One week...

...until next Wednesday. But also one week (roughly) since the beginning of school for the entire Ricardipus clan, except for me. Been there, done that, got a couple of diplomas and no, I don't have to teach medical students any more, thank goodness. Been there and done that too, for five years of graduate school. My sole investment in the new school year, apart from shuttling various and assorted Junior Ricardipi here and there, is in avoiding all of the frosh (translation: freshmen, first-year students) trampling around the downtown campus these days.

But now that Mrs. Ricardipus is off at teacher's college, our home seems to be filling up with binders, exercise books, various important-looking notices and other assorted bits of paper, and textbooks with titles like Engaging Minds: Learning and Teaching in a Complex World, Elementary and Middle School Mathematics, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, and the odd novel like Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which I might actually read myself. Oh, and American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang, which is also apparently part of the curriculum. It's a graphic novel featuring, among other things, a farting monkey. People who read it may, one day, be teaching your children, you know.

And me? Well, apart from unfortunately having discovered the shoot-em-up fun that is Cube, I'm just plugging away at the usual slog, helping people with grant applications for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (due Monday; thank goodness that will soon be over) and generally failing to answer Black Knight's confusing question about DNA splice junctions (oh, go look it up - actually, don't bother, it's probably not worth it). All in a day's work, really.