So this weekend was the big Philly trip. Rather than leaving on Friday in a rush and tizzy, we waited until Saturday, arriving in Philly at noon-thirty, rather than early enough for the morning sessions. We grabbed lunch, walked around and revisited all of Wifey's old haunts back in the day with ex-Husbandry, though we couldn't locate Woody's and the old bujii art-cafe was be-shuttered. It was quite a bit of walking around (Rob Chin thought that I was going to Philly for the Anthropologie store rather than an ethnography conference) before we managed to check in to the hotel and lie down to canoodle for a few minutes before I ran off to the ethnography presentation my professor was giving. West Philly seemed very similar to Center City, just more collegey. A drink and celebration of new grant later, I was back in Center City, and Wifey and I went to a French restaurant, Brasserie Perrier, for dinner, which was bustling and probably friendlier than the few restaurants I've been to in New York. The creme brulee was enormous, but not as big as Wifey deserves. Heady with the quaintness and shortness of the entire city, we were tempted to try and hit Woody's, but it was too damn cold.

We slept in late, and failed in our attempt to walk around and get an early breakfast, so we ended up checking out first instead before enjoying a quiet French brunch of wet eggs amid Wharton-type locals. We were somehow reluctant to leave town right away and end up back in New York, so we kept explorer, even as burdened as we were. We kept on pushing back our departure, and Wifey wants to move to Philly to raise the kids there, or so he says. The schools sucks, at least. Unfortunately, they were closed as was the Market Terminal Market. Or something--one of those indoor markets with beeswax, organic produce, and uniformed Amish, fresh chocolate. We got tied up in Burlington Coat Factory of all places, which meant that we ended up leaving at 6 rather than 3. But luckily Wifey bought a nice soft-looking gray suit, with a backflap. This suit makes him look like a baby-penguin, but an erudite one. I managed to find some work shirts, a belt, and boots, without tax. We managed at the very end to discover the gate to Chinatown, having a quick Vietnamese snack, with Wifey gaining a honeydew-boba addiction. The train ride home was long, but we made it home safe, tired, but happy.

So Ibn meaninta blogabout Marvel Zombies. Neither Wifey nor Rob understand my obsession adequately. But Kirkman is a genius, and this here comic is pure brilliance--a virtuouso revisitation of all things Marvel, although with perhaps too much of an Avengers focus for my taste, which has a wonderful logical conclusiveness to it all. It's amazing the things which you can eat, the philosophical talkiness of it all, the Ellisian crossover crossovers, leaving just one question: original recipe or extra crispy?

So it's nice to have a Wednesday routine which doesn't have the usual school-parts of the routine. That is, just the office sitting around and writing grants (I have a supersecret 100k-waza I'm trying to tokui) and such rather than the actual pretending to teach students. I mean, my new Wednesdays are overbooked but rather nice in terms of the relative lack of teaching. It's a nice space to reflect, do all my reading, and generally do non-teacherly things.

So I am trying to reconstruct the menus from my time visiting at home for my annual tournament dropby:

Saturday:
Greenbeans with shredded pork
Baked chicken
Tofu with mushrooms and pork

Sunday:
Beef stew (american style with tomatoes, celery, and so on)
Rainbow trout
Green beans with blackbeans
Spring rolls (pork, zucchini, bean sprout, and carrot filling)

Monday:
Red-braised pork, daikon, and eggs
Beef with Broccoli and Mushrooms
Nappa with bean curd skin and meatballs
Eggplant with pork
Steamed meatloaf with tofu and tomatoes

My parents report they won't need to cook for two weeks. I believe them.

Every time I go back, it gets a little stranger and a little sadder. I mean, they've closed off the entire upstairs (three bedrooms), and turned it into a giant walk-in refrigerator, separated from the warm downstairs by a thick curtain. This thus means that they sleep in the formal dining room, and I ended up sleeping in the basement. The grandparents have stopped dying their hair. But at least the paternal unit has now found a job at the local community college as a lab assistant.

But it's good to back, as hectic as today was: airport, office, brooklyn meeting, practice, a special trip to l&l for wifey, and then finally home and cuddly now with wifey-poo. Poo.

So turnout was low, which meant that there was more tomfoolery, although tom was absent today. I don't even remember, but I was amused more than once today, or something. Meanwhile, today I managed to defeat 32 cubic feet of snow. In particular, it was 2 feet x 2 feet x 8 feet, which is plenty enough to allow me to skip suburi. Jack Bauer doesn't do suburi, though. Still, he kicks ass, though less impressively than in times past, I'd say.

So I'm more a little than annoyed by the ignorance of my peers. The topic is so middle school--prime factorization, gcd, and lcm. The point that I was trying to make was that prime factorization in order to calculate the gcd is stupid, especially since you already have the two numbers in question, so you had better use the fucking Euclidean algorithm. Prime factorization is in practice difficult, of course, and there are many cases, even in asking whether certain numbers are prime, where we are not looking for prime factors, but any factors. I mean, it's just getting old, teachers not knowing anything: It's all well and good that you tell your students about Mersenne primes, but why is it that none of them can actually explain why they must be of form 2^p-1 and not something else? Why are we still subjected to this fucking cake method, whereas the Euclidean algorithm actually has deeper intuitive applications? and let's not even get started with all of the other questions about primality testing by raising 2 to the N-1 power, etc, etc. I mean, it's just troubling, and it's frustrating that so many teachers are satisfied when students are merely excited, rather than probing and understanding.

So I had to break up a fight today, which was probably due to how I dropped my kamae in that first period of that class on this day this year. So the rest of the day i was fully of fury, and the students were somewhat unsympathetic. So tired now.

So I forgot to mention how Wifey ambushed me after practice on Thursday at the dojo having stayed late at Federal Court. We ended up in Little Italy where the waiters complimented his pink "corbata" in an effort to woo him in. But to little avail.

So today was a trip to the Brooklyn Museum with the kiddies, and we pulled off the miracle of going through the entire bloody museum in under an hour. But that meant that I at least managed to lunch with Alric in his neighborhood at a very pleasant and cheap Thai restaurant. I am still amused how he lives in "Bore-em" Hill. Hehehe. I also scored a major shoe-coup today, and should probably go out and buy more tomorrow while this tax-holiday still lasts. I really should have done more work this weekend, but with keiko and apartment-showing woes tomorrow, it's just going to be hard.