Summer is Nigh

Although I still have a couple of hours of grading of projects to do (one class has a deadline of tomorrow for their equity analyses), it feels like my summer is beginning.

• I put in about 6 hours yesterday working on the "big-dataset" options project. Unfortunately, many of my files were corrupted, so I had to reestablish them. This is mostly low-level scut work - copying files over from multiple sources, doing some aggregating, indexing the data sets, and so on. As one of my friends puts is, it's all foreplay before the "real" data work starts (but I've been told foreplay is important).
  
• I got my bike back from the shop Monday, and have been out riding the last two days. Just damn - my legs and cardiovascular system are out of shape. I put in about 7-8 miles each day, and there weren't any major hills. Even so, I'm sore. Pain is nature's way of telling you you're fat, lazy, and out of shape. I figure it'll take about 2-3 weeks of almost daily riding to get my legs back, and twice that to get my lungs back.
  
• I've actually gone most of the way through my syllabi for the fall already. Since there were a couple of days last week that I didn't feel like doing any hard core work, I went over my notes for this semester (I teach the same classes next time) and made a few changes and a lot more notes. For once, I made the notes and changes while the semester was fresh in my mind.
• Finally, in honor of the end of the semester, Unknown Wife and I are taking in a matinee showing of Spider Man 3. Not too exciting a date, I know, but it's cheaper, we don't need a babysitter, and there are fewer kids around.
  

Finally, Unknown Son has really taken to his new bike. He's still on the training wheels, but he rides it after school, after dinner, and even before school. I told him once he gets comfortable with it the three of us (me, Unknown Son, and Unknown Daughter) can go on a stretch of the bike path (Unknown Wife doesn't have a bike, so she drives the pickup vehicle). There's a half-mile stretch and a 2 mile stretch. They can handle the half-mile, but we'll do the 2 mile one in about a month.

Enough Blogging -- Back to research!