hudebnik

OK, I'm a few hours late to the party on this, as I've been grading final exams. But Marian of Edwinstowe has left the building.

Marian wasn't a close friend of mine, but a fond acquaintance, who always had a smile and something interesting (and impeccably well-informed) to say about cookery.

Some tributes from people who knew her better:
Anton,
Vissevald, and
Justin.

There has been Too Much Death this spring.

Current Mood: sad

A rainy, stay-at-home sort of day.

We made six batches of cookies today.

shalmestere wrapped some Xmas presents and prepared them for mailing. Walked the Things twice so far (one more walk as soon as I post this), but it was raining so we didn't get to the park. I was sorta thinking of getting to

greenman73's class on bow and arrow maintenance, but we were on a roll baking cookies.

Tomorrow, back to grading. Two of my students contacted me today (one by phone, to my home number, which I have not given out!) to ask questions about the take-home final exam that's due Tuesday. So I expect to see a couple of panicked students in my office tomorrow too.

Tomorrow night we might get to dance practice, if we think we'll have time to adequately clean and cook for the SCA business meeting cum Xmas party we're hosting next Saturday.

Current Mood: tired

For those of you familiar with the SCA, but not from the greater New York City area,...

The Crown Province of Ostgardr holds a monthly business meeting, called "Commons". Since we don't have any free sites at colleges, churches, etc. for meetings, it happens at people's houses, rotating from month to month, and for the last several years

shalmestere and I have claimed the December meeting, which turns into an Xmas party as well. This year I gave my last final exam at mid-day, then caught the next train home and started cooking and cleaning;

shalmestere took half a day off so she could come home early and start cooking and cleaning too. Grilled butterflied leg of lamb, hummus, tapenade, pita bread, carrot slaw (which we made from multi-colored carrots from the farmer's market), six kinds of Xmas cookies, mushrooms stuffed with an onion/Brie/pesto mixture, mulled cider, veggies and dip, Brie tarts, "heroin" chicken wings... and that's not counting the stuff other people brought to contribute to the table (some soda pop and a bunch of desserts).

Anyway, it's over. Several bags of trash have gone out, the second or third dishwasher load of the day is running, the leftovers are put away, and we found people to take home the most egregious of the desserts so we wouldn't have to have them in the house. Tired.

In the morning, I have to finish grading my last final, and a few homework problems from that class (which I really should have graded weeks ago!), and assign letter grades, and my semester is over! I have no shortage of "to-do"'s, of course: read and referee a few high school science papers (some of which, in past years, have been really good), choose a textbook for one of my spring classes (this should have been done at least a month ago), test software and send it to the Computing Center for installation before spring semester starts, write up a glossary of assessment lingo (what exactly is the difference among "goals", "outcomes", and "objectives"?) so the various committees on my campus are speaking the same language, write more exercises and chapters for my nascent programming textbook (and update the existing chapters to agree with the latest software release), shop the aforementioned textbook around to some publishers, prepare for next semester's classes....

So those are my "to-do"'s. The joint "to-do"'s are more fun: the obligatory pre-Xmas inspection of holiday lights and storefront displays in Midtown, wrap and unwrap Xmas gifts, write checks to Worthy Causes, see some movies (there's a sizeable backlog of recent offerings: Beowulf, Enchanted, Golden Compass, Sweeney Todd, Persepolis, and the DVD of OotP, all of which have been postponed until my final exams and Ostgardr Commons were over).

Current Mood: tired

After the aforementioned shopping trip to the nearby farmer's market,

shalmestere and I packed the car and went to the von Halstern "Winter Wolf Tournament". We're not in Haus von Halstern, and we have very little interest in the average SCA tournament, but

murieldechamay's husband was doing the dayboard and feast, so.... It rained for much of the day, which scared off a lot of tourneyers, but for those of us who had planned to spend the day indoors, it was a pleasant, laid-back day. We chatted (with

murieldechamay,

tashadandelion, and a bunch of other people some of whom surely have LJ accounts but I don't remember them) about music, Renaissance clothing, and the usual SCA gossip. Every few minutes we would get up and grab some more food from the fabulous dayboard, or

shalmestere and I would play some music... we even watched a few bouts of fighting, which had been moved from the soggy soccer-field onto the less-soggy asphalt but were still fought in the rain.

murieldechamay had warned us "This is a von Halstern feast: it'll be meat, meat, and more meat." There were a reasonable number of non-meat dishes, but the description was basically accurate. The special theme for the day seemed to be "Bambi": I had about three slices of ground-venison pie with lunch, a bit of venison jerky in the afternoon, a bowl of venison-and-barley stew with dinner, and we brought home some leftovers of both the pie and the stew. There was also roast pork (which went nicely with the very spicy apple-garlic (?) sauce), and fall-off-the-spoon-tender beef, and spinach, and other good stuff, of all of which I was unable to eat as much as my tastebuds wanted because I was so full from dayboard.

No after-dinner dancing was scheduled, so we packed up and got home at the unheard-of hour of 8:30 PM.

Today (Sunday) was gorgeous, clear, and chilly. I was going to make pancakes or waffles for breakfast, but found we were short of ingredients, so I had to run to the grocery before finishing breakfast prep. We walked the Things for about an hour in the park (did I mention it was a gorgeous day?), then spent a less-pleasant hour at Home Depot and a hectic time at Trader Joe's (which I gather opened two days ago, so it was jammed). Once home, I tried to install a new ceiling light fixture in the bedroom, giving up because there didn't seem to be any way to attach the thing without an outlet box already installed behind the ceiling (I don't think there are any ceiling outlet boxes in this house, just wires and the occasional threaded rod coming out of the ceiling). As a fallback, I installed it in the enclosed porch, where the ceiling is (I think) solid enough to put screws into. Anybody know how difficult it is to install outlet boxes?

So... Friday afternoon we took the Things to the sitter, packed the car, and drove to Crossroads at Canterbury, the Chaucer-themed SCA event we've been looking forward to for a year. After that build-up, it couldn't possibly live up to expectations, but overall it was quite a good event, and some parts were incredible.

It was of course burdened by the addition of the Kingdom Rattan Champions' tourney, which predictably brought in a lot of people who had no interest in the theme of the event... but on the other hand, their presence covered the site rental, and left the organizers with less to worry about financially, so I shouldn't complain.

( Blow-by-blow account of the event )

Current Mood: tired

Let's see, what's happened recently?

I spent four days last week at the Computational Complexity Conference in Buffalo, where I renewed contacts with various complexity theorists. I also gave a "rump session" talk on my work on "Delayed Binary Search, or Playing Twenty Questions with a Procrastinator". The audience seemed to enjoy it: I got more questions than the previous two speakers combined, I was invited out to a bar by two of the research gods of the field, and by 11:00 the next morning two of the audience had made significant additions to the theory: David Schweizer found a recurrence that seemed to correctly describe the delay-2 case, and Andris Ambainis found a proof that the optimal algorithm took time log_ψn + O(1), where ψ satisfies ψ³ - ψ² = 1, exactly what would be predicted by Schweizer's recurrence. I decided this was significant enough to invite them to co-author. I told them I was busy for the next week, but wanted to submit the thing for a conference deadline July 7; I hope they're working on it now.

Thursday night I returned from Buffalo. I spent Friday grocery-shopping and pre-cooking for the SCA feast we prepared and served on Saturday. Various things went wrong: there was no firewood until over an hour after we arrived, so the legs of lamb started cooking later than they should have; we didn't know where to get water on site, so the rice started cooking later than it should have; the autocrat suffered a car accident; a misunderstanding led to me ferrying a search party up and down Flatbush Avenue searching for her while she was safely at the site and

shalmestere was doing last-minute preparations; a rainstorm hit just as we served the first course; etc. etc. But everybody seems to have enjoyed the food, nobody went hungry, and I'd call the whole thing a qualified success.

Unfortunately, we couldn't stay around for the night or the morning: we had dogs at home to feed and walk, and I had to catch a plane Sunday afternoon to Houston, where I am now and until next Sunday morning, attending a workshop on how to teach beginning programming using Scheme. Most of the participants don't know the Scheme language, so they're struggling to learn it; I, on the other hand, am primarily trying to learn how to teach from Scheme from someone who's been quite successful at it.

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