We are off and running in Fall Term! Classes started last Monday (along with an opening Convo speech from Gov. Walz), and it's been off to the races ever since. So far, the term has felt very disjointed, and I don't feel like I've established any routines yet. I can partly chalk that up to the weird first week schedule (both Monday and Friday have a different class schedule), which makes it hard to get your footing. My taekwondo studio (the other anchor in my schedule) also had a modified class schedule last week.

I asked Muse to archive the files it could see and send them to my Google Drive. It did.

The more than 29,000 word text calls for ecological conversion due to “sin against creation and the Creator.”

I am generally a morning person. But even I have my limits. So when my alarm went off at 4:30 last Saturday morning, I groaned and wondered what exactly I was thinking when I filled out that Signup Genius form a few weeks back. Two and a half hours later, I waded into the shallows of a weedy lake, shifting into a moderately paced freestyle once the water reached my waist. Even though the water temp was warmer than the air (hello, late summer morning chill!), I was thankful to be wearing my wetsuit as I took my position in the water just past the first buoy, before the next wave of triathletes swam by.

I’ve begun a new project to synthesize the emerging literature around “technofascism” into an accessible explainer. Since I’m an educator…

Photo by Dina Badamshina on Unsplash It wasn't until the morning after we returned home, when I left my bedroom to head downstairs upon waking and saw the open bedroom door, that I registered Elder Kiddo's absence. Which, as I'm writing this, sounds utterly ridiculous, given that we'd just spent the better part of 5 days driving halfway across the country and back and helping to move into and set up an apartment -- meeting family members of roommates, assembling furniture, going on Target runs, hitting up the bookstore. I mentioned as we drove out that I had no idea how I'd react to the second year drop-off.

One of the many unwritten responsibilities of an academic job is peer review. Peer review is really just a fancy term for reading and evaluating the work of others. Peer review takes many forms: reading submitted journal articles or conference papers to determine if the research they describe is worth publishing (or if the research or writeup still needs work); reading grant proposals to determine whether they should be recommended for funding; once you get tenure, reading the scholarship of pre-tenure colleagues as part of the "should this person get tenure?" process; etc.

Minnesota's professional women's volleyball team will be known as the Minnesota Forge after the team unveiled the name and brand on Wednesday morning.

While I still have a good month and a half before the academic year starts, when August arrives I start to feel like summer is over. Maybe it's because August is when the high school activities start (marching band camp for Younger Kiddo is this week, for instance). Maybe it's because Elder Kiddo goes back to college next week. Maybe it's because pretty much every semester-based academic is panic-prepping and the panic is contagious. Or maybe it's because the sun is still sleeping when I get up and is setting when I'm driving home from my late-evening taekwondo classes.

My partner's mom celebrated a milestone birthday this year. To honor said milestone, we took a family trip on an Alaskan cruise in June -- my first trip to Alaska, and my first cruise. Confession: I have never had any desire to go on a traditional cruise. The Venn diagram of things I like to do on vacation and things I believed happen on cruises is 2 circles about 10 miles apart. The excesses, the environmental footprint, the exploitation of local economies, being trapped in one place with a lot of other people...no thank you.