My birthday is coming up too. That always makes me depressed. Seriously. The number is getting up there. And I have nothing. So sad.

Sure, having a house makes some things easier. But I do feel very alone, especially in this vast space. I’ve also lost any appetite for travelling, which has been something I was really looking forward to.

What I fear the most now is overconfidence. This term I’m teaching one course twice, and it is a course I’ve taught last term. So I’m bound to be so confident that I become lax in preparation. Usually this spells doom as I will likely miss some important details. I just have to force myself to type up new notes for each lecture.

I do always pray before the first lecture of the day. Pray for a humble heart. Because truly I don’t know what I’m doing.

I’m also lagging in life, it seems. Friends who are similar or younger in age than me have already married and have kids. I feel like I’m just wasting my life away.

And I’m even lagging in thinking of a third thing I’m lagging about…

Classes are also coming to an end. I’m going to miss my civil kids (I seem to always miss the kids…until after the exam and they all disappear), and the front row of my math kids. Final exam is going to be crazy: two exams to proctor in a row, two exams to mark simultaneously.

How am I feeling about all this? For one, I’m feeling quite lonely, to be the only one in this big place. For two, I’m feeling quite overwhelmed, to not know what to do with these house things. And for three, I’m feeling thankful, to God for everything.

Even more thankful that on this hectic week, I got offered a 2-year teaching contract! Well, 2 years less a day, but still! Very exciting news. I guess things just want to happen together.

Almost done packing my stuff at Steven’s place. Can’t wait to get out of here. Only moving these essentials tomorrow. Lots and lots of other stuffs for Saturday. And I will officially be in debt! Things are happening!

The day started at about 2am, where I missed my alarm clock by about 5 mins and rushed to pack too many things in too little space. The shuttle to the airport at 3am was brutal, constantly between sleep and half asleep. Conversations with Dave made it easier. Budapest’s airport looks so good from the departures side, but so horribly bad from the arrival side. Shouldn’t they change that around? Flight to Munich was short but very very full. Managed a nap through the landing which means it must have been a smooth descent. And here I am at the lounge which was great.

Ah…getting back to the normal grind, with 5 days until closing. Getting crazy over there.

As with the last two WPCs that I attend, I did well on the first day, and then crashed in the second day. And as with the last two WPCs that I attend, I finish around 75th out of about 100 official competitors. This doesn’t mean that I’m not improving, of course, it just means that everyone’s improving, and I’m just not improving more. Sadly, I think this may be the last one I attend. Getting 70s every time is not a good feeling.

I’m still very happy that I came here. It was definitely a blast to be with the people I knew, and meet new people as well. But there is definitely a sense of disconnect, as beyond puzzles, our interests diverge. They are more into pop culture and trivia, I’m more into…other things.

The social aspect is, as always, a bit awkward. I’m usually “just there”. I stick with the Canadian team for the most part, of course, sometimes this involves getting a nice Brit and a loud American in the mix. Mama and Papa Calver are also great to talk to.

Too bad I didn’t get to see one Hungarian instructor that I met in Waterloo a while ago. Maybe next time.

Heading off to the world puzzle championship again! This is very exciting. I love the Hungarian style puzzles. They do get a little crazy though. I’m sure some rounds like the “borderless” round will be a “pointless” round for me…too bad it’s not “fewer points the better” type of thing.

Europe is so close to Toronto…it’s only a 7-hour flight to Frankfurt! I’m so used to the 12-hour flights to Narita or the horrific 15-hour flights to Hong Kong! This 7-hour flight is nothing! But why does it cost about the same….

Still love most students. It’s usually this time of the semester when I start getting attached to the students. I miss some of them when they leave my office. Then again, after the semester’s over, I’ll probably not see them again. I think this is a recurring sentiment that needs to be explored better…

Going to be teaching the same course twice next semester. I think that means lower workload, so does that mean I should be looking at finding ways to get alternate income? After all, this house thing is costing a lot….

I love a lot of my students. I try to learn their names, and some will see me every week. But after the semester’s over, I might have some on facebook and never see them again. Even then, contact is rare. So…why bother learning their names and being their friends? I suppose it creates an illusion of me getting personal with the students instead of treating them as numbers. But it’s just that…an illusion. They disappear.

Having a bus pass is nice. Bumping into students randomly on the bus is fun. That never happens if I drive around in a car.

135: Midterm was apparently too easy…except for the front row. Other than that, things are moving slowly but smoothly. Still don’t know why they are so shocked when I turned a linear congruence into a linear Diophantine equation…

115: Midterm grades were slightly disappointing, and clearly some students didn’t study at all. Apparently I’m the only instructor with full office hours…so at least some of them are studying.

Done the lawyer set up thing and the transfer of money thing, both of which were overwhelming. The mortgage thing is annoying because I think I’m getting too high a rate, but I’m too lazy to comparison shop. And then I need to make a bunch of calls to insurance, hydro etc. which I really hate. But they all have to be done somehow, so I just need to get them done…somehow.

Even the puzzle thing I’m attending in November is starting to get annoying to me. There’s the AC strike, there’s the registration fee thing, there’s the social aspects at the event…just too many things. I really need a place and time where I could just relax for a while…that should come in December…maybe.

135: Did I mention that linear Diophantine equations are quite tedious and boring to teach? Yeah, not a good idea. The diversion to nested quantifiers and negations were mixed. I tried to do some function stuff where the mapping showed some wacky math, but apparently most didn’t get it. Negation was fun, and they got a laugh when I wrote wrong answers from class below the line that supposed to include the right answer. Other than that, I still have probably 75% attendance, which is still good.

115: Transformations went ok, I think. Probably nobody was getting the linearity stuffs. Then came determinants…yikes. That’s a horrible thing to teach. I had to use slides, too, since I needed to catch up. Unfortunately that just means that my hands aren’t long enough to reach some places to explain things… At one point I said “I’ve just lost most of you” to which David laughed really hard for a while. Office hours continue to be filled by lots of engineers. Fun times. Not for the lectures, though.

135: I skipped some things on sets and the linear Diophantine equations are kind of boring, but at least the students are still coming. Starting to lose interest, I’m sure.

115: 4 lectures this week. Things are moving along slowly. But there’s just one incident that was kind of crazy. I was motivating the definition of the matrix inverse, and I was asking the students about the inverses of numbers in the reals. I asked what’s the inverse of 3? They correctly answered 1/3. I asked what’s the inverse of -10? One student with a strong accent confidently said “10! Just 10!” And for some reason, I started laughing uncontrollably. For a while (didn’t know how long), I couldn’t stop laughing. They laughed even more when I took out my tissue. But I still needed to move on, so I tried writing the definition of the inverse on the board while calming down. Good thing it was at the end of class. Afterwards the guy came and asked “why was everyone laughing?” A few guys came in during office hours, and we share the laugh once again.