It's good to be home, and teaching!

I'm here!  We moved about a month ago, and the kids started daycare/school, and I started teaching.  It really feels like home here.  Since I'm from these parts, the small critters and plants that live here look normal, the crickets at night and the birds chirping in the morning sound normal, the weather is normal, the smells in the air are normal, the tap water tastes normal, and the people act normal most of the time.  Where we were, everything was different--sometimes for the better, but it just didn't feel like home.  It probably didn't help that I knew I wasn't likely to stay for too long.  Now I hope I'll be able to stay exactly here, in this house, in this department, until I retire or become emeritus.

The kids don't really remember where they were born, so from there perspective the weather is not normal here and they have noticed that.  But it doesn't seem to bother them, and they are making new friends in their classrooms and on our street.  We didn't know any kids near where we were living before, but now there are tons of them, and frequently they are out playing or biking on the sidewalks.

I have a large class of seniors in a class that's relatively unrelated to the other classes in our discipline.  That makes me feel better about my teaching because at least I don't have to prepare them for the next class in a sequence.  I'm a bit unsure of what I'm doing, but it seems to be going well so far.  Also, I hired someone already and have some collaborations getting started!  I am not sure how to decide what the people in my group will be doing, or how I'll get time to figure that out while I'm teaching, but anyway being a professor is amazing!  It's going to be even better in a few years when I have at least some vague idea of how to do all the things I'm supposed to be doing :)