It was cold here today. At the peak of the afternoon the thermometer, which is, of course, an app, said it was 32 degrees. But, just below that, all proud and sure of itself, was a line that read: Feels like 22°. But at least it was sunny, here on the inner coastal plain — where the heavy land and the green sands meet.
Yesterday it was 50, for a time. Right now, this evening, it feels like 15.
All of these numbers have been verified against other outputs, because I’m not the simple sort of person who thinks we don’t need weather forecasters or forecasts anymore because we’ve got phones.
Some people think of it that way. I talked with one over the holidays. He was playfully griping about his wife always watches the weather, and why is there so much weather, and where did the sports go on the nightly news.
Rare is the day when I can tell people what I do and they want to talk about it. So we did. And I’m pretty sure he came to regret it. As I explained … ahem … the National Weather Service, and Accuweather, and IBM and it’s super computer and The Weather Channel and the private equity firm that owns them now, and satellites and buoys and forecasters … to a man who has been in commercial aviation for longer than I’ve been alive.
Just your random guy, this would make sense. But you have to figure, a man that flew for Delta, and now boasts of flying rich people around on their whim, would have some passing familiarity with the demands of the atmosphere on the needs of his job. But, no, it’s right there, in your phone.
Friends, it is not.
Anyway, cold, but sunny. I will take the former because of the latter. I accepted it cheerily today, albeit with a shiver, and because this was the last night of the season when civil twilight arrives before 5:30 p.m. We are, friends and loved ones, making progress out of the darkened season.
It occurred to me the other evening, as I put on a fancy new sweatshirt, that a simple and small thing I would do if I had no cares in the world money, would be to buy up a bunch of sweatshirts. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of old sweatshirts, several of them decades old, and they occupy an important place in my mind and in my wardrobe. But there’s something magical about slipping on that new sweatshirt the first few times, when the inside is just so.
It is the tactile version of the new car smell. It is soft and luxurious, and maybe in a way most of our torsos don’t deserve. Of course, you say, that’s silly. When has a torso ever deserved anything. Others will say, a new sweatshirt isn’t an extravagance. But, no, I’m saying I’d figure out how many wearings and washings I could get out of each shirt before it didn’t fit this criteria any more. Then I’d give the thing away, and wear a new one. How many would that be a winter? Thirty? Forty? If I had money that I’d never miss, that’s a thing I would do.
I thought of that recently while I was slipping on this handsome little fellow.
It was a gift from my godmother-in-law (just go with it). She has three of us to shop for, though really she doesn’t need to buy me anything, so every year her sons-in-law and I get basically the same thing. And she’s good at it. I have some really nice lightweight pullovers from her thoughtfulness.
And if I spread out wearing them, they’ll last a long time. Decades, maybe.
I managed to avoid a Thursday meeting about a Tuesday meeting, which was to precede a meeting next week. I wrote something that kept the meeting from happening. I wrote it on spec last night. It was requested today. I blew it up and rewrote the thing, just to make a few points more carefully and clearly.
And then I wrote a document that, hopefully, will be of some help to my faculty colleagues. Our university does a wonderful job of building up support services and resources for the student body. And what is in the surrounding community is quite robust, as well.
The problem I have seen, on every campus I’ve worked on and probably the ones I attended, as well, is one of awareness. Not everyone knows about all of these programs. How could they? Why should they? So in each class I build a one-page document with some of the most important resources and share it with my students. Last semester I thought, I should share this with my colleagues, in case any of them would like to add to whatever they distribute. I did that earlier this week, and that led to a few people sharing what they share.
I began to think of synthesis. I said I would pull all of these together once the semester got under its own power and nothing needed my attention anymore.
Well, that’s silly, of course. Everything will always need our attention. So I just did the thing today. And what emerged was a three-page Google Doc full of campus and community resources. And maybe someone can make good use of them in the days ahead. Or maybe we can keep building the thing out in weeks and months to come, because, even at three pages, it is hardly complete.
So I wrote six useful pages before lunch. And then I had lunch. And late this afternoon I have built two more lectures. That means … hold on, I’m doing math.
…
…
Seriously, this takes a while …
… probably longer than one of those documents I wrote this morning …
I think approximately half of my semester’s course work is laid out.
Barring the unforeseen and small changes.
(This is the part I’ll keep repeating, if only to see the list grow smaller.) That should leave me only with grading the work of 93 people throughout the term, plus the 15 or 20 things I’ve planned to write, plus finishing two research projects, and three panel presentations. Plus committee work, my contract packet, whatever else pops up, and so on.
So I have some free time between now and early May, clearly. Obviously I volunteered to present guest lectures via Zoom in Minneapolis if a teacher somewhere needed it.
