So David had the (mis)fortune to listen to my lectures last week. He says that the way that I lecture and the way I talk in everyday life are completely different. Hehehe…I guess I do have a tendency to do that, actually. Not just lecturing, but with games and Bible studies. So I have triple personality, apparently.

So there was the Trinitarianism Bible study today. I really don’t like how they treat this as a big joke. Sure there are jokes in the text, but that’s not the whole point of it, and they seem to fail to recognize what is important that can be learned. And they treat the authority of the author as if there is none, as if they know much more than the author’s years of experience in the ministry. Sigh…

Report on marking: yikes. Just finished half the second question. 4 more questions to go, and it’s due very very soon. Don’t think I can make it. Meanwhile, there’s research that has been essentially abandoned. On a unrelated note, I have made tomorrow morning a massive calling telethon thingie, with planned calls to Toyota, Air Canada, West Jet, and UW Optometry.

Yesterday’s MYF: lunch that is mediocre, and then, the sports. Well, sports and board game, I guess. The main point: I played the most painful game of Scrabble, ever! Seriously, these girls took way way WAY too long! Among them, Laura took the longest, and yet she ended up in last place. So anyway, remind me to set out time limits next time around, and forbid checking dictionaries! (Scores: Clarence 124, Christina 138, Laura 67, Me 103.)

Marking progress: not so much. Didn’t mark anything yesterday. Just started marking not long ago today. It’s very slow. I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it. Meanwhile, I need to remind myself to type up the homework tomorrow morning at school… Oh yeah, the book scanning this morning…I scanned twice, and that’s all I had to say. Since this looks to be a random paragraph, I might as well mention the strong winds going on outside…tis the season, I guess. Throughout the day, I was trying to solve this slither link puzzle from a website, and it’s just very very hard. I haven’t solved it yet, not even close… Final bizarre musing: I think it was last Wednesday when I was really really hungry and stepped on the scale. I clocked in at 85.5kg, which is a low point in recent memory, down from an all time high of 89kg. So, at least I’m sort of improving there.

Another fine episode of Mythbusters this evening, with the killer tissue box and the Robin Hood arrow splitting. But the highlight of the episode is the funny stuff brought on by the narrator! The narrator rocks! On the arrow splitting, he managed to sneak in “arrow-dynamics”…hehehe. And much more that I couldn’t record here.

I need to comment on this extraordinarily warm weather these days. The high temperature has been around 17 degrees for a week now, I think. Normally, it would be snowing by now. Yikes. Really weird.

Forgot to mention that during Friday’s group lunch, I actually managed to talk to one of the new grad students. He’s from Denmark, actually, and that’s kind of cool. So anyway, it’s certainly strange that I would talk to a stranger, but now that it has happened, it’s not too bad…

Bye Austin. I’ll miss you.

I just feel very grumpy this evening. Possible reasons: I have trouble breathing; I think my room is too stuffy and hot; my progress on the humongus marking task is very slow; the prospect of very little research time weighs me down; the sudden resurgence of my love for puzzles, and the sudden realization that I have very little of them to do; just a general sense of numbness. Hope for a better tomorrow.

This lady Maria on Jeopardy is simply amazing. She won 5 days now, with more than $100K. It was really exciting to see her wager $10000 on a Daily Double. I do not believe I have ever seen such a big wager on a DD… So…go Maria!

There was this $8000 question on Millionaire yesterday, and the guy simply didn’t know the after (even after phone-a-friend and 50:50): Which reality show’s contestants perform tasks called Roadblocks and Detours on their way to the Pit Stop?

It’s kind of weird when the solution to an assignment was posted before the time that it’s due. That’s what happened to the assignment that I’ll be marking this week. As to the time that it was posted, there were a few versions of it, and my version is that it was posted 2.5 hours before it’s due…so…not good. Meanwhile, the marking madness starts now.

It’s fun to go out for lunch with a bunch of people from the C&O grads.

I’ve got so many things to do and yet so little mind to do it…

I got my PhD lecture requirement done yesterday! Weeeeeeeeeee! So that was probably the worst of my three lectures, and I blame it on being so tired and hungry at the lectures, plus I really don’t like to describe breadth-first search. So…there you go. But the evaluators liked it, in fact they liked it so much that they left five minutes after the lecture began. So…they didn’t see the bad part…hehehe. So anyway, that’s done, and I guess my conclusion from this is that I don’t mind lecturing. I don’t hate it nor love it, but I don’t mind it.

Looks like a horrific week coming up. Mainly the marking of an assignment. It used to be a two-person job, but Omran’s going away this coming week, so I agreed to takeover all the marking this week, and next time Omran will takeover. I’m expecting 50-75 hours of work for the week, just for the marking…so…yeah. 200 papers, 6 questions…yikes.

I definitely lost interest in this season’s Amazing Race. I don’t like anybody on the show right now, and the locations are just really sad. Anyway, I might still watch it, we’ll see.

So…Levent’s evaluation of my lecture yesterday? Satisfactory. This coming from him, this must be pretty good. So, not too bad. Now I really have to think hard about how to explain breadth-first search…

I’m now a download freak. Sort of.

I was just trying another one of those difficult sudokus…didn’t finish it this time, though. So…maybe later. And I ordered a “super hard sudoku” book as part of the things I bought from the Japanese puzzle website…we’ll see if I can do even one of them…