Some random comments...

School has been pretty good so far this year, although my students are not as sociable as last year’s students were. But that class was a rare one indeed, and experience shows that type of class comes around once every few years at most. I was fortunate that only a few years prior to that class I had Wenjing and Preeti’s class, another special one.

Every year a handful of kids spend lots of time in my office, and they are the ones I bond with the most. I wonder if I went back through my records if I could recreate the list of all those “Math Lab” students? I still stay in contact with many of them, but others have totally vanished from my life (which is a bit sad when I think about it ☹).

The weather is fairly dismal this weekend but, hey, it’s still a weekend! And no matter how much I enjoy teaching, having time to sleep late, relax, write and read is always a pleasure. After I return to school Monday, I have another two days off, which is great!

Currently listening: Jean Luc Ponty first came to prominence in the rock world as a member of Frank Zappa’s band on some of his most acclaimed albums. Since then he has had a stellar solo career, and I am really enjoying his Life at Semper Opera. Jazz-rock fusion is one of my favorite types of progressive rock.

Currently reading: Clifford D. Simak was my first favorite writer when I discovered sf at the age of 14. He had so many outstanding stories and novels that periodically I go back and reread one of them. Right now I am reading A Choice of Gods, one of his loose trilogy of philosophical novels (along with Project Pope and A Heritage of Stars) he wrote late in his career. I still enjoy his pastoral musings tremendously, and I realized how much of an influence his writing was on my own Sashi series of stories.