Receiving an Award & Other Thoughts

Let me start with some good news, this last Thursday night I attended the Purdue Excellence in Teaching ceremony and received a marble apple with three other colleagues for our pilot study we did last spring in our classes on how to use ChatGPT effectively and ethically. Before this, I think I said that I thought this was for 10 years of service at Purdue, but it was about our study that we won the $1,000 for in the spring to split to use for professional development. My mom drove up this week from North Carolina to be here, so it was nice to get dressed up and be there even if there wasn't a whole lot of pomp and circumstance.

Other than that, after finishing John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, I read his last novel The Winter of Our Discontent. I enjoyed it and there was a lot of relevance that cannot be overlooked even today. The main character, Ethan was relatable enough and someone I could empathize with on many levels. He was a lot smarter than he portrayed himself and once you realize what was going on and some of the choices he was making or had made, it was understandable to see how he convinced himself to do what he did but at the same time question them. I think of anything The Winter of Our Discontent is in sharp contrast with The Grapes of Wrath. The Grapes of Wrath at its core is about a family struggling in conditions of extreme poverty and being refugees in their own country while The Winter of Our Discontent is about a man who comes from old money and lives a fairly comfortable life in a small quaint American town. It is about a man's internal conflict with his strong morals and ethics and the pressures and desires outside of him by his family and society to gain wealth/status and material comforts. In a lot of ways, Steinbeck is genius in the way he is able to bring such diverse characters alive in our imaginations while criticizing capitalism and materialism. I am not sure, which novel I liked better, but as a man living in 2024 in a relatively stable position, I feel like I relate more to Ethan in The Winter of Our Discontent than the characters in The Grapes of Wrath

The weather has finally started to cool down since this weekend. I promised that I would share some pictures of the New England Asters that are currently blooming. The bees love them and it is good to see them enjoying these late season flowers. The last picture is of the one group of asters that is bent over but if it was standing up straight is taller than me. I found out that I should prune them as they are growing in the summer to make it bushier and less straggly like you can tell in the picture.

The middle picture is of a football game at Yena's high school that we went to last Friday with my mom. It was the first high school football game I went to since high school I think and that was fun, but hot.

These last three pictures are of some drinks and food. The first and last picture are versions of blueberry martinis that I made with the homemade blueberry infused vodka that I made. These cocktails turned out very nice with some other ingredients. I think the blueberry flavor did come out in these drinks because I cannot imagine them tasting the same with just regular vodka (they wouldn't look the same either). The second picture is of a fairly new pizza place in West Lafayette that I tried with my mom and it was really good. We tried the fig and prosciutto and hot honey garlic chicken pizzas. I love fig on pizza if it is done right, and this one did not disappoint with the fig, prosciutto, arugula, and walnuts!

Finally, we aren't sure when my mom is going to be able to go back to the cabin in North Carolina because of Hurricane Helene. If you have not heard, the mountains in Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina have been hit very hard. There are roads that are not passable and literally broken, so communities are completely cut off with no water, power, or cell phone service. It is not good! I can't believe I am saying this, but we need to all be prepared because this is what climate change is going to look like in the years to come with increasingly more extreme natural disasters in areas that we would normally not expect to get hit by them like the mountains from a hurricane.

It sadly makes me think of my third novel that I just finished this summer that has to do with the effects of climate change that ironically takes place in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee. This whole event makes me want to get to it, type it up and do all the editing that needs to be done, and send it out to anyone who would like to read it. I went on a trip this summer writing it and I feel like I still haven't fully recovered from the jet lag, haha!