This past week was one of the busiest I've had in a long time.

After five days of no childcare (planned closures for PD and parent-teacher conferences), we rolled right into a short work week. A short work week in which I needed to jam a lot of stuff since I'm going out of town for a conference this week. I had projects related to outreach, instruction, a research poster presentation, and our website usability tests. Those needed to cover both this week, the week I'm gone, and in preparation for the first days I'm back. This was on top of needing to prepare the material for my conference presentation on Wednesday. Oh! And, due to a deadline for another conference, I had to work on the deck for that. 

Additionally, my brother was in town and I wanted to squeeze in a dinner with a friend. Plus, as a nervous traveler, the week before a trip always sees me making lists, gathering stuff to pack, and generally fretting about what could go wrong. (Still nervous there is not going to be an Uber around when I call for very early tomorrow morning.)

There was so much on my plate, I ended up fully time boxing my week. I don't love doing this because it makes it hard for students to schedule appointments with me, but I could not help it this week. I needed to see, hour by hour, what I needed to accomplish this week. Aside from not finishing a slide deck, I was mostly successful. 

How do you get through busy weeks?

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Slowly making my way through The Cheese Chronicles by Liz Thorpe. I always had a vague awareness of how cheese was made, but this book has given me a much clearer idea of the complex process. Plus, I now have new words to describe the flavor and aroma of cheese. Lanoliny is a fun one.

*Books shared here are affiliate links for Bookshop.org

• More of this please. It's good for so many reasons. [WaPo - gift link]

• Systems of authority and the problem of time. [Culture Study]

• Now I'm trying to picture the scenarios in which I would need to outrun these things. [Lifehacker]

• The emerging Instapot crash. [EATER]

• I gotta learn a few of these home maintenance tasks. [Real Simple]

• Capturing and creating family recipes. [Life Kit]

• Single family homes, NIMBY's, and the housing crisis. [The Daily]

• Coconuts are pretty amazing. [Gastropod]

• Confessions aren't always the truth. [Hidden Brain]

• In a "Sure, why not?" mood for a movie, we put on Jexi. This is helmed by Adam Devine whose zany bro-ness I don't mind. It's a rom-com where a smartphone's AI is the plot driver. It is rather crude but that just makes the social commentary all the more explicit. It seemed like the cast had a lot of fun making this one. [Netflix]

• I've seen Ocean's 13 many times. I enjoy the series, but the side plots in this one are great. The story of the workers at the dice factory is my favorite. Also, I always wondered, how much do they spend pulling off the con versus how much do they actually get? [Netflix]

• It's fall and I made a classic: grilled cheese and tomato soup. Nothing fancy with this. Just good ole cheese singles and condensed tomato soup. The one change is that we make the soup with milk instead of water. That was a trick my husband taught me and it's a subtle but noticeable change. [Campbell's]

• I made stromboli for the first time. It was easier than I thought it would be and the result was a thing of beauty. The dough cooked well and you could see each layer in the cross section. I followed the recipe for mushroom and pepperoni exactly. No changes. I would make this again as is. [Budget Bytes]

This gorgeous photo by Junji Takasago was a winner in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. I love the balance and ethereal quality of the image. [The Atlantic - may be paywalled]

Assuming the planes I’m on have Wi-Fi, I’m going to use the time to clear out my Feedly. Feedly is the RSS aggregator I moved to when Google Reader was sunsetted. It’s a great way to follow websites, blogs, newsletters, and social media. I love that I can folder and tag things for easy organization.

I am very excited to head out of town for the week. I haven’t been on a plan in four years.