Preparing…

Ah, preparations. In a few days it’ll be time to start teaching a new class. The new semester will begin. This means I need to start getting ready, but of course, in the last few days I’ve finally hit a nice groove on the work I’ve been doing on The Project, and have knocked out – wait for it – a whole page! Yeah, I know, it does not sound like much but this is between a host of other tasks (some of which I will tell you about) and it was a complex page and full of things I wanted to try for the first time, not to mention I had to knock off rather a lot of rust. Now the rust is off, I’d love to get more done, but alas… prep. I’d show you some of the results beyond the first panel I shared a few days ago (now with the colours adjusted a bit – not quite so red, etc), but the page is the first of a visual motif I want to save for later. So I won’t be able to share much of the progress on this story at all.

Anyway, the good news is that it is a class I started some years ago, and so I get to have a lot of fun with a new bunch of enthusiastic juniors and seniors, exploring a topic that never stops giving – General Relativity. (See this post and those linked within for reports on the teaching of the class last time, in 2008.) I don’t expect that there’ll be any filmmakers visiting the class this time (that time it resulted in the excellent film by Phillip Shane on Einstein on the History Channel), but who knows? Phil and I are discussing another film project that will start this Winter/Spring (I hope) and so goodness knows where it’ll go. I’ll tell you about it in due course.

Other preparations involve things like reading tons of material for various committee meetings coming up, clearing a ton of detritus in the garden to prepare for some Winter planting (urgently, I must begin a new compost pile, using up a lot of the leaves I just gathered), and -very importantly- thinking over options for the various things I’d like to do to celebrate my visiting mum’s 80th birthday. This may involve a ton of cooking and baking… We shall see. There’s also preparation for various things concerning the Science Film Competition, with a bunch of reminders, invitations, and announcements to be sent out. (See more here.)

Ok, that all said, I’ll step back to the drawing desk for 30 minutes, before going off to join a dinner group at an interesting restaurant. Should be good. I’ll be updating you on some more things soon.

-cvj