Ah, the value of a good night's sleep.
This was the first full week of basketball practice. Going from a sedentary job to a 2-hour standing period each day is demanding an adjustment period from my body. Couple that with the change in daylight savings time, causing night to close in early, and suddenly the couch has been transformed into a bed. Come home around 8:00, putter around a bit, stretch out and tune up some DVR episodes... zzzzzz....
When the alarm goes off at 7:00, the fuel of up to ten hours of rest has made for a pretty sharp week mentally. In fact on several of those days I stirred awake by 6:00 and still got eight hours of shuteye.
Hidden Bloggers know that a vital measure of how my work week is going, is the number of backlogged e-mails in the box. Finally got it under thirty by Friday after it had ballooned above a hundred for about a month there. It's been a slow climb, and the peak is in sight. I'm hoping that next week will be a little quieter with the holiday approaching.
Life at the Farm was also productive in doing some staffing planning. More to come on that, but this week moved entirely in the right direction. It's nice to have the occasional hair-pulling-free week.
Segway back to hoops for a minute. Nine practices into the season, the time has flown. That's good news, because we have been having fun. Every drill is 10 minutes or less except for full-court 5-on-5 scrimmages, which keeps things from getting stale. And there is a ton of elements to master. Offensive patterns. Shooting. Defense. Rebounding. Press break. Ball handling. Passing. Pre-game warm-up routine. Out of bounds plays. How to line up on free throws. We've got more height than I initially thought. It's a scrappy, enthusiastic bunch.
Math can be torturous when it asks students to do proofs. This is what one of my students is facing. The tutor too, actually. I feel like I'm doing about two-thirds teaching and one-third learning at this point. Which is why I don't charge. And also why I love this set-up. I figure that in about 3-4 years I'll be pretty well versed in a variety of courses, well enough to bump up that teaching ratio.
Math teaching methods have changed in twenty years. When I was a sophomore in college I took a class about matrices that required painstakingly grinding through about two dozen steps on paper. Nowadays the high school sophomore I'm tutoring does matrices. By punching numbers into a calculator. I am not distraught by this. Name the last time you did a matrix. You can't. I said did a matrix, not saw The Matrix. Be serious.
As condo bookkeeper I reviewed our financial projection for the next ten years. It's looking good, even despite some unplanned expenses this year. In 2014 we're giving the carports, driveway and fence a major makeover. It'll be the type of gleaming appearance that makes realtors drool.
Got in my nine-mile (stationary) bike ride every day this week except one, when I did a two-mile run at 7:30 clip due to time constraints. Sundays off. Ahhhh.
Have you ever tried to build a new relationship only to fizzle due to utter lack of e-mail response? Me too. Technically it's a pet peeve. But I've come to understand that relationships aren't like physics, where if you roll the ball up the hill it's certain to roll back. It's more like the old Biblical parable about tossing seeds into the ground, and some grow. So I just toss out more seeds than I used to. This week, the ground was barren. Ah, well. Next week, who knows?
Speaking of rolling, I heard Jack had 'em laughing at the comedy club on Thursday. Nice to know that his circle of comic influence is growing! I look forward to writing the foreword to his book someday.
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