life update, November 2021

(previously: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October)

Uh, I guess that thing happened again where the month is half over before I manage to write an update. To get back on track, I'm resolving now to write an update on exactly December 1, short though it might be!

The main bit of news I have this month is sad. Our cat, Mylk, passed away five days after my October update. He had come home from the hospital, and we were working hard to manage his condition with medication, but he was no longer showing much interest in food, and moving around got harder and harder for him. We finally decided it was best to euthanize him rather than let him continue to suffer. For the first time since Alex and I moved in together in 2009, I'm living in a house without a cat, and it's not much fun. I think we'll probably adopt another cat after a period of mourning has passed.

Another piece of bad news is that three students in my grad course got COVID. Apparently, they all got it at the same Halloween party. Halloween was a Sunday; they came to class Monday; they all started having symptoms on Tuesday or Wednesday, and didn't come to class Wednesday, and on Thursday afternoon I found out. It was scary to get several "I tested positive for COVID" emails in quick succession. (The campus contact tracing system also notified me, but the students all told me themselves sooner.) After getting those three emails, plus a fourth one from another student who was at the same event and had not yet tested positive but was worried, I decided to move my class online. Thankfully, I haven't heard of anyone else testing positive since then, and as of today, all the isolation/quarantine periods are over and we can resume in-person classes. The three students who tested positive are all recovering, and they continued to participate in class remotely. (For the most part, everyone on campus is supposed to be vaccinated, but there are exceptions. I don't know these particular students' vaccination status, and I'm not allowed to ask.) The whole thing was a reminder that COVID is still here and still a threat.

In happier news, my students Gan and Patrick each presented papers at the HATRA workshop in October. For each of them, it was their first first-author publication (and these papers were also my first last-author publications -- a different kind of milestone). They both gave great talks, and I'm really proud of them both. It was a little hard for me to stay engaged and have fun at HATRA, though. It's partly just because I'm tired of online events (and with HATRA being hybrid, the online experience was, frankly, even worse than usual), but mostly, I was having a bad day because the workshop was the same day we had to euthanize Mylk. So, that sucked, but I still managed to be there for my students, and I'm grateful to Alan Jeffrey for being a great session chair.

My so-called "mid-career" review, which looks at my career progress from December 2017 to June 2021, is happening right now. In fact, I think people are supposed to vote on my case in a week. I'm worried about what they will say about my slow progress on research. I think my colleague Cormac, who is my official department mentor and also the head of the personnel committee, might be worried on my behalf, too; he asked if he could meet with me tomorrow to talk about how my research is going. I know he has my best interests in mind, and he probably wants to meet so that he can put together a strong case for me.

The UCSC lecturers' union (which is now Alex's union!) will be on strike on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. I'm planning to go out and picket with them at some point, and will probably cancel my own classes on Wednesday in solidarity with the lecturers.

At home, we're slowly setting into our new place -- slower than I'd like. We still don't have any art up on the walls, partly because we're just busy and/or lazy, but for me it's also that I feel hesitant to make holes in the pristine walls! There are also some boxes that we still haven't unpacked, because, while this house has more space than our old house, it also has less built-in storage in certain places, particularly in bedrooms and bathrooms. So we need to buy more storage furniture, and figure out how to make better use