Another one of my classes was locked down today. I’m sure I’ve said that recently. Probably about that class, but it is official official now. The syllabus has been uploaded. I’m not touching anything else with it, build-wise. Of course I have to work on lectures, but there’s time for that. For now, it is organized and mostly coherent.
The last thing to do was to fix the syllabus. Change the dates. Change the time and date details. Add some standard university boilerplate. Wonder why this was a nine-page document. My afternoon goal was to cut that down. Eventually, I made it five pages. Here’s how you do that.
You press the delete button a lot.
When you add things you have to delete things. Paragraphs and sentences can be made redundant. Then you can move sections around to take advantage of page breaks. Then you can reduce sentences to their Hemingwayesque destiny. Finally, you can just delete a whole two-page section with information that exists elsewhere, anyway. Voilà! Five pages!
If you’re not leaving the bulk of your work on the cutting room floor, you’re not doing your best work.
I also locked up my online presentations class with a new thumbnail image: owls staring at a computer. Tomorrow, I’ll go through my org comm class once more to make sure that it’s ready. Monday, I’ll put the finishing touches on the first week’s slide decks. Tuesday, I’ll hit the ground stumbling.
If you wanted to see the new sunglasses shelf in its natural location, and I’m sure no one did, here it is. One piece of scrap plywood for the back, two bits of leftover pine for the sides, one of the rip cut to match the other. Two other pieces of extra wood crosscut into shelves. Glue on the sides, brad nails on the shelves. Wood screws for the cleat, which was was also leftover. Six shelves, lots of sunglasses.
It does what I wanted it to do.
I hate it already.
I do not know why my lovely bride has two helmets in the garage. She can only wear one at a time. (She has at least three active helmets right now.)
The sunset looked promising from the backyard.
Over at the north corner there was a nice mixture of colors amidst the tangle of plants. The roses and the hydrangea are having a fine time of it. I think we might have developed a second hydrangea in there, somehow. Just there on the right the famous honeysuckle is sneaking into the shot.
Looking to the west, the sunset got serious quickly.
That’s a good argument to knock off work at key times. You can only catch that by chance unless you make the actual effort. Make the actual effort. You don’t want to miss views like that.
