Back from a weekend in Samsonville. It is snowing today, not a really major storm though. Saturday was my mother's 75th birthday, my sister hosted a nice little celebration (what is little for us is a bash for most people, though. There were 12 people there).

Yesterday I spent a big part of the day working on my mother's computer, which I believe has crashed. I wound up bringing it back to Castleton with me, and I hooked up her old machine in its place. The old one works fine, although it is Windows ME, which sucks. But with high speed internet access, the difference is almost not noticeable. Luckily, I had bought her a flash drive about a month ago, and backed up her documents. So it isn't that much of a big deal if I can't fix it. While I was working on the machine, my father worked on my portable dishwasher (from Castleton). My mother made eggplant for me as a payment for my computer work, and I joked that I should just hand it over to my father, as payment for his repair of my dishwasher.

The blackboarding of class is going OK. The slowness of working over the Internet is a pretty major issue, though. I managed to get the audio files to work by subscribing to mediamax, which is a place for hosting files. I hope to not have to keep paying for that space, though, since the university really should be able to help me with this.

I had one of those anxiety dreams about the semester last night. When I was a student, those kind of dreams took two forms: one was that I'd arrive at school dressed completely inappropriately. Either wearing pajamas, or just underwear or no clothes at all or something. I have heard that this sort of dream is fairly common. For me, they usually happened when I was younger, in elementary or high school. I remember the odd thing was that no one else in the dream ever noticed, despite the fact that I was in a panic, trying to figure out what to do. When I was in college, the anxiety dream more often took the form of realizing that the semester was almost over, and I had not been to class at all or done any work.

They have a new variant now that I am an instructor. Last semester I dreamed that I arrived at the first day of class without a syllabus to hand out, and with a bunch of disorganized papers on the desk that I was frantically flipping through, trying in vain to find my notes and the handouts. I had no idea of what to say to class. Last night I dreamed that I screwed up the first several weeks of class by doing the wrong things. I forgot what we were doing in class and did not do the things I planned. After a disasterous class I realized my mistakes but it was too late to fix the problem.