Hooray for summer!

What I've been up to over the last few weeks:

• Finishing up the semester. I posted about that conference in April and we had two weeks of classes left when I got home. I could go into a rant about the students who were a total pain right at the end of the semester, so I have already done that on FB and IRL, so I'm just done with it now. Time to move on and plan the summer, right?
• Reading a new book. I'm sticking with fantasy books and am currently reading "Dune". I'm really enjoying it and look forward to the others in the series. It's slower-going than when I was reading about Harry and Lyra, so it's taken me a while to get through it and I'm not done yet. Grading also interfered with my reading time. ;)
• Getting back into exercising more consistently. I've gotten up early four days this week to get back into morning stationary bike riding. I LOVE getting it over with first thing- sometimes I forget that I even exercised! I got a bit lazy about it as the semester wore on, so now I have no excuse!
• Watching birds in my yard. We have a LOT of different birds that visit our feeder and yard and this is a great time of year to see them. For those who are interested, we see cardinals, house finches, red-bellied woodpeckers, tufted titmice, Carolina chickadees, grackles, white-breasted nuthatches, goldfinches and more at our feeder AND see blue birds, robins, house wrens, and others in the yard. I was really excited to see a couple rose-breasted grosbeaks at the feeder a few weeks ago (just passing through probably).
• Other various work-related things. We did another science day with the elementary school kids this week (including D's class). I planned a new one for the 4th graders so that they wouldn't be repeating what they did last year. I attended a memorial for one of our emeriti this week, too. He had retired LONG before I got here (by about 20 years), but I had met him once or twice and wanted to add to our department contingent. It was sad, even though I didn't really know him. I was thinking about how I may someday be attending such a service for current colleagues and that made me sad, too. The memorial also fell on the anniversary of my grandpa's death (almost 20 years ago).

Now that the semester is really over, I am trying to get organized and make a plan for the summer. I have another summer undergrad research student coming at the end of the month and my grad student is doing field work all summer. This is the last summer of funding for the Big Grant, so I want to do something constructive on that. I have a sense of urgency about getting some research done in the next few weeks, since D will be out of school the first week in June. Once she is home, it just feels like the weekend every day and makes it harder to stay focused on work. H will be teaching a class, so that might help.

I have some other things rolling around in my head about updating classes, so I may post about that soon (or on my real name blog). Now, I need to go read this paper that a co-author gave me WEEKS ago. Bad me!