We had a lovely November this year, very warm. On December 1st, it started to snow. I guess Mother Nature is willing to stick to the schedule, for once.

At any rate, this morning there is a lack of agreement among local meterologists. The optimist says we'll be getting 4-6 inches in the next day. The pessimist says we'll get triple that. Seeing as I have to physically turn in a paper tomorrow, I'm hoping for less instead of more.

Also, I've decided that I will not use my bicycle until the wind-chill factor gets above zero again.

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A few weeks ago, I was one of two panelist in an academic session called "Today's Disabled Veterans." First we screened a rather anti-war film called "The Ground Truth," then had a roughly hour-long chat with the audience. The panel consisted of myself and a Air Force veteran, who had been a cargo plane loadmaster until 2006 or so. I don't want to be one of those that compare services, but I'm not quite sure how he came by his PTSD.

Anyway, it was a good session. We had about 20 attendees, including a rear admiral who got his BA from UB's history department many moons ago. He was attending incognito, but it's not hard to pick out a flag officer even if they are in civilian clothes. If nothing else, he had a better-tailored suit than any professor I've met.

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The good news is, there's a new X-Com game coming out. X-Com is a true classic, a turn-based small-unit tactics game combined with a strategic resource-management game. Both sections were deep and complicated, yet approachable. My entire dorm was playing this in the 94-95 school year.

The bad news is, the new one took everything good about the original and flushed it. The new X-Com is going to suck. As testimony thereof, I give you this, their official trailer.

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As I was packing up to leave seminar this evening, the professor asked "Have you always been so meticulous?" I was confused, until I realized he was looking at the stuff I was packing up. And it hit me, that I have been arrainging my stuff in the same way all semester in every class. My binder is open, two pens and a pencil arranged at the top of the binder. When I want to use the blue pen, I put the black pen in its spot. And my water bottle goes to the right.

I was surprised to discover that I'd been arrainging my stuff with such precision. I can only blame my Marine career. Aviation maintenance puts an premium on keeping track of one's tools, and flight equipment/parachute rigging takes that premium and ramps it up into obsession. When working on, say, a helmet, I'd always put my tools in the same places, so I could grab what I needed when I needed it, but also so I could tell at a glance that everything was there. Now I've transferred that habit to the tools of my new profession.

It was an interesting epiphany.

And I wish the paper I'd turned in today was better organized. The professor might rethink his judgment. It was not a very good paper at all. But this week is kind of a bad one for me, so I'm not as productive as I should be, and I wrote it very much at the last minute and without a decent thesis.

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On my bike ride in to class today, I had to pause and watch what I assume was a physics recitation. Two undergrads were at the base of one of the taller buildings on campus, with a dozen or so students on the roof. They were tossing pumpkins over the edge, and timing the gourds' fatal plummets. It looked like quite a bit of fun. It's too bad I didn't have time to ask who their instructor was, because now I'll never know what their results were.

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This evening I went to a concert starring Basia, who I'd never heard of. It's become a small world: she performs Latin Jazz. She's from Poland. Her band consisted of an American, an Englishman, a Sardinian, twins from Mauritania, and a Frenchman.

The music was excellent. She's very talented, as is her band. It was their first gig on the North American leg of their tour, and they did seem a little jet-lagged, but got it together after the first song. They did a two-hour set without an intermission, and seemed nicely crisp by the end.

The show was in a theater inside the Seneca Niagara Casino, and it was an interesting performance space. It was small, with stadium seating for 150 or 200. It had a thrust stage, which meant the audience surrounded the stage on three sides.

The biggest problem was the sound mixer, who had the speaker level much too high. Basia is vocally very talented, so there was no need to deafen the (very enthusiastic) audience.

I was there as a guest of my GF's father. I'm not saying he's a high roller– but the buffet had a line 60' long, which we bypassed after he waved a card.

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For years now, I've been making this point in conversations. But someone went and made a video:

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I live in an apartment complex at the edge of campus. The apartments are designated for graduate students and students with familes. Many residents are foreign students. So the resident life staff tries to make Halloween easy for those without much experience with American holiday customs.

Thus they had a Halloween party for the kiddies this afternoon, Friday October 29th. After the party was to be a group trick-or-treat, stopping at all the apartments that had volunteered to give out candy. Naturally, I'd signed up. I liked candy when I was a kid, and now that I'm an adult, this is a perfect excuse to eat the left-over stuff myself.

When I signed up, I was told that they were going to start trick-or-treating at about 6:30, when the party was over. Mindful of that schedule, I was in my room doing calisthenics this evening. I was figuring on finishing at about 5:20, getting a quick shower and changing into costume, and I'd be all set for the kids.

At 5:10, I'm nice and sweaty, doing leg-lifts, when the doorbell begins ringing insistently, the way kids do when they think pressing the button will make candy appear. Kind of like lab rats who have learned which button dispenses food. My roommate is in his room, and apparently notices none of these goings-on.

I jump up, yell "Coming!" (which does not stop the doorbell), rip open a bag of candy, run to the kitchen, dump the candy into a bowl (some falls on the floor- good thing I'm pet-less!) and then run with the candy bowl to the door.

Outside is a herd of perhaps twenty kids, with half that many doting parents. Almost all of the parents are using either video cameras or still cameras. As I begin doling out candy, I am painfully aware that I am:

• Unshaven (it's my day off!)
• Wearing a sweaty t-shirt and sweatpants
• Unshod

I hope the parents think I'm dressed up as Rocky or something.

The kids didn't care what I looked like, since I was doling out candy. I had Mini Reese's Cups, so I was giving two per child. One girl, perhaps five, politely said "I only need one," and handed her second piece back. Something ain't right with that child. Or, more likely, her parents spent a great deal of time impressing on her the rule that 'you take only a single piece of candy from the bowl,' and my actions were on obvious violation of that rule.

To conclude, it was fun seeing all the costumes, although being in a herd made it hard to distinguish who was what. But I was embarrassed about being unready for their arrival. I hate this feeling:

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I had a great time in class yesterday. It was the required intro class for all PhD candidates, so its mandate is to introduce us to the many different forms of historical scholarship. Yesterday was capitalist-centered economic history. Next week is Marxist history.

I flatter myself to think I'm pretty good at economics, for a historian. I don't freak out when confronted with calculus or statistics, and I do some light reading to keep up with current economic thinking.

Thus I was quite excited that this week our readings were Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and a new book by Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution. (de Vries doesn't have a Wikipedia entry. I think I may fix that tomorrow. He's one of the most widely-read current historians.) Anyway, it was all economic history. It became clear that the other eleven students (nine really, two were absent) had no idea how to handle de Vries, whose text included things like " ∑ p_i x_i = I = T_ww ". Serious Historiansâ„¢ are expected to know a little bit of Greek, but more on the order of "γνῶθι σεαυτόν" ("know thyself"). Math frightens them. I was having a grand old time talking with the professor about de Vries's work, while most of my fellow students were doing their best to hide. [My brother-in-law may recognize the equation from Gary Becker's work, that de Vries was building off of.]

Smith's work was also interesting. I'd never actully read him before, and we were all impressed by how modern he seemed. Not just in that many of his ideas are still essentially dogma, but also his book is written in a more modern style than most of the writings from the 1770s to which I have been exposed. I assume that the editors modernized the spellings, but his sentance and paragraph structure seem comparable to a rather verbose writer of the current time.

The class's one serious Marxist was confused by Smith. She was surprised by the extent of his sympathy for "combinations of workers" (i.e. unions) and his antipathy for and suspicion of capitalists. Still, I was surprised to have to argue with her that Smith wouldn't actually have agreed with Marx. What part of "invisible hand of the market" didn't she understand? Ah well.

Having had a great time in class, I picked up my backpack to leave, only to realize that the red blinking bike light I keep attached to the bag had broken. Curses! But all was not lost. I've been gently teased by my compatriots for never biking without two different red bike lights. Who is laughing now? Eh?

Turns out, I wasn't laughing either, because when I got down to my bike, I discovered that one of my bike toe-clips had become detached. I have no idea how- the clip was apparently undamaged, and the screws that should hold it were still firmly emplaced on the pedal. My best explanation is that gremlins had removed it then put the screws back just to mess with my head.

As a young adult, I carried a multi-tool with me wherever I went. The Marine Corps broke me of that habit, because for aviation maintenance, tool control is very very important. So I was without the resources necessary to fix my bike. I managed to get the dragging clip detached after about 15 minutes of work with my bare hands, which wasn't fun. Just as I finished, it started raining. If I'd not been delayed, I'd have been safely home by that time.

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