It’s April! Finally! :)
First up: Happy Birthday Hólmfríður! Today was your special day! 🙂
So yes, for those of you that are Icelandic-ally challenged: Finnur the Prankster posted a blog-post shortly after midnight today saying that we’d just bought a very expensive house, and then went on to detail all the things we needed to fix (leaks, roof-parts, flooring) before moving in. This was, of course, an April fool’s prank, so no, we haven’t bought a house – or even found one to begin with. Still, that house doesn’t look half bad!… 😉 Also, Finnur is still grinning ear to ear over all the responses he’s gotten today… 🙂
In other news, Anna is finally healthy, and returned to school today for the first time in a week. Ironically, Bjarki’s daycare was closed today due to a staff-day, so Bjarki hung out with grandma Anna all day to give poor Finnur a break. Yes, Mr. Works-From-Home has worked from home while minding a not-terribly-sick Anna, who in turn happily (ecstatically?) spent ridiculous hours on YouTube this past week. He appears to still be employed, so that seems to have gone ok.
On my end, this week marks the end of week #1 out of 3 of making and giving 4x2x40 minute lectures in one week. Why is this hard, and why am I’m whining so much? Well, it just sucks up a lot of time and energy. For example: each 40 minute block takes me about 3 hours to prepare (Yes, I’m making new slides, so shoot me! I need to be able to show images, and lots of them, and it saves me time writing on the whiteboard). Each block generally lasts for 50 minutes each of being in the classroom. So that’s about 4 hours per 40 minute lecture block. I have 8 of these blocks now, so I’m spending about 32 hours a week on lectures (or four workdays).
For my remaining workday, there are homeworks to assign, solutions to write/assemble, homeworks to grade, and attending (barely) to the course I’m taking on “Course design, assessment and evaluation“. And there is also recovery, because each lecture is pretty darn draining, thus very little gets done for the remainder of a lecture day. Hence: Lectures get written on adrenaline-rushes the evening before.
Now, regarding this week: The good news for this week was that I did manage to give four lectures, although, boy, was it hard to get going on writing lecture #4.
The bad news: Over this weekend, I need to a) cobble together homework assignments for both courses, which should have gotten done today. They didn’t get done today because: i) No Time! and ii) I Refuse To Work This Friday Evening Like I Did Last Week!; b) I need to solve last week’s homework assignment in my EM course, write it up properly, and then grade the submitted homeworks; c) I need to finish writing up an application for my job which is due Monday; d) I need to make a lecture for EM on Monday; oh do a lot of things for my job. and e) I’ve promised to serve as a photographer for Finnur’s niece’s confirmation on Sunday. Of all these, I’m really only looking forward to e)
Two more weeks… two more weeks…
