That's Hot.

Yeah. It's not just Paris Hilton saying that. It's seemingly everyone across the US. Last week, I drove from Illinois out to SC, and just about every temperature reading I saw was in the 90's. The entire week out in SC was in the 90's, as well. And sure enough, after one day cooling off into the mid-80's, it's back into the 90's for the next few days. That's hot. And muggy, too. Oh well.

I've spent a lot of time in the air conditioned comfort of my car the last week or so. 650 mile drive out to Greenville, SC. Then another 220 miles from Greenville to Charleston, SC. Then 220 miles back to Greenville. Then another 650 miles back to Urbana. Then another 150 up to Naperville. And another 150 back to Urbana. That's a lot of miles. Roughly 2000 miles in the past 8 days. I'll be perfectly content to just putz around town for the foreseeable future.

I suppose now's a good time to work on my dissertation.

Overall, we're getting there. I'm pretty much prepped for my first month of class. Still need to edit a few more sets of lecture slides, but I think that we're getting things there. My professor was kind enough to let me have his lecture slides, so I have something to start with. I've been doing a lot of editing, and I'm going to teach a slightly different course than he did, but it's great that I've got a proven template. I have a suspicion that students won't particularly love every minute of my class (since I'm going to work them relatively hard), but hopefully it'll be good for them when they're interviewing. For my work, I need to have a couple solid weeks of work before classes start up. I'd like to get a couple chapters written up and sent out to my advisor for review, so I can really get into designing stuff for the actual data collection. In any case, it's time to get stuff done.

The body's held up alright the last couple weeks. I actually shot a round of golf and played tennis twice over the last couple weeks. The tennis was okay, though I couldn't do the things that I used to with my serve - that will come if I actually start playing regularly. I'm still lousy at golf, though I think that with my current incarnation of game, I can become a guy who legitimately shoots around 100 pretty easily. I think that I have to re-tool my swing if I ever want to hit woods well, but my swing seems to be built well for long irons. I think that if I can figure out how to hit that 30-75 yard shot with a sand wedge (which I used to do reasonably well), I'll be enjoying myself a lot more out there.

In any case, I've got a visitor for the next week, so I finally got the guest bedroom/future studio cleaned up and set up roughly how I want it.