Have been very busy teaching introductory econometrics and associated lab to my Econ 41-42 students. Fun, but a lot of work. So many little glitches in R-Markdown. Great, useful program, but bringing students up to speed, and being the one to introduce many of them to the proverbial “workaround mentality” is time-consuming.

Two very light fiction reads in past week: Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave, and Oliver Pötzsch’s The Hangman’s Daughter.  I cannot recommend either unless you have no alternative.  They were right there on our library’s new fiction shelf, so very convenient (normally I like our university librarians’ fiction reading selections).  Thank heavens I decided to take action and ordered through inter-library loan Kwei Quartey’s third Ghanaian detective novel.  I started it two days ago, quite good.

FAVL received a large donation, $10,000!, so I am ecstatic about that.  Our programs in Burkina Faso and Ghana will really benefit from having these unrestricted funds.  FAVL Treasurer Deb Garvey and I also finally packed up in last couple weeks 8 boxes of donated books, very high quality, and sent them off to Burkina Faso and Ghana.

I skied my first black run (well, just part of it) a couple weeks ago.  Thanks Jeff Schroeder. Very proud of myself.  It is hard starting things like this at 54.  Learning to play the piano actually is almost harder than skiing.  Thanks Jim Nette.  The weather has been very strange in Bear Valley and I am not flexible enough in my schedule to take advantage of some of the “never seen anything like it in 20 years” powder days (the resort uses “epic” a lot), but the coming weeks look more stable.  See you on the slopes!