’re wrong. As I was sitting on the train the other morning, going over the presentation for the class I had to teach, I was hit by a sudden realization: I shouldn’t worry about filling the time in my class, but making sure I use the time to teach them what they need to know.

Stunning isn’t it? You would think that someone who’s job is to teach, and who likes teaching, would have realized that sometime before the sixth week of class, but I’m not smart that way. Since the first class I have been worried about making sure that the whole class period is used to present material to the students. For some reason I was deathly afraid of running out of material before the end of class. I guess it’s not too surprising that that was the case. There really isn’t any other measure of how well the class is going when you first start teaching, other than knowing that you are “teaching” the whole time.

But now that I have given them a midterm and seen the results (note to self, make the exam shorter next time). And looking at the results there might only be so much that I can blame on the exam being too long; being truly honest I may have gone over some material too quickly for the students to really get what was going on.

So I’m going to see if I can’t bring myself to slow down somewhat to help ensure that the students really are understanding what is being presented. I know that looking at the class as a period to present them with what they need to know is going to make my teaching far better than by looking at the class period as just a space of time I need to fill.

Mmmm....Donuts.....

So one of the drawbacks that I’ve found to my long-distance commuting, beyond the lack of time to ride my bikes, is that I’m really quite hungry shortly after getting to work; I eat breakfast in the morning, but that’s before 6:00, so by about 10:00 I’m starting to get hungry. And that has led me to notice something, there’s nowhere to get a donut on campus!

Once I realized that I started to think about what things were like in Minneapolis. Though there are some coffee shops where you can get some pastries, there really wasn’t a place to get donuts there either. And that got me to think about why there aren’t any places to get donuts on a campus in the US. After all, if you think of the pinnacle of donuts it’s the Krispy Kreme brand, which is in the US...yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shop.

I guess the stereotype of Canadians really liking donuts is true - actually it turns out that Canadians have more donut shops and consume more donuts per capita than anyone else...who knew? Because when I think of a mid-morning snack my mind goes to donuts right away. And frankly, getting a donut on a Canadian university campus wasn’t challenging. The U of A had at least three places to buy donuts, two Tim Horton’s and an independent donut/coffee shop on campus. And think of it, they don’t even sell donuts in the most popular coffee shop chain in the US - Starbucks; though you can get expensive, shitty croissants.

All in all this leaves me in a crappy situation, hungry and with nothing suitable to eat as a snack. Though thinking about how high in calories and fat a donut really is, I could probably just eat a chocolate bar and not be eating anything worse...though they just aren’t as tasty. Or maybe, since I’m not biking as much I should just lay off the high calorie snacks...

Pissed off

So I haven't really complained about all that much lately, so here goes. These are three of the things that have been really pissing me off lately:

1) My office so fucking cold? This is southern California, it's the perfect weather, it's not too hot, frankly the outdoor temperature is almost the ideal room temperature. So why then is the building I work in so overly air-conditioned? On top of it all, I don't have any control over the air conditioner. It may be hidden in one of the other offices, but I haven't been able to track it down yet. When I do I may have to super-glue the thing to a warmer setting.

2) I am sick of being stopped by customs guards on the way home. I still don't really know why they have the guards there, but there is a remote custom station about 60 km (40 miles) north of San Diego. What happens is that every now and then they close down 4 lanes of northbound traffic to see who's in the cars. As best I can tell, the only thing that they are looking for is how brown you are. Either way it just sucks for everyone involved - it takes about 10 minutes to go a kilometer.

3) Finally I am absolutely sick of the morons who live around me. There are speed bumps all through the 'community' and the jackasses who drive SUVs cannot seem to get it through their thick skulls that the massive vehicles they drive will not fall apart when going over a bump. They insist on creeping over each bump at less than 10 km/h and drive me absolutely nuts. The other day I actually passed a guy while I was biking in and I was still able to go over the bumps at 30 km/h and I don't have suspension.

Well I'm glad to get that off my chest. I'm sure that there'll be plenty more rants to come in the future, because frankly, I'm really starting to hate stupid people and there are far too many of them around these days.

Speed bumps
Customs
Cold office

What happened to me?

So this is a bit odd. Here I am sitting on the train on my way home and I don’t have any work to do. Ok, maybe that’s not entirely true, there is ALWAYS something I could/should be doing for my work these days. But tonight I have nothing planned, for what seems like the first time in weeks! Ok, that’s not really true either, I just realized that there was no way I was going to get the grant done in time so I decided to say to hell with it.

Since I started teaching it’s been one thing or another. Working on lectures, making assignments, grading assignments, writing midterms (I still have to grade them, but that’s for the weekend) or working on some grant proposal. I vividly recall my postdoc boss telling Deirdre, after my farewell lunch, that she’ll have to keep me from working too much. At the time I though that was kind of funny. I’ve always thought of myself as a bit lazy and always able to find time to relax. Well, it turns out that he was right.

It’s the sick aspect of this job, you know that you have to bust your ass to do well enough to get tenure; only there is no way to figure out just how hard you actually have to work. It’s almost like a silent auction, only you can’t see the bids and you’re not really sure how often people are going back to up their bids. So you constantly do the same, thinking you need to do just a bit more.

It’s a really odd situation and one that is ripe for promoting paranoia. Despite all this I enjoy it. Grad school and postdocing were fun, but now that I have the chance to do my own thing I feel much more inspired. I’m pretty confident things will work out for me in the long run, so I guess it’s not such a bad thing to take a night off from time to time. Either way, I’m loving all the work I’m doing so I really can’t complain.