It is time to check in on the peony. It looks pretty good to me. I wonder if it will hold up under the rain.
Isn’t that typical? I’ve been talking about the weather. Noting its variation. Observing that we need the rain. I’ve been watching the drought monitor for a long while and, hey, we’ve been in a drought since last fall, and we’ll still be in one after this weekend’s weather passes by, I’m sure. And, yet, I’m complaining about the raindrops bending over a peony.
I’ll lament even more when some summer storm bends over the crape myrtle. Isn’t that typical?
Anyway, cool today. Cold, perhaps. We made it to 53 degrees. I’m starting to regret putting my winter clothes away two months ago. No, I will not go and fetch something out of the basement wardrobe, just for seasonal spite.
There is nothing exciting today. Well, nothing more exciting than this: I have gotten my work and my personal inboxes down to 30 items. I’ve also been arranging the order of the next few books I’m going to read. I’m going to read a lot this summer. That’s my gift to me. The only question is how many books I’ll keep going at one time — I used to read four at a time for reasons of convenience — or if that’s even a thing I need to do. It’s going to be a great summer.
The temperature has been falling from an abberrational 71 at midnight to the upper 50s, all day. Tomorrow we might hit 60. Saturday we’ll do well to stay in the mid-50s. Summertime!
I wonder how the peonies feel about this.
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation and sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. Enjoy. I still am!
This is the last week of this feature. (For now, anyway.) We are going to spend it all looking at the majesty of Malin Head, the northernmost part of Ireland.
I am grading. I will finish tomorrow. Using the power of will, I will will it to be done. It will be done. I have made great headway, but the alternatively best and worst thing is the little counter that shows me how much more there is to go.
Actually, maybe that’s the worst thing. The best thing is seeing people turn in good work and watching their grades improve. This has to do with how finals are weighted, maybe someone finally took it seriously, or it just all clicked into place. Whatever the individual reason, the grades are going in positive directions. I haven’t seen anything scary or negative. May the trends continue.
I was sent to the grocery store because my lovely bride had done the regular shopping, but forgot an ingredient for tonight’s dinner. So I volunteered to go. What’s one brief trip for one item compared to all of the shopping she does? You just go back to the dairy aisle, confront yourself with the modern age of dairy products, and grab the thing you need. Also, you might cruise by the cereal aisle for something you’ve lately been craving. There’s no need to get all the things you’ve been lately adding to your mental list, because why be efficient when you can go back again? What, then, is one brief trip? It is a pleasure to provide some brief relief to the bringer of groceries, the standard in lines, the regular pusher of the shopping cart.
But let’s talk about what you’re driving to the grocery store. Why are these trucks taller than the car? What do you think you are buying at the grocery store? You certainly aren’t filling the bed of the truck. It’s a sizable store, but I know you aren’t because you are doing the TikTok Combat Park Challenge for no reason whatsoever.
The person driving the truck on the left here, I saw them loading groceries. (In the cab, of course.) The man driving the truck on the right was sitting in his truck. You shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, but you can tell the price, and in this case, it is hard to imagine these trucks living a heavy duty lifestyle.
I bet they feel pretty gratified, right now, about gas prices, too.
Anyway, ricotta acquired. Self-check out checked out. I had determined to stop using those things, but the checkouts with employees were backed up considerably. Maybe that means other people are also over the whole “You aren’t paying me to do the work you are no longer paying your employees to do” concept. We’re all going to come to that conclusion before long, I think. Next time I go to the store, this will be my stand.
After I marvel at the oversized vehicles out front.
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?
Today was finals day. Two classes had their finals due this afternoon. These were done remotely and submitted online. To celebrate we, of course, went for a bike ride. It was a fast 20-miler, and then I got right back to it. I started the day knowing I had 144 papers to read, and knowing that 48 of those were going to come in today.
And for that hour, just a bit more than an hour, my empty mind drifted over to the questions I’d asked on the two finals. One class had four simple questions. Two hypotheticals I was asking the students to work through, and then two questions that were a tiny bit subjective. In the other class I had the students watch a program and answer a bunch of questions about it. You can run through all of those questions quite a few times while you’re not thinking about anything else.
I hope I caught all of my typos. I hope the students did well. I hope it was all clever enough to let them show what they’ve learned, how they’re thinking, what they’ve possibly gained from their time in my class.
Not too long after we got in, Canvas, the platform the university uses for online classwork, crashed and died.
One class had finished their allotted final window. The other was mid-final. About four people hadn’t submitted their final yet. Well.
Also, my online students have their submissions due on Monday. Who knows how long Canvas will be down? And some of those students manage very regimented schedules. Well.
There was nothing more from the university than that. During finals. Well.
(Update: It came back overnight, in fact, not too long after I shared my contingency plans with all of those students with work still outstanding. Problem solved. Can kicked down the road. Everything is now due next Tuesday.)
But I can start grading that one final right now. (Mini-update: They’re doing well.)
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?
I mentioned, Tuesday, my new custom-made lapel pin. Today I wore the second one I made and ordered. This is what I say at the end of each class, and it’s the last thing I say in my last lecture, which I build to all semester long.
Thanks for coming today. See you next time. Until then …
If that’s the way people think of me in the final analysis, then it’s worth repeating it.
And so I did it twice today, for the last two times. Weird, I always feel like I’m just getting to know the students, and that we’re all starting to feel comfortable in the room, when it’s time for the semester to end.
But it ended in a big way! In Rituals and Traditions we were joined by a colleague, the assistant athletic director for compliance and academic support, and the deputy athletic director for strategic initiatives and external engagement. They heard from five groups who have been working all semester on proposals for things that our athletic department to build traditions, increase student and community buy-in and improve the gameday experience. Those people were not prepared for how well the students did. Everyone was impressed, even the other students. One person said, “I thought our project was pretty good, but I wasn’t expecting everyone else’s to be so great.” No disrespect to that project, but that was a fair read.
I was proud to see their work come to fruition, and excited to see all of this come together in the context of this class I conceived out of my own interests, and then found plenty of literature to draw from will designing and implementing this class which I invented from whole cloth.
The athletic department people learned a lot because of their work, and because of their hustle. We conducted a survey and got 252 responses on the thing. The instrument told our students a lot and they leveraged that well, today.
Perhaps some thing or things that were said today will provide an inspiration or an impetus to the athletic department. That’s the idea. For certain the people that came to visit were impressed by what they heard and saw, which is great. I’m doing this class again in the fall. I hope to make the class even better.
In Criticism we closed the term by watching the almost avant-garde June 17, 1994.
We had just enough time at the end to talk about a few elements of the doc, and I gave them the final lecture, and someone came in to proctor evaluations.
In both classes I asked them, one more time, to be safe and be kind.
Outside tonight I was looking up at the moon and the clouds thinking about how fortunate I am to get to say that to groups of young people, over and over, for three months.
It was 9:22 when I took that photo. And after that I started thinking about how fortunate I am to have, now, the next couple of weeks to wrap up the semester’s work.
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?
We made it up to 89 degrees today. In a highly variable spring, this feels like the signal day, the one that convinces you that spring is actually, ya know, going to stick this time. It could be the sweat, on the small of your back. It could be that the sweat is telling you that this will probably turn right into summer. You’d like a nice long mild spring. You probably won’t get it. You’d definitely like this to happen before the second half of April.
That also means we’re in the final month of the semester, and boy, it feels like it. A nice warm, sunny, day like this, and we’re all ready to be outside already.
But first there was class. Today in Rituals and Traditions we talked about unhealthy ones. There’s a thing in Pittsburgh where people are stealing traffic cones and taking them into baseball games. It’s silly and probably fun, but also potentially dangerous and certainly theft. We also talked about sports where diet and weight issues create unhealthy rituals and problems for athletes, and some of the people that emulate them. We discussed the running of the bulls in Pamplona. I discussed the old Aggie bonfire and a whole host of things at the University of Mississippi.
We touched on hazing, binge drinking, and the Indians, Braves, Chiefs, and Redskins. We discussed the Seminoles earlier in the semester, and someone brought them up as a sort of contradiction today, which was great. Florida State makes a great effort to work with the local Seminole tribe and treat their imagery and representation with authenticity and honor. But not all of the Seminole approve. You’ll never get universal acceptance, and this is an important consideration. And so is your thinking and your receptivity to different stakeholders, and what you need to be mindful of, prepared for, and what it means to work through perceptions and circumstances that aren’t good for your team, your fans, or your league.
In Criticism we watched Slaying the Badger. This is a documentary about the 1989 Tour De France, one of the greatest editions of the modern race. I picked this because we have recently watched a football documentary and a basketball documentary, and there’s a lot to learn about watching something in a sport you don’t know very well. It says something about what we perceive, what we lose, and how we learn. Plus, it’s just a great story full of real and human drama.
This documentary lets you talk about multiple perspectives and different sides of stories, who’s here and who is not, and the effect of time, memory, and recollection. Also, it is a great film.
I’m buying the book and reading it this summer, finally.
I’m going to do a lot of reading this summer. That’s what I’ve decided this spring. First I have to finish catching up on everything. Or catch up on finishing everything. And also keep up on everything. And do the other things. It’s a lot to think about.
Which is what I thought about on the bike today. Good thing, too, since this was this week’s Worst Ride Ever™️. I didn’t know it when I started out, standing there staring at the wild almond.
I didn’t know it here, at the dogwood.
I was starting to figure it out around this tractor, though.
Here’s my shadow selfie. I think my shadow knew all along.
Same tractor, on the way back in.
And then the last little bit of road on the way back in.
This week’s Worst Ride Ever™️ was still (a very slow) 73 minutes on the bike.
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?
