After a lot of deep soul search­ing, I sus­pended this semes­ters stud­ies at Cor­nell. It wasn’t an easy deci­sion. But for the last few weeks I’ve felt stretched to the max­i­mum. The eight hours of com­mut­ing time was an absolute killer. I was also *just barely* keep­ing up with the read­ing. Add onto that trying to do a good job at RIT and being able to sup­port Drea — well some­thing just had to give. And Cor­nell was that something.

It was a dif­fi­cult deci­sion. The right deci­sion, but dif­fi­cult none the less.

I’m going to try to keep on my read­ing sched­ule. I mean, I bought the books! And I’ll be read­ing them next year. So I might as well get on it and start my immer­sion in those texts. Espe­cially since I’m hoping to con­tinue research­ing through­out this year.

Today, out­side the book­store at Cor­nell I was hugged by Touch­down, Cornell’s mascot. It was purely platonic.

All I know is that it was like 90+ degrees out. As you can see I was sweat­ing from walk­ing around campus. I can’t imag­ine what it was like inside that cos­tume. But one thing I can say, at least on the out­side, Touch­down had… well… some B.O. problems…

The first week of classes at RIT has been a blur. In part that’s because my only day to get out of class busi­ness done is Wednes­day. I teach effec­tively 6 straight hours Monday and Friday (its two dif­fer­ent sec­tions of the same class). Tues­days and Thurs­days are spent in Ithaca (today I cal­cu­lated that I spend over eight hours a week dri­ving to an from Cor­nell — that’s a whole busi­ness day).

What is a bit awk­ward is that the lab com­po­nent of my course is on Mon­days. The lec­ture is on Fri­days. So stu­dents are get­ting the so-​called “hands on experience” before we cover theory. Or at least that was what I had to work on this week. I think I’ve man­aged to come up with a plan that takes care of that for future weeks.

Ok, ’nuff typing, time to read anthro stuff.