pacing at the starting line

The first class I teach for this semester begins on Thursday. I have a training session to attend tomorrow (Wednesday). Vegetarian lunch provided--yes! Hopefully the training session would help me to finally incorporate the E3 platform in helping my students. Unlike Blackboard, which CMU used when I was teaching there, E3 is not so visually-intuitive but the students seem receptive enough to using it, so why not adopt this resource?

Still trying to figure out this work-family balance, if it is in fact a balance framework I should be striving for. During the winter break that just ended, which was really just solo parenting as I shepherd the kids between Hsinchu, Taipei, and Kaohsiung (lesson learned: the kids are only borderline ready in staying at hostels) while Daniel was at a conference in Italy, I started cramming on parenting skills again by re-reading books by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. There was a time when I decided to just use my own intuition since our family life was just too crazy with all the international moves, but the amount of bickering between the kids had become intolerable, and surprisingly Siblings Without Rivalry has helped a great deal in giving me some strategies that worked much better than just yelling for everyone to settle down. So now I have five other parenting books that's been standing on my bookshelf for a while and I plan to read (in some cases re-read) them all, probably during the one or half hour I have to myself before my own bedtime. Better than nothing, right?

I also recently acquired a cooking gadget called a Thermomix. Some people here call it "the German maid" because it's produced by a German company and it basically revolutionizes cooking. I'm not using that word lightly; just youtube or google it to get a shallow understanding of how much it dummy-proofs mainly stir-fry/steaming methods of cooking as well as baking preparation. It has a built-in scale and everything. Of course it costs literally more than a brand-new washing machine, but I think it's worth the investment in food safety (more and more of an issue in Taiwan as well) and just more ease of home cooking. I really need the motivation as eating out in Taiwan is still too convenient and habitual.

So, as a new semester begins, this is a little bit of what's been preoccupying me.