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three sentences

Three sentences about the past week

Bliiiiiiip.

Oof, I sort of knew that I hadn't been writing every night, but somehow a week slipped by. There's been a bunch of havoc at work, just more stuff than usual not working like it should. I played some pokego (but not as much as I needed to in order to hit Level 50 by next Tuesday, so that's probably not happening at this point, I guess we'll see). Did a bunch more driving with Juniper, including some highway time, which I continue to find surprising despite having been right there in the car at the time. :^ ) Didn't go to the Eggplant Party, in favor of pokego and general exhaustion. Got a bunch of XP on Tuesday and Wednesday, but still not enough to be on track to hit Level 50, but I guess we'll see.

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(no subject)

I'm on A Meal of Thorns this week talking about Melissa Scott's Burning Bright: why I love it, what makes it space opera or cyberpunk, and the mystery of the ending.

AAP conference

Posted by Dow

https://happydow.blogspot.com/2025/10/aap-conference.html

This past week, I attended the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference and Exhibition for the first time in many years. It was amazing! The sessions I joined were excellent, with really good speakers. I feel smarter already! I wish I could have attended more of the sessions, but it was tiring for me to drive back and forth downtown five days in a row. I'm unaccustomed to commuting in traffic more than once in a while! I managed, though, and it was worth it!

One bonus was seeing medical students from my program in attendance (over twenty of them!). One of our graduates presented a session on osteopathic medicine, too. I was proud of them all! Here we all are at lunch and in front of the famous Blue Bear at the Colorado Convention Center.

On one of the days, I met with a former residency mate and lunched at The Teacher's Lounge. This restaurant is very nice and located inside a former Denver Public School Building-turned-hotel. The hotel is The Slate Hotel, and I loved the pencil sign with a wonderfully sharp tip (how I love a well-sharpened pencil!!). The menus looked like composition books. Too cute! And my spicy fried chicken sandwich was yummy.

One super cool surprise was bumping into a kidlit friend at the conference. My two worlds collided in this moment! Annie Herzig is a super-talented illustrator, and she was hired to doodle thoughts from conference-goers. She designed the title and a few anchor illustrations, and then she filled the rest in via live drawings all weekend. Amazing!!

Funny thing: I'll be back at the Colorado Convention Center next month presenting for the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) conference. That's also a giant event! I have three panel sessions that I am a part of, so come by if you're in attendance.

Now to recover from all this week's excitement and learning!

https://happydow.blogspot.com/2025/10/aap-conference.html

(no subject)

My October AMS Feature Column, The Hypergeometric Flower Pot, follows a train of thought from high Balatro scores to a famous infinite series.

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three sentences

Three sentences about 2025-10-01

Long day of work yesterday. We've had a couple of outages lately, none of them caused by anything my particular team was doing, but everyone has their hair kinda on fire, and it's stressful. I was working on something that I was trying to finish before I had to leave to take Quentin to Marshals Academy, and ran into an unexpected and confusing snag, and ended up going to pokego Raid Hour after dropping him off anyway, but then went back to the car and spent an hour on my laptop (which I'd brought for this purpose) trying to figure out what was going on. I didn't, and then worked more on it once I get home, which I finally did.

(Marshals Academy is the LARP Adventure Program thing for high-schoolers, which LAP recently extended to include eighth-graders. Quentin did it over the summer, and is now continuing into the school year; among other things, it qualifies him to serve as a CIT for the after-school middle-school LARP program that LAP runs, which he's excited about starting, even though approximately a quarter of the participants will be older than him. :^ ) It's cool to see him picking up a teacher/mentor/leader sort of role like this; he is not our crazy little baby any more.)

Three sentences about 2025-09-30

Happy half birthdays to kiddos! They have collectively turned 30, and are pretty great. :^ ) We celebrated with sushi for dinner and Friendly's Butter Crunch ice cream sundaes for dessert.

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three sentences

Three sentences about six months

Bliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip.

On 2025-05-09, I said

(Huh, it's been less than a month since I posted? It feels like ages. Well, maybe I'll catch up a bit this weekend. Anyway, I am not back yet.)

hahaha no

Well, I'm obviously not going to catch up; I certainly don't remember details of the past almost six months down to a day level.

I've been thinking of starting again, but I just feel like I don't have anything good to say. So many things are so terrible; and yet pretty much everything in my little world is pretty much fine. It feels wrong to chirp away about the mundane pretty-much-fine things every day. It feels wrong to post three sentences of relentless doom every day, even if that's really the most interesting thing happening right now, by a lot.

And why even bother? Penn Jillette has a journal that he goes back and re-reads, which sounds so awesome. I'm not going to do that in any case, but if I did, what would I even want to read about? What would anyone else want to read about? I'm not writing the next Diary Of Anne Frank here, as our country slides into becoming a fascist dictatorship. Bleah.

Well, I guess just chirp away about mundane stuff, for now. I think I am not here to capture some sort of historical record of what's going on and what I'm doing, just to have slightly more contact with something slightly behind the 1600 sqft where I spend most of my time. So, hi.

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books

wednesday books

Chronicles of Avonlea, L. M. Montgomery. I've read the Anne series multiple times, but this was my first time with these short stories (which are only very loosely connected to Anne and her books). I was intrigued by

ladyherenya's comment that they were mostly about spinsters, especially as I'm still thinking of writing a spinster story myself with this Therese Gauss project. The stories were charming, though by the end it was a bit too much of traditional gender roles and romantic happily ever afters for me. Interesting to note that the book was published a year after Montgomery herself married, unromantically and unhappily, at the age of 37.

Puss in Boots, Ludwig Tieck, translated by Wikisource. Readaloud. I booklogged this fourth-wall-breaking satirical comedy when I first read it, but now I can report that it works as well as a readaloud as I'd hoped! (And I suspect it may even work better as a readaloud than dealing with the difficulties of actually staging it.) It is very clever and I am excessively fond of it. (And probably would be even more so if I got more of the cultural references.)

Silver and Lead, Seanan McGuire. Book 19 of October Daye; don't start here. At this point I'm following along with the story for the ride, but not going back to reread earlier books (though A is following along more closely and able to fill me in with hints and theories). Toby is still not particularly skilled at detective work, but as usual solves things by heroically charging in and assuming that everything will work out, which it does, though with the potential to cause more trouble in later books.