Fall

I was realizing I haven't posted in a while - nothing since vacation. So here's a bit of catch-up to where we are.

Calvin had a blast at camp. I saw him in between his two sessions (they take the hold-overs into Two Harbors for a day at the beach and ice cream). There was no hint of home-sickness. He was excited to see me and equally excited to go stand in line for ice cream. So things were going well there.

Sweetie had a great, yet tiring, time on her cruise. (I'll try to get her to post about that adventure.) She had to follow that up with 10 days of educating, which only added to the exhaustion. She was quite glad when it was over and she could catch up on her sleep finally.

School has started. We have a new teacher this year. She is younger than our last several teachers, but seems to have an even temperament and good control of the kids and the curriculum. The Things have both said they like her. Homework has begun, which means daily struggles with Hobbes to get his done in a timely manner (and correctly). I'm sure my mom is smirking about this, but Sweetie takes the brunt of that whining. The school is down to seven kids this year (including a couple kindergarteners), but we are open. In order to stay open next year we need to raise at least $50k, and maybe more. Which brings us to...

PTA has started up again. Again, since we're such a small group, pretty much everyone is an officer - I'm President, and Sweetie is Treasurer. It's much harder to do things because if we want to do anything EVERYONE has to be involved or we don't have enough people to do it. So that's going to be a struggle, since everyone (us especially) are so busy with other things like...

Cub Scouts has started up. Hobbes is a Webelos 2 this year, and Calvin is a Wolf, and I'm the Wolf Den Leader. So far we have one other Wolf Cub, although I'm hoping to get at least one more. I'm trying to keep the Wolf meetings on the same day as the Webelos meetings, since it's $10 in gas for every trip across the island. Our first meeting was this week and the boys had a good time running and jumping and somersaulting. Hopefully they'll be equally enthusiastic about flag ceremonies.

Work has also been a bit of a distraction. I was invited to go to Yonsei University in South Korea to lead a workshop on microbial genome annotation (something I know quite a bit from my TIGR days). Preparing for the trip took up much of my spare time. Then I arrived to find they wanted a second 90 minute workshop on the Manatee annotation tool. I'll do another post soon just on the Korea trip (with pictures!). Another interesting work-related item was the Wrigley Advisory Board meeting that happened last week. They allow the local faculty to sit in on the meeting and attend the dinner. The Board is populated with some very interesting and nice people. Sweetie and I enjoyed having dinner with them (and having an evening Thing-less).

The weather has finally turned summer-like, just in time for the official "season" to be over. Although along with the warm weather, we've also had some rain. Yes, rain! In October! A little early, but welcome. Perhaps this means we'll have a wet winter. I'm not looking forward to my annual obsessive preoccupation with the sea and swell reports, but at least Buccaneer's Day is behind us.

One last note: We finally got back our pictures from our water-proof camera we got on vacation, so I posted some new photos to Vacation Day 8 and Vacation Day 11.