Sub Ubi

Patience is a virtue I do not have.

By this, I don’t mean the run-of-the-mill, “When will this line move?!” kind of patience. I have that. The Bureau of Motor Vehicles does not scare me. I can wait with the best of them in a queue. I mean I have no patience for the big stuff: personal excellence, career advancement, and the like.

About three weeks into graduate school, I was ready to be a full professor. I wasn’t, but that’s how I felt. Or, in hindsight, I now see that I was impatient to get on with things. Now, I’ve learned from my first year as a member of the faculty at Olin that patience can be a good thing—that I have a lot to learn. Nor does it mean that I’ve magically found patience.

Consider:

On August 1st, the moving truck I rented was empty.

On August 2nd, the ceiling in our kitchen looked like this, because of a leak from the shower upstairs. It was fixed that day. (The shower, not the ceiling. The ceiling is still on the “to do” list.)

A week later, we enjoyed two relaxing days on Lake Cayuga with friends we had not seen in too long.

We also enjoyed ice cream.

On our way home, we spent an hour at the Corning Museum of Glass. I hope to go back, because one hour is nowhere near enough for this amazing museum.

We’ve spent time discovering our new hometown. Admittedly, it was a less exciting place in the past. Today, however, we can walk downtown to find locally owned stores, and are particularly excited because we can buy fresh, local milk. In glass bottles. That you return and have refilled.

Christian and I made and bottled our own beer while he was here. Admittedly, someone else took care of a lot of the process, but we’re finding that it gets better with every tasting. It was something I had never done before, and enjoyed the brewing and process a great deal.

With fresh tomatoes in season, I made salsa. I’ve never done this before, and it was marvelous.

I made a lot of salsa. It’s in the freezer now. I want a chest freezer, so in the future I can make more.

Although Christian is our first house guest (and a long-staying one at that), we also hosted friends from Olin on their way from Chicago to Boston. The evening they were here, we went to the county fair, and had ice cream and deep fried Oreos.

Christian and I have ported the Transterpreter to a new processor and robotics platform, and have learned quite a bit about a number of things along the way. A bit intense, but a good learning experience nevertheless. We can see a possible paper and future project directions based on our experiences.

And we have weathered the ongoing attacks of our neighbor’s cats. Apparently, the cats had friends here, because they often come by, crying to be let in. So far, our defenses are holding.

That’s month one. I’ve just finished the first week of classes. Should I be surprised when a day doesn’t go exactly as planned, because a server died in the department? No. Should I be surprised if I don’t have a perfectly smooth semester? No. I have to constantly remind myself that the past three months (and, indeed, the past year) were very intense, and very busy, and now is the time to start taking some deep breaths, settling in, and finding a groove that doesn’t involve 80-hour work weeks. Or, as the case has probably been lately, 90+ hour weeks.

I still want to take over the world. And I want everything I do to be amazing (not perfect—they’re similar, but different—amazing has more of a shazam! factor). And I want everything to be amazing right now. I don’t think this, consciously, of course. I live it. It’s subconscious, and it takes effort to step back and realize that I’m doing a pretty kick-ass job (especially with the salsa and beer), and it’s going to take some time to settle into a new home, a new job, and a new pace of life.

/me watches the clock for a few seconds…

Nope. That didn’t help. I’m still impatient.

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