Those boring play tables with the beads on the curly wires

I'm a total sucker.

We took Ceci to Children's Mercy in Kansas City for her second follow-up visit. While we were in the waiting room at the special care clinic, Aaron and I were reading books to her. That got old shortly (she quickly prefers to eat them rather than read them), and Aaron saw a play table - the kind with the curly rods with wooden beads on them. The kind that I always thought seemed so boring. I mean, seriously, how boring is it to chase those little beads around on curly rods?

Anyway, he took Ceci over to it, and her eyes about popped out of her head. She reached both arms straight out and grabbed those rods and started frantically playing with the beads. At that exact moment, our name got called to see the doctor, and we literally had to pry Ceci off of that play table. One finger at a time. She didn't cry, but it was pretty apparent that that play table was the coolest thing she'd ever seen in her life. Including the cat.

So, after we got home... yep... I went and bought Ceci a mini version of the play table. You would have thought I'd bought her her very own puppy. See photos below...

Classes Are Over!

Yay! Let the summertime festivities begin! By festivities, I mean research from 7-5. I honestly love teaching very much, but it is so refreshing for summertime to arrive - my daily job activities change literally overnight. I am in the process of grading final projects for the undergrad structural steel design course, but I think I might be able to finish them tonight.

The next step is to clean my desk. When I was in college, I never understood how all the profs functioned in their little offices with paper piles stacked to the ceiling in every nook and cranny. Well, now I understand. In fact, I better than understand. I now look back and remember a few professors who did NOT have piles of stuff everywhere, and I have no clue how they did it. The only reasonable explanation I can think of it off-campus storage. Seriously. I throw these piles away weekly it seems, and they just come right back. They freak me out. I tell myself it gives me street cred with the students, but I think the piles may just scare them.

After I get my desk clean (next week at the earliest), it's paper-writing, proposal-writing, and lab activity season. :-) I have a grand total of three papers that are 80% written and just need revised before I can send them out. Revising these things is the hardest part. I rarely suffer from writer's block, so my revisions are more of an exercising in deletion. I tend to be a little verbose sometimes. Anyway, it will be good to get this sort of thing out the door in a few weeks.

The other cool thing we're doing is some really BIG testing of bridge girders. The test frame that we're going to use for loading the bridge girders is going to be constructed next week, and I'm pretty excited about that.

Travels

April was a busy month for me. The semester has been reaching a crescendo, and I had a lot of traveling to do for work. Most recently, I got back from Austin, TX, where the ASCE Structures Congress was held this year. It was a busy conference, and it turns out that I drove instead of flying. Yes, I am a swine-flu pansy-ass. What can I say? I sleep better at night.

It was great to get home after the long drive and see Aaron and Ceci. They were waiting on the front porch when I pulled in... little Ceci was in her boucer, and she seemed pretty happy to see me. :-) She could have puked, though, and I would have claimed that it was because she was happy to see me.

I have to say, the majority of I-35 between Lawrence, KS and Austin, TX is pretty damn boring. There were a few bright spots. The Flint Hills in Kansas are gorgeous. Every time I see them I think of how lovely they are, and how they are the antithesis of what people think of when they think 'Kansas'. Just beautiful, green, and rolling hills as far as the eye can see, with no houses, no barns, no trees. Just rolling plains. There was also a pretty area in southern Oklahoma, called Turner Falls. But the rest of the drive was preeeeeetty boring. It has been raining nonstop in TX, and we passed through some badly flooded areas. Cars underwater and whatnot.

Well, the students are giving their final presentations in Steel this week, and then the semester is over. Summertime is almost here.