Within the sound of silence

The last three months (so all of summer, really) has been a whirlwind with just so much stuff going on.  There was buying the house and all that went in with that leading up to June and then moving myself in and then moving Lindsey in later.  Shortly thereafter she headed up to Michigan to prep for the wedding and then I did the same and that's where we left things off.  After we got married, we went up to Pictured Rocks for a quick honeymoon.  The real honeymoon is later in Costa Rica, but this was definitely a good time too.  But it was a six hour drive up on Monday followed by six hours back down on Thursday and then four more hours back to Indiana on Friday.  The following week, we drove up six hours to Appleton, WI for Lindsey's cousin's wedding which was a good time.  I got along quite well with that side of Lindsey's family.  Then we got to drive seven hours over to the cabin with my mom's side of the family.  Once again, that's always great because we have an island and there's no neighbors and no one gets to tell you what to do.  After nearly a week there, we came home on Saturday.

I'm not going to claim any of this is hard, but I've been struggling a little since I got back on the come down.  There was just so much over long period with all of the great things, including getting to spend some time with my best friends who live out West and then getting to experience new things and now I come back and Lindsey's in school and I don't for a couple weeks.  Right now, I need to find things to do and meaningful things to do because I'm feeling a little purposeless at the moment and compared to the rest of the summer, any event has to be fairly monumental to distract me now.  I'm currently writing this from my office where I can get a few things done but its still not what I want.  This is the issue.  After months and months of noise, now there's just silence.  I love silence, but I don't know what to do with it now.    I'm hesitant to say it, but I wouldn't actually mind having a week or two less of summer just because I run out of things to do and admittedly, I get a little bored.  If we could start earlier and have an extra week of Christmas break, heck yes, I'm all in.

Anyhoo, summer goals are going well.  I still believe I'm on target to get all ten taken care of, though I have been slack in biking and will need to average about five miles a day to get that knocked out.  Chances are I'll end up hitting up the Monon for a couple 30+ mile rides in the next few weeks to make sure it gets done.

I'm getting married in roughly 18 hours.  I have no doubts.  This feeling is amazing.

Maybe I'm Amazed

As soon as I finish writing this, I will be unplugging the electronics here at the house and heading up to Michigan.  In less than 40 hours, I'm getting married.  For a long, long time, I didn't actually believe this day would happen.  Lindsey's not exactly what I expected, but she's much better, because she's an actual real human being and a darn good one at that.  What I expected never really existed and if she did, chances are we wouldn't have worked because we wouldn't have worked through all the difficult times that inevitably arise.  I have no doubts whatsoever on that with Lindsey.  We are in this for the long haul and we're going to have a lot of good times.  We're going to have a bunch of bad times too but I know she loves me and I love her and we will fight through all the bad times that get thrown our way or, more likely, I cause.

I'm amazed even by how much I've come to appreciate her over the past week.  I've been living at the house now for roughly a month.  Lindsey moved all of her stuff in on Saturday before heading up to Michigan on Monday morning.  In the days before she moved in, she was spending quite a bit of time here, because who wouldn't be spending a lot of time at the house he/she owns?  In that time, I let go several of the issues I was hanging on to, most predominantly, the issue that we could be together but still do our own thing at the same time, like when she's watching TV and I'm reading and I'm totally fine and holy crap, is that a load off of my mind! Seriously, you have no idea how scared I was that this wouldn't be feasible.  As a huge introvert, yes, Lindsey is obviously allowed in my bubble, but there are times when that bubble surrounds me and me only and those times are more frequent than most people imagine.  Occasionally, people get kicked out of that simply because they've been in it too long. I just need a break from them.  I'm not trying to be mean; this is just how it works.  So yeah, figuring that out was great.  Since then though, its been three days without her and I've missed her.  Not in that pathetic "What will I ever do without my snookie-wookie sweetums?" way, but in a legitimate way where I acknowledge that things are just better in general when she's around.

I can't wait to marry her.  Yes, I'm excited.  Yes, I'm still a little terrified, but if you're not doing anything scary, you're not living.  This is going to be awesome.  This is going to be harder than anything I've done before.  Bring it on.  See you Sunday.

I'm a shut up, sit down

Its definitely time to update since a couple more of the summer goals have been knocked out.  I know I promised more about the house, but you'll see more of it when you come to visit me.  I have had to do a few handyman things around the place though, so I'm learning all of that fun stuff.  I had to switch out the electric cord on my dryer because it was three pronged and our outlet was four pronged.  I also had to do that the day before I left for the AP reading when I didn't have many clean clothes either so thankfully it was a quick job.  I switched out my shower head last night and now have a much nicer time taking a shower.  More basic things will come up and I'll be fine until there's an emergency.

Speaking of the AP reading, I got back from that on Saturday so that's another goal down.  It's also the basis for the title of this entry.  Grading for nearly 50 hours wasn't actually as bad as I expected it to be because you never really felt too out of it simply by having that 15 minute or more break every two hours.  There definitely were some frustrating things with the grading though as the prime goal is to grade exams as consistently as possible, meaning that strict adherence to the rubric is demanded.  My biggest issues came with the rubric itself.  I know grading over 200,000 exams means you have to have some sort of rubric, but too often it seemed like the answer that was being looked for just meant parroting back the correct statement that your teacher (hopefully) taught you instead of showing true understanding.  So yeah, there was definitely some frustrations, but overall, it was definitely a good experience especially once I get paid for it.  I expect I'll do it again next year.

The week before that, I also knocked out the goal of introducing Lindsey to Lisa and mine's habit of visiting a new baseball stadium each summer.  It wasn't that successful though this year as the game got rained out.  Lisa did get to sample the nachos though and I got to try Primanti Brothers for the first time.  I wasn't tremendously impressed.  The trip wasn't a waste though as we did have a fun day at the zoo before that and we got to spend a night catching up with our friend Beez earlier.  Now though, I've got to go call the Pirates box office and see if I can get a refund on those tickets.

If you can't see the thin air, then why the hell should you care

Roughly two weeks ago, I knocked out the first of hopefully many summer goals.  On that Tuesday morning, I headed out to Virginia, where I spent the night camping in Grayson Highlands state park.  The next morning, I hiked the Rhododendron Trail out to Mt. Rogers.  The following day, I hiked Old Mitchell up to Mt. Mitchell.  The day after that, I hiked Low Gap and the Appalachian Trail up to Mt Cammerer and managed to not get eaten by bears despite other hikers telling me that they had just seen one.  It was the hike to Mt Cammerer that provided my opportunity for finishing a goal as it is located on the far east side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and I camped at Cosby Campground the night before.  Yay! One goal done.

Coming into the trip, I knew there was the possibility of rain each day and hiking in rain, or especially in thunderstorms, takes away a lot of the fun.  I received good providence and didn't actually have to deal with rain while hiking.  On the Mt Rogers hike, the weather started beautifully but once I had summited, a quick check of the sky showed that ominous clouds had rolled in and I started busting butt back home on the way back so as to minimize the time I would spend hiking in the rain.  Thankfully, that amount of time turned out to be zero, which is minimal.  My hike of Mt Cammerer had beautiful weather, but again, there were supposedly bear sightings.  The hike of Mt Mitchell provided the worst weather.  While it didn't rain, I was hiking in clouds for the vast majority of the hike.  Getting to the summit earned me a spectacular panoramic view of roughly a couple hundred feet in each direction.  This begs the questions - if you can't see anything, is the hike worth it?  Most of the time, I'll answer yes without hesitation.  This one certainly was.  Yes, if there isn't much of a payoff once you've reached, the experience has been slightly diminished but certainly not to the point where the journey isn't worth it.  I love walking through the woods and climbing over rocks and getting out and being active and just generally being a sweaty mess.  If the final view isn't there, oh well, but I still had fun and this gave me another state high point to claim.

If I really want to stretch this as a metaphor, and apparently I do, I'll compare this to the rest of my life.  The day after I got back, Lindsey and I were meeting with the couple who will follow up with us on our premarital counseling.  Lindsey and I ended up getting in a heated argument shortly before we were to meet with them.  The drive over to their house was basically done in icy silence.  It wasn't a great way for us to prevent ourselves so at that point, the payoff wasn't really worth it, but I've certainly enjoyed the process of getting there.  We've worked everything out to this point and I certainly still love her, so yeah, even though things don't always work the way I want to, it's still been a blast getting to this point.

Technically, I have two goals done.  Yesterday we bought a house.  More on that later though.

I have never failed to fail

I have a hard time believing that its already been 12 years now that I've been putting out summer goals.  It started back in 2005 though as I was coming off my first year of grad school and was back doing fun things in Chicago and had all sorts of cool stuff planned.  I've never been able to knock off all ten things from the list and had I done so, that year would be held up as the standard to which all summers measure up.  In that first summer, I believe I got six of my goals, but even now, that was possibly my favorite summer since I've started.  There's been other years that have been close, (2007/2012?) and years where I've hit more goals (top so far is eight), but none has the cache that that first year still holds.  The worst I've ever done is three, including the summer of 2008, where the three that I got weren't even that impressive.  My roughest summer was probably 2013 simply because it was my first full summer here in Indiana and I hadn't developed much of a social life at all yet.  I got a bunch of stuff done but I didn't have anyone to just hang out with and the summer trips with Luke didn't start until 2014.  This year though, I'm expecting big things; like, really, really big things and I'm fairly optimistic I can hit all ten goals.  Let's even start the list off with two fairly huge goals.

1) Get married.

2) Buy a house.

3) Have friends and/or family over and grill out at my new house while sitting outside and sipping a beer, possibly around a fire, at said house.

4) Camp in a national park.

5) Grade AP Statistics Exams.

6) Kayak Pictured Rocks.

7) Make use of a floating cooler.

8) Color at least one of the pages in my math coloring book.  I'm going to have to borrow some crayons or colored pencils or something.

9) Add Lindsey to Lisa and my's summer tradition of visiting a new baseball stadium.

10) Run 100 miles and bike 200 miles.

Bonus! Since I'm going for broke on this, let's add on a few additional goals because why not.

11) Learn voting theory well enough to teach it for Math 1250

12) Set a 10k personal record

13) Read two of the books I had previously started and then quit on

14) Review my Spanish from last fall

15) Not get Lindsey pregnant.

Part of the reason you're getting the bonus goals is because I'm really confident in most of the original ten and that's because many of them are already scheduled.  Lindsey and I are getting married in mid-July.  We've already got an accepted offer for a house and we take over that in early June.  Once we've got that house, I can't imagine we don't show it off to a bunch of family and friends.  I've already been accepted as an AP Reader.  Lindsey and I will be in northern Michigan for our honeymoon and have already purchased a kayaking excursion.  Lisa, Lindsey and I have tickets already to a baseball game in Pittsburgh.  It is very likely I will be headed back down to the Smokies in a week or two as well so that's plans already for goals 1-6 and 9.  Goal 8 is very easily doable as is goal 7 assuming that we get that floating cooler we registered for and bring it floating with us or out to the cabin.  Goal number 10 I'll have to be intentional about, but I'm already signed up for a 10k and will likely be doing another half marathon in the fall so training for those should knock the miles out quickly.  This time, my half will be on flat ground so I can make up for the fact that Nashville's hills slowed me and everyone else down.

What a day, what a day

The time from Friday afternoon through Saturday night have been some of the most packed hours I've had in recent memory.  Lindsey and I have been seriously house hunting for about a month or so and thus, when a couple houses with good potential came on the market earlier this week (Read Wednesday or Thursday as the market has been crazy), we contacted our realtor and set up a showing for as soon as possible.  That turned out to be Friday afternoon at 5 so that's where the story starts.  We first looked at a house out in Ingalls that was nice and really quite cheap, but I wasn't totally feeling it and there's not a whole heck of a lot out in Ingalls anyway.  Next, we went out to Noblesville to check out two more, one of which we were very excited about.  House 1 was a little expensive, but we liked it a quite a bit even though we were just checking it out on a whim.  House 2 was the one we really wanted to see, but as it turns out, we definitely weren't alone on that.  They intentionally played the market by making everyone wait nearly two days to come see it so when we got there, we were one of five potential buyers checking it out.  Lindsey and I decided we actually liked house 1 better, but again, it was more expensive and not by an insignificant amount.  At this point, it was getting to be about 7 and I had to be back on campus on 8 for trivia.  Lindsey and I definitely had some decisions to make, but we put that off to Saturday per my request.

At trivia, our team consisted of three of AU's math faculty as well as three math majors/minors.  Last year, I wasn't on the team but they added me this year.  Last year, the team led all the way until the final round, before eventually taking second.  This year, there were significantly more teams, and we ended up taking second again.  I got back home after trivia around 10:30 but spent the next hour or so working out the financial details to see if we could actually make it work to buy one of the houses we had seen earlier that day.  I went to bed around 11:30 and slept fitfully due to concerns over whether we could make this work.  Normally, I'd just sleep in in the morning, but I was getting up at 6, so I could drive over to a buddy's house so we could run for a while.  

I got up at 6, drove over to Treg's place, we met up with Josh and ran for 11 miles.

After running, I headed over to Lindsey's place and we talked through all of the money stuff and determined that we could make an offer on house 1.  We called our realtor and got everything set up.  Since the market is ridiculous right now, she put our offer in and only had it last until 8 that night so as to discourage the sellers from waiting out for other offers.  I then drove back home because I got to shave and get all pretty for prom that night as we were to be chaperones.  Every time my phone went off that afternoon, I checked to see if it was a text or email from our realtor, but instead, it was a bunch of other group texts that were great, but not potentially life altering great.  Finally, as Lindsey and I were desperately searching for a place to park, our realtor's text came through.  The offer wasn't accepted or rejected, but instead, the sellers had made a counter offer as they didn't want to cover any closing costs.  We debated what our counter-counter offer should be and about an hour or so later texted our realtor saying what we wanted.  Our realtor listened to us, then somewhat ignored it, instead contacting the sellers and essentially asking them to reconsider.  She's good at what she does so she was able to convince them to do so and we ended up getting the house for our initial offer! We then spent the rest of prom not really being concerned with prom and instead focusing on the fact that we had now agreed to buy a house.  I sent more texts last night than pretty much any other night in my life except for possibly our engagement night.  So yeah, I bought a house while at prom.  

Will you ever shut up?

Based on the fact that I'm down to posting every two weeks or so, I've actually given serious consideration to giving up writing on this blog.  This used to be my release; the place I could to go to air my grievances as well as all of my successes and still have relative anonymity.  I gave up the original Xanga blog because everyone else stopped blogging.  I restarted this because I liked writing because it gave me a way to release and just get all of my feelings out.  I'm not going to lie, it was cool when other people cared, but I didn't make a big deal of it when I switched over to blogspot.  I'm 34 and writing about the basics of my life.  I'm actually surprised you care as much as you do to keep checking this as often as you do.  My audience consists of my family, my fiancee and possibly a couple of friends.  Even then, most of my friends are getting married and so allegiances are shifting.  It's sad because I no longer rank as highly with them as I used to but its certainly not sad for them as someone else is taking on a huge role in their life.  That's the hard part for me now.  I'm not writing as much for myself anymore because I have Lindsey to be my sounding board.  Things don't rattle around in my brain as much because I can talk to her about anything.  I don't have as many friends reading this as I did in the Xanga days but that's okay.  It is sad though that I have actually lost touch with many of my friends.  One of the things I was ruminating over the other day while feeling down was how many good friends I've had that I no longer keep in contact with.  Over my life, at various times, I've had these people as my best friend for at least a year or more: Brad, George, Brian, Luke, Jon, Lisa, Scott, Cheryl, Steph and Lindsey.  Of those 10, I'm marrying Lindsey while Luke is my best man and Jon will be standing right beside him in my wedding.  The other seven likely won't be invited.  What's even more sad is that there's a couple ex-girlfriends that I dated for a significant time that didn't crack that list.  So yeah, life moves on an things change and we can't hold on to the past and I get stuck between missing the past and trying to do my best for the future.  Back to the point - no, I won't be giving up this blog.  The entries might keep getting scarcer, but I'm not giving it up now.  I've got 3 weeks left in the semester and if nothing else, I don't want to give up the summer goal list.  Its hard for me to believe this is the 12th year I'll be doing it but I've got some kickass goals coming up and this may finally be the year I have the summer of my dreams.  Stay tuned...

My brother never missed a beat

When I first came to Anderson, I promised to give it at least three years before I made a decision about whether or not I wanted to really set down roots here.  As was expected, the first year was really quite tough simply because I have a hard time just getting to know people and I experienced so little community that first year that I was tremendously lonely.  Seeing as how its year four, things have obviously gotten better.  In fact, things are pretty awesome now.  I'm getting married this summer and I'm currently looking for a house so yeah, things have improved a little bit.  However, I screwed up.  I've been focused on me and all the craziness that's surrounded my life lately that I forgot about those who were there when life was crappy.  During my first spring break, I wasn't struggling just with the typical loneliness.  I had been involved in online dating again and having a smidgeon of success for the first time, but come February or so, I ran out of all my options and things hadn't been going well enough that I wanted to pour any more money into it.  Sara and I met about halfway between us to celebrate both our birthdays.  Celebrate was definitely a relative word that day.  She was dealing with some horrible parents and some tremendous stress and was having just as bad as time of it as I was.  That day, we were good for each other because it was someone else to commiserate with and we could dump out our feelings and not be judged or seemed needy and it was pretty helpful.  It was good enough in fact, that we decided to do it again the next year.  This time, things were looking a lot better.  I was really happy in a relationship and unbeknownst to me, so was Sara.  She ended up marrying her guy while I got dumped a month later so she obviously had chosen better, but that was different because we got to celebrate instead of commiserate and this time, we had Lisa there with us as well.  It was the start of a good tradition because it was a chance to be with family that I love dearly and don't get to see enough.  This year, I just forgot about it and I feel pretty awful about it.  I got distracted with my spring break trip and with wedding details and house searches and all the other good stuff that I forgot about how my foundations were built.  I'm sorry Sara.  Please forgive me.  I'll do better next year.

Don't Live a Life Untrue

I always knew that premarital counseling was essential, but the premarital class that Lindsey and I are in has been good to me for reasons different than what I expected.  Also, to be clear, this is a class as we're in it with five other couples and not yet counseling, which should hopefully come afterward when we're paired one on one with a couple who has been married for a while.  The homework we've had to do has done a great job of straightening out my expectations.  I always assumed that since I waited a long time to get married and never rushed into anything that I'd be good and ready and mature before I got married and everything would be wonderful.  My thoughts never corresponded with real life though.  I always kind of pictured my best friend as someone who it was always amazing to be around and there were never any bad days.  This is where the illusion ends.  When you get to live with your best friends, its not that there are no bad days.  There are actually a lot more bad days.  Its just that they get to see those days and they experience them with you and they help you through them whether its by doing something marvelous for you or for just being there when you need them to be there.  This is what I'm learning most - not that I'll have to work at my marriage but what kind of work it'll be.

Do I stay or do I go now?

As I mentioned in the last post, the end of Christmas break saw me as lazy and depressed because I wasn't social or productive.  For the last several years, hiking has been one of my escapes and basically, any time I've had a week or so free, I've looked to get away and marvel in God's creation.  The biggest drawbacks to that are that 1) I live in Indiana, where decent hiking is several hours away and 2) airplane tickets are expensive, at least on a Midwestern teachers salary.  Between backpacker.com and bigroads.com, I've got a list of about 250 different awesome hikes in the states.  However, very few of them are in the midwest, but one I've been eying for a while is Zaleski state forest out in Ohio, which is about four hours away from me.  I contemplated going several times over the end of Christmas break, but didn't go.  Now, I've got Monday off and the only thing I have on Tuesday is Calc recitation so I've got the time, but its going to get really cold in the next couple of days so I think I'll save some gas and hotel money and just stay here still (possibly regretting it) but there's a chance I head out tomorrow morning at 7.

Morning edit: I did not go.  Instead, I sit here in my apartment, updating this post.  I still think I made the right decision, but I also think its a little bit irresponsible not to road trip when gas is $1.60.  I will make up for this at spring break, and after the semester ends, and for my first honeymoon, but still...

Education is so lame

Education is so lame when you bitch and you moan.  Second semester officially starts in a little less than twelve hours and I'm sure there are plenty of people not looking forward to it.  I am not one of those people.  I am very excited to be back because even though I now have significantly less time to read and work out and dream about all the trips I'm going to take, that's actually awesome because I'll still do those things and ideally I'll cut out the massive amounts of tv I've been watching.  I've had so much time on my hands and for the majority of it, I haven't been productive or overly social, especially outside of time spent with Lindsey.  Maybe its still me being too hard on myself, but this lack of productivity leads to me being mopey and honestly, a little depressed.  I'm mad at myself for just wasting time and getting fat instead of taking this time to relax and appreciate that for what it is.  There are so many of my friends who would kill for a month off over the holidays and here I am whining about it.  Yep, so be it.  For now, I'm thrilled to be getting back to school because it'll mean I'm actually doing something useful again.  In another two months, I do guarantee you that I will be ready for spring break though.  Where should I go?

How am I the lucky one?

The goals I initially tracked for 2015 were pushups, pullups, miles and having three epic life experiences.  I stopped tracking all the fitness stuff fairly early on as my body decided to break in several ways in the past year(ish).  I failed on the three epic life experiences, only getting one and a half.  It was still a pretty darn good year for me though.  I got engaged to my best friend.  I hiked all over a bunch of national parks out west with my other best friend.  I met my first niece.  I ran my second marathon and despite cramping, still finished under four hours and was able to hold off vomiting until about an hour afterward and it happened in the parking lot and not the bus so hooray for small miracles.  Julie did much better in the half marathon.  I was on hand in Cincinnati with Lisa to watch the Mets clinch the NL East.  We sat next to Daniel Murphy's cousin and wife, who annoyed us before the game started.  I explored mountains in both Virginia and Georgia.  I'm certainly not complaining.  I'm not trying to brag here either, even though it may seem like it.  One of my goals for 2016 is to better appreciate the things I already have and do less of comparing myself to others.  That should be a way I can make my life better.  Here are my other goals for 2016:

1) Get married.  Lindsey already said yes to my proposal and our venue just charged me a couple grand for a deposit so this is all good to go.

2) Buy a house.  Or a condo.  Or a townhome.  Or a really nice cardboard box somewhere to keep costs down.  What? Lindsey and I need a place to live and I haven't convinced her to move to Anderson yet and we're both teachers so we're poor.

3) Get promoted to associate professor.  My application has already been accepted so Lord willing, all that needs to occur for this to happen is for me to stay both alive and employed at AU until August.

4) Go somewhere new.  All right, this is my goal for basically every day of my life.  Lisa and I will be going to PNC Park in Pittsburgh for our new baseball stadium.  Luke and I will be going to some new national parks in May.  Lindsey and I will be going on a honeymoon hopefully somewhere new and then somewhere new and expensive (again, for us) over next winter's break.  We're also going to be going to our new  house/condo/etc.  I'd love to be able to get out to a new state.  I was able to knock off Virginia and Georgia from the list of states I haven't been to this year.  I'd love to get another one this year with a trip planned to South Carolina in 2017 for a math conference.  I'm currently at 32 (counted by memories, a couple are pretty weak) or 35 (physically been).  Most of what I need is either the Northeast or the deep South.

5) Not break myself.  I want to spend significantly under my deductible for health insurance this year.  Hitting that the past two years hasn't been fun.

I'm going to stop there.  Those are my five goals for this year, most of which are already planned.  It looks like it'll be a great year.

The problem lies in me

Yes, my posting has been minimal of late and that's a good thing.  I've always said this blog is my catharsis but now that I have Lindsey to talk to about anything and everything, I don't need this as much.

Its exam week and I'll only have grading left to do as of 10:00 tomorrow morning.  The majority of my grading is already done and that makes me happy.  However, on Sunday, I got hit with the usual exam week sickness that comes nearly every semester.  I've doubled down on zinc drops and cough and cold drugs and I've gotten in front of it primarily so I should be good.  What I wasn't really ready for was the bout of nihilism and malaise that accompanied it.  I know this belief that everything is meaningless is just bullshit, but I haven't been able to kick it for the past few days.  The malaise has accompanied that because if you search for meaning and find nothing meaningful, well, you're going to have a bad time.  Maybe I just need something to focus on or distract me for Christmas break.  I will have to prep for my new class and I am planning on studying Spanish so I don't lose that.  I'm looking into quick hiking trips even though its only been two months since Georgia.  Lindsey is going out to see her cousin over New Years (I was invited, but I'll be spending New Year's Eve and Day just watching football so I didn't want to be a buzzkill the entire time).  I may try to find something nearby in either Kentucky or Ohio or something.  Anyone have any suggestions on projects I should take up before next semester starts?

Go forth and have no fear

I know. I haven't posted in a while.  I'm not sorry about that though because its a good sign.  I've said before that this blog is my catharsis and things have been going really well so I haven't felt the need to truly vent about anything lately.

Here's the deal.  I'm about as all in on Indiana right now as I'm ever going to get.  I've got a wonderful fiancee who has the capability of turning my bad days into good ones.  I'm so thankful she's in my life and I'm greatly looking forward to marrying her and starting a life with her, even if it is in a place that's an unreasonable distance away from a decent mountain.  I've got a solid group of guys from church who started off as the core of my softball team but have now expanded to include book study guys.  Yes, we meet at the bar and discuss everything over a beer.  This makes me like them more.  My social life is getting better even if you wouldn't really be able to tell it from the number of Indiana people I'll be inviting to the wedding.  I still love my job.  Roughly a month ago, I submitted an application for promotion to associate professor which also entails a raise and ideally a little more job security, not that I have any worries whatsoever about that.  I still do occasionally check CCCU for other openings because once again, I miss mountains.  Further, the current expectation is that once I'm married, we'll be buying a house and that means I'll have put my own legit roots down somewhere for really the first time in my life.  I was tied to MSU for a while but that was always with the expectation that I would be moving on eventually.  I'm finally starting to get some of this adult stuff down.

We claim you as one of our own

I know I haven't posted in three weeks, but I promise I'm making it up to you.  Two full weeks ago, I was out in Georgia getting my hike on out in the Northern Appalachians and it was all fantastic.  Last weekend, Lindsey and I went out to Turkey Run for a night of camping before heading out for a hike.  This past weekend, I proposed and now I'm engaged.  So yeah, its a short entry, but I'd say its fairly worth it.

There's one for the sorrow and two for the joy

Last night, I asked Lindsey what I should write about for this week's happy post since I wasn't really sure.  Jokingly, she told me that I should write about the entire Digiornio pizza I had eaten for lunch and dinner. If I get to the point where the happiest part of my week is a pizza, its a really bad week.  If nothing else, it should be at least a pizza and a beer. But I mean seriously, pizza is absolutely delicious and quite possibly my favorite food, but if a pizza that I didn't even make is the highlight of my week, come hang out with me because I'm struggling.

Tonight I've gotten serious about writing up my promotion application.  I spent the last hour and a half just writing up two pages on my teaching effectiveness.  There have been times when I've struggled with doubts about my ability as a professor.  There's certainly not the daily issues with fraud syndrome like there were in grad school and I am so incredibly happy that that isn't the case. (Side note: the worst episode may have been when I passed my comp but felt like I scraped by and had basically been given a pass and didn't even really want to celebrate.  Thank God (not used flippantly) for Cheryl who made me go out and enjoy it.) But yeah, there are times when the upperclassmen I have just don't do the basic things they know they should be doing and I really wonder if its because they don't respect me as a prof.  Then I go through all of my AU student evaluations and I get a reprieve from that.  I've given out 9 evaluations over the past 3 years (should be at least 12, but twice it didn't happen for various reasons), and of the 109 students that have rated me, on the questions, 'Overall, I rate this instructor as excellent', on a scale of 1-5, 64 have given me a 5 with a further 31 giving me a 4.  12 have given me a 3 with one each giving me either a 1 or 2. I can explain those two low ones as students who just didn't want to work and were upset that I didn't cater to them as they expected.  So yeah, seeing that makes me feel good.  I've been critical of many teachers in the past (hi, basically everybody. Sorry about that.), and if I take it back, its not because the job is super difficult (its definitely not easy though), but its because you have to deal with being at the mercy of the opinions of people who don't know what's best for themselves and then blame you when things go wrong because that's easier than accepting their own fault.  I guarantee that at least one teacher you know owns a mouthguard because they grind their teeth in their sleep because of the stress of the crap you put them through.

In the whispers when no one's around

Thankfully, I've gotten back into the habit of lifting on MWF mornings.  Since I have calculus at 8 a.m., this means I have to be in the gym and lifting by 6:15 so I can be done and showered and walking to my office by 7:15.  On days like these, that means I get to walk over as the first light of dawn breaks through.  This morning, there was also a good layer of fog enshrouding everything, giving the whole morning this surreal feel you get like when you're encapsulated in a good book and your imagination has become intensely vivid.  We have a pretty college campus and so my walk was illuminated by street lamps, just adding to the entire feel of the morning.  Its a great way to start the day and hopefully an omen of great things to come.  Praise to our creator who makes all beautiful things.

Some say it was Greenland, some say Mexico

First off, seriously, how good could the Meat Puppets had been bad Kurt Cobain actually sung for them full time?

It was a rather uneventful week.  It was exam 1 week so that dominated everything as I had to give and grade three exams which meant there wasn't a whole lot for me to talk about on what made me happy since my ability to write an exam isn't anything special.  Based on today's blog title, you'd expect it to be about travel and that's what I was originally intending it to be.  However, Friday was fine and we had President Pistole's inauguration and the speech was given by Comey, the current deputy director of the FBI and that was all good, but for some reason, the rest of the day was just a giant downer and I have absolutely no reason why.

So instead, that's what today's post is about.  I like that I can talk about when I have bad days or when I failures and shortcomings.  When I went back through my old posts on Xanga, I was surprised by how many things I talked about openly, but that was mostly about girls I liked and anger at math teachers (most of that was dumb, but I was a dumb angry kid, even in grad school, probably even still now - dumb still, not as angry).  Now, on this one, I've opened up about more meaningful things, such as fighting through loneliness, struggling with porn, not knowing where I want to be, and yeah, still some relationship stuff, some of which was stupid and some which wasn't, but all of this stuff has been genuine and authentic.  It may not be things I want my family and friends to know about me.  Yes, I may wish they saw me as perfect, but I'm not anywhere close to that.  Once I've been much more able to open up about these things, I've been better able to receive grace since I'm not believing this facade about myself.  I'm awesome, but at the same time, I suck and that's okay and I like that.

I'm that kid in the corner

I'm a day late on getting my happiness post from the weekend up.  Sorry about that.  This weekend's post actually covers an event that happened last weekend.  Last Saturday, one of my colleagues invited over everyone in AU's school of science and engineering over to his house as a way to welcome in the new engineering faculty.  Lindsey and I were one of the first ones to get there so we got to see when everyone else showed up.  A short time later, one of my fellow math colleagues shows up with his three year old daughter, who we'll call A.  There's a handful of other young(ish) children there and A isn't usually shy so she originally goes off to play with them on the trampoline.  She wants to get in with them, but since most of them are significantly older (other kids were 5-13), she's intimidated and actually heads off a little ways and kinda sulks a little bit because she's got a decent amount of attitude for a three year old girl.  I notice this and a couple of minutes later, I excuse myself from talking with my fellow professors and go talk to A.  I ask her if she wants to go jump on the trampoline with me since the other kids are still on it.  I figure I know what its like to be the kid that's off to the side and wants to get involved but would prefer it to happen on the terms I like so I'm going to watch out for other kids in the same situation.  This isn't to say anything bad about the other kids because they were all really friendly, but I think A just wanted someone there whom she knew to make it not so overwhelming.  So yeah, that's me - protector of little kids that I know well.  I still hate strangers kids when they're loud and annoying in public but I'm actually quite good with kids I know.  We ended up playing some form of Duck, Duck, Goose that didn't really follow the rules at all, but a good time was had so everyone was happy.  There's actually a pretty awesome picture of me and A playing but I don't think that's going to be put out on social media.  Sorry everyone.