So, in this middle-of-the-night-instead-of-working posting, let's see what updates I can come up with. Hmm.
First: Jars, what great news! May all be as well and healthy and happy as possible, for all of you.
Aims, Callaluna - I can't imagine it being easy, but it seems from how you write that it's the good thing for you, so the hardships are worth it. Good luck.
All y'all - it's so good to read your updates! Fay and esse and Susan and erin and Raq and PMM and Stephanie and Jilli and Nora and John and sail and Barb and Strix and juliana and beth and sumi and Amy and Glamcookie and Fred and Anne and Theresa and Frank and and... and it's bad to name names because now I'm sure I've missed at least one and am already sorry in advance!
You know the basic important stuff, I guess - the much-loved khusband, PiBoy, Pi++Toddler (or is it Pi++Girl? When does it have to change?), physics, lecturing (so working at talking in front of students all the time, not in front of a computer as I had been during my MA and PhD), and the details of the daily runnings-around are pretty much covered by this, but at the same time, so much not.
Nothing - no matter how many large paragraphs I throw at any screen - can convey how impossibly lucky I feel that I got - and get, each and every day - to be part of the lives of those two wonderful exceptional rare people, who are still a little boy and a toddler (no, I really should get started calling her a girl by now). I have no idea what kind of cosmic lottery we filled in order to win such a prize, and then win another one, all over again. And, yeah, of course every parent feels that way, completely objectively, of course, and without any comparison to any other little human being who walks around the earth, and yet, I can't avoid but feel that I managed to really luck out in this, the 'Everybody feels that way, but in our case it's the rare time in which it's true' sort of way of looking at things, you know?
PiBoy is five and a half years old, and in his last year of kindergarten. Pi++LittleGirl is three and a half years old, and is at her first. I could post endlessly about them, embarrassingly so, and therefore I won't even start. I do realize that children's stories - as well as children's pictures - are mostly interesting maybe to a few family members of those children, and sometimes not even to them, so I won't go into all those little details who build the everyday pictures of their lives, and therefore of such a large part of mine. I'm deeply thankful that I got to experience with them those normal-boring-mundane details of their everyday. The fact that they are their normal-boring-mundane stuff coats them for me in all the colors and glitter possible.
With work, things are quite the same, and yet somewhat not. I'm a physics lecturer at a pre-academic program, just like I've been doing in the past few years, but the program grew extensively last year (due to bureaucratic reasons unrelated to the content of the classes), and suddenly I'm the head of the physics part, with a few lecturers and lab-instructors whom I have to coach and manage and who thought I'm a grow-up enough person to be in charge of others like that?
It increased my workload immensely (especially since I've realized that I have opinions - even strong opinions! - on how certain subjects should be taught, which ends up in me having to actually sit and write those opinions down, for the other lecturers to be able to teach accordingly, so that all the groups who are supposed to cover the same material actually do. Some of that stuff I can't find in any schoolbook, so I totally have to make it up as I go along. In fact, that's what I'm supposed to be doing right now, instead of rambling about meMeME, but there you go).
Also, last year I ended up agreeing to another project (before I knew about how much my regular job would grow), so last year was hectic to the point of - oh, I can't think of a proper comparison. Grading season was especially crazy, and between the khusband's illness, being adamant that (continued...)