Yesterday was the annual Math Dept barbecue, and we all had a good time eating, chatting, and playing croquet, pool and bocci. This is a good department which next year will be totally different with 5 people leaving (2 retirements, 1 maternity leave, 1 transfer, 1 leaving teaching) and 6 new people replacing them. Mike, Adrianne and I are the only tenured people, so we will be doing a lot of mentoring next year. Thankfully I will be dropping from 5 preps to 4 preps, but it should still be a very busy year.

We have a tradition of going to dinner whenever one of us has a birthday, but we have not gone out for Jean’s birthday (May 22nd) or Mark’s birthday (June 12th) yet, so this morning we are going to brunch. Tonight is our neighbor’s 60th birthday party, which is a scary age, haha.

Currently listening: John B. Sebastian’s boxed set Faithful Virtue, which basically contains all his recordings from the 1970s. Some of it is great stuff (such as all the material from his debut album), but sadly none of it is as well-known as his early Lovin’ Spoonful material (which was equally as good and the subject of another wonderful boxed set).

Currently reading: I have started reading The New Space Opera, and the first story in it was actually a planetary romance, which is my favorite type of futuristic science fiction. Strictly speaking, planetary romances are not “space opera,” although anything which encourages more planetary romances to be written is fine with me.