24 Apr 2020
1434 dealing with student emails
1618 dealing with student emails
2014 having cake
2249 getting destroyed at trivia

Food: Tacos, Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake (never got around to lunch)

Fact: Leonard Nimoy was in a couple seasons of the TV show Mission Impossible starting in 1969 (so after he was already Mr. Spock)

Dumas got his stitches out today so he is back to being a collared dog.  We went for a walk and the white laberdoodle followed us much of the way to the high school before stopping in the middle of Greenway and just barking for ever.  In birding news saw the first Scarlet Piranga of the year, they are such pretty birds.  We really need to stop calling those things tanagers, it makes no sense.  Trivia went very poorly, for some reason eddie/ania/zac got all the easy questions (seriously, why is "name the 3 primiary Axis countries" a question) while Kevin/Maria and the 3 of us got all hard questions.  We were also impressed that the west coast team knew the Rangers were a hockey team, but they only hockey player they knew was Wayne Gretzky.  We eventually ended up asking them 1980's version entertainment for the middle piece.  Their final question was what does "IMF" stand for in regards to television.  After deciding it wasnt International Monetary Fund Zac came up with Impossible Mission Force.  Eddie was about to talk him out of it since they didnt think Mission Impossible was old enough to be in the 1983 version of Trivial Pursuit, but Maria accepted their answer too quickly.  Only other thing i did today was finish sorting out grades and deal with student emails.  So glad the semester is wrapping up.

23 Apr 2020

1539 looking at thrush sequences
2207 Grading exams
0013 Grading exams
0228 Grading exams


Food: Shrimp and Sausage with potatoes and peppers, Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake


Fact: The catacombs of Paris were once a large Paris mushroom producing area, in the 1880s they were producing 1000 tons a year between 300 farmers.  However, just 20 years later (possibly due to construction for the metro system) the farmers had all left the catacombs and were mainly producing their mushrooms outside the central portion of the city. 

Spent most of the day either emailing with students or grading exams.  I asked the students for feed back on the switch to online learning and overall they thought it went ok.  Multiple students commented on how enjoyable the intro videos were because they provided lighthearted distractions and a sense of normalcy (and cats meowing in the background made them smile).  Most of the problems people had were exam related, but based on how well they did i think it worked out ok.  The best request though was more puppies (so i sent her this puppy picture).  We also listened to the Yankees/Rays game which included a rain delay and a walkoff hit for a yankees victory.  Father and I have decided the best way to stream the games is to sync 2 streams one tv and one radio and mute the tv.  MLB allows you to overlay radio over TV but it really screws up the commercials and so each commercial break is torture for father.  What was funny this time around was with the rain delay we finally decided to give in and skip to the restart of the game, only to discover if we had waited 2 more minutes it would have resumed on it own. It took us longer than 2 minutes to resync the games.  The highlight of the day though was trying to figure out what exactly dinner was.  When we were walking mother said we were having shrimp and sausage or sausage and shrimp.  I asked her which it was going to be and father said it was critical so we could pair our beer correctly.  Eventually she said it would be shrimp and sausage since she had gotten out a pound of shrimp and just a bit of sausage.  So we agreed that sounded like a Stout would be the best.  When we got home i went to the outside fridge and got a couple stouts including a Narwal 2018 for me since it was a sea creature to go with the shrimp.  But then as she served it mother announced it was actually going to be a sausage and shrimp dish.  Luckily she made the cake to distract us.