And I lied in the last post

 Of course, I misled with the previous post: I missed something on the list --- preparing for a two week summer camp for middle school students: lots to do on that front too: but I will be getting paid for those two weeks!  

Yours, soon to be gainfully employed!
N.

ps I am, of course, still gainfully employed as a professor....

Happenings

 In academia, at least in the US, there are typically two long semesters.  In my case they run roughly from January until early May (with graduation festivities to follow) and mid August until mid December.

The period in between --- late spring and early summer --- is (again, in the US) generally unpaid unless one teaches summer classes, or has a research grant which pays summer salary.  In my case, I save during the year so that it doesn't matter that I don't get paid for three months.

Of course, that doesn't mean that I have an easy life doing nothing for weeks on end.  I'm currently 

• finishing revisions to a paper with two colleagues 
• working with colleagues on two different grant proposals
• planning a conference
• preparing a professional development course
• preparing a book proposal
• trying to write up two research papers
• preparing for a major talk in September

and that's just what pops into my mind immediately!

Yours, busy as a bee,

N.

End of semester happenings

 It's been a very nice few weeks: for my birthday, Boo surprised me with a birthday themed puzzle, her very first 9x9 puzzle!  And it's a lovely puzzle --- I solved it on video for her, and it subsequently got featured on BremSter, with the result that as of today, a few weeks later, it's had 1990 solves!

In related news, we put up our thousandth FullDeck and Missing a Few Cards puzzle on missingdeck.net, passed 600,000 solves, and over a million views of videos of people solving our puzzles.

We were honoured by the college with the Community Engagement award, largely for sudoku related outreach, and will be giving a TedX talk in the Fall on this topic.

Yours, thrilled by all of this,

N (or MaFC)

It's been a while

 It has been a while since I posted anything as BreadBox.  One of the last posts was that Boo was a student in Halifax, at University of King's College.  Well, she's now graduated, and Skibo is a senior there as well: he's looking to earn double Honors majors in History and Physics.  

In the meantime, I've taken up setting variant sudoku puzzles: I co-create with "FullDeck", setting together as "FullDeck and Missing a Few Cards".  

A couple of weeks ago, I drove up to Halifax to visit Boo and Skibo for a week, and while there, taught  both of them to start creating puzzles too!  I'm looking forward to their creations!

Yours, puzzlingly
N.  Or, MaFC.