Computer Problems

This weekend, we experienced technical problems on two fronts.

One involves our DSL.
I had been missing messages from my home account this past week, and some people to whom I sent messages were not getting them.
I thought this was a server problems until the DSL service from our phone provider quit completely yesterday.

We had bad weather both last weekend (1.5 inches of rain in 12 hours) and this weekend (0.5 inch of rain in 1 hour, thunder and lightning), so I wonder if that has something to do with it.
Last night, I spent over an hour on the phone with our ISP and then in three way conference call that the ISP tech support geek arranged with The Phone Company (TPC). I am pretty sure that the TCP techie was in India--and he could not contact the regional TCP Network Operations Center. So I can only hope that a ticket was made out to fix our problem.

This morning, I thought I'd pack up the laptop and head to UNM Student Union (SUB) to work on two different projects that I have half-done and on my computer. The SUB has wireless internet access. So I started up my computer and almost immediately, it crashed on me.
I hate that blue bios screen that says that Windows was shut down for it's own good.

A computer geek friend met me here to see if he could help.
First, we he thought it was the memory stick that was corrupt.
It wasn't.
Then he thought it was the wireless card.
Probably not.
It seems likely that some program I have at start up has a corrupted registry.
I have instructions to take the computer home and boot it up.
It will run a hard-drive disk check, which will take hours.
Then I should erase uninstall all of the extraneous programs.
And hope.

He did say that my computer is "long of tooth" and that I probably need to get a new one soon!
Oy. When it rains, it pours!

I'll probably be doing more lurking than posting until next weekend.

Training Update: In Which the Author Questions What She Is Doing

My first day of In-Person Training here in Illinois was a humdinger of a day.
Tired from all the excitement yesterday--a graduation, and a celebration luncheon,
traveling felt to me like an another full day in its own right, and I did not get to sleep until after midnight local time. And today--today!--well, let's just say that after more than 10 years as a school teacher, and years of other experiences before that--today I felt like I did not know a darn thing about my profession. I am having my doubts about my ability to do this.
I was inordinately tired and running on caffeine and nerves, with ears that stubbornly refused to clear, all which is a very bad combination. I am currently wondering about whether I am too old, too set in my ways to do this. So I did the only logical thing. When I went to Jewel to buy lunch stuff, I also got some Tahitian Vanilla Gelato. Ahhh. Life is good even if I am terminally bad at figuring out what the trainers want.

A few notes on the training techniques.

Overall, I think the trainer we have is very good. She understands the curriculum and she always points out what we are doing right first. And yet, everyone--rookies and teachers more experienced than I am --everyone seemed more and more nervous as the day progressed. For some of us, the problem is learning something new, but for me, some part of it is unlearning habits--and I do mean habits--that were inculcated either deliberately by our teacher education programs, or that were picked up unconsciously from other teachers.

The more I see of the IRD curriculum, the more impressed I am with the ideas that it represents. It is singularly focused at all levels on one primary goal: getting people to become absorbed in what they read so that they will read books and obtain pleasure and an education from reading. The curriculum is very structured in order to achieve that goal.

Finally I am being told that I talk too slowly and am too deliberate.
I think that's funny after all the years that I was told to slow down.

I spent years learning the Hilda Taba discussion format: a gentle, slow way to guide students towards generalizations.

Maybe it comes from teaching high school chemistry.
If I went even a bit faster than a deliberate pace, I could count on losing more than half the class. For most of these young people--even those who are very good students--chemistry is extremely difficult for them to get their heads around.

Maybe I have finally become--at last--a mostly native New Mexican.
Manana will come. And those people from the east (here defined as anything across the Pecos River), well, we all know that they talk way too fast. And anyway, why rush through life.

But maybe it's because of that dreadful anomia that comes with Tamoxifen.
At the time I had to write down every term I would use in a lecture because I couldn't count on remembering some of them, even though they were as familiar to me as my own name. Words like photosynthesis, chlorophyll, or natural selection.
And for me, although it got better, it has left me talking more slowly,
as I struggle sometimes to get certain words out of my mouth.

And it is really, really frustrating because I remember not struggling like that.

I know that I am an intelligent person. I love academia. I enjoy getting my head around new and exciting ideas. And that excitment of grasping something new, even before I can formulate the words, is extremely pleasurable to me.

And yes, that does mean I am likely a Geek.
Just last week someone said to me: "I think you misunderstood the question. Isn't what you are saying really that certain reading methods are useful?
How can reading a scientific paper be pleasurable?"

So.
I love books. Reading is almost as important to me as breathing.
And, to paraphrase Thoreau, if I had two dollars, I would buy bread with one to feed the body, and with the other I would buy a book to feed the soul.

But perhaps I am not right for this program.
It is not feeling like a good match.

Oy, I am so full of angst.
And here I thought I was too old for that!

It's That Time Again...

It's come down to the last two weeks of the semester for me and for MLC.

She had a paper due today and one due Wednesday.

I have a paper due on Thursday. It's the one about the neurogenic hypothesis for depression. It was interesting. It was exciting. Until about 1 PM today, when I realized that I still have about 5 pages to write and I am absolutely sick of the subject! I will be glad--glad!--when I hear that the hypothesis isn't so hot after all!

I have reached that point where I find myself dreaming about French Polynesia in the middle of a sentence about how SSRI's up regulate adult neurogenesis in the granular layer of the hippocampus. Soon I will be asking myself the existential questions:

Where do we come from?

What are we?

Where are we going?

And I know that I will truly have had enough when begin I answer them in neuroscientific jargon (with apologies to Paul Gauguin):

Where do we come from? Our memory for location appears to be formed in the posterior portions of the hippocampus.

What are we? Neurons that fire together wire together.

Where are we going? A genetic predisposition for depression can be triggered by environmental influences such as stress.

But my questions will continue with the one that plagues all graduate students as the final weeks of the semester loom large before them:

What was I thinking, anyway?

But no, I refuse to even try to answer that one!

French Polynesia is looking better and better. Sun. Sand. Palm trees...

...and no environmental stress.

I wonder if I have enough frequent flyer miles?

Hmmm. I'll check that out, as soon as I finish discussing the problems with the neurogenic hypothesis.