Catching Up...

The past couple of days has been a nice stretch of catching up on life and paperwork, after putting them on hold to finish my term paper.

• Our group is mostly done moving into our new trailer/office. It's actually pretty luxurious--a lot more room than our old office, and we have windows! Inconceivable! (ours is the second from the right).
  
  
  
  
• My taxes are done, courtesy of H&R Block--both the US and Canada returns. Also, I ended up paying less than I expected--I guess that's what happens to the portion lost to taxes when your income does a nosedive as a graduate student.
  
• I have paid up tuition for next term, and completed various pieces of paperwork so that I get my stipend. That part always seemed like a scam to me--"You pay us some money, and then we pay you back your stipend." Yeah, I know, taxes, income, and all, but coming from New York, it seems like something that the Teamsters or the sanitation workers would have cooked up.
  
• Did a much-needed round of laundry; the weather has gotten nice enough that they were dried on the clothesline outside--a nice feeling.
  
• Took care of various hard drive backups; I think that everything important is now on at least two spindles, if not three.
  
• In the continuing saga of trying to reduce my landfill output, I took out the trash today at 62 days. No great shakes--nowhere near my record. Based on this rate, I'll need another four trash bags to finish off 2006, but that doesn't count time that I will be spending away from home this summer.

In addition, I finished my portion of grading final exams for the class I'm TAing. Overall, I thought being a TA was a positive experience--I sure learned the material in more excruciating detail than I ever would otherwise--it's a nice confidence booster, if I ever need to pull out the 'basic science' aspects in practicing building science. Definitely increased my awareness and appreciation for good teaching, and good course administration.

Hokay. Final on Thursday. Back to tooling.