I do, apparently, but as personal problems go it is mild and worth working through. There could be so many more. Your starter may not start, for example. Worse still, your alternator may not alternate.
Happily all of the various mechanical parts of my lovely automobile are doing just what they are supposed to do — taking the action, adding the -ER at the end to give it a name and then safely transporting me from A to B. I have my health. I have many other wonderful things we sometimes ask overlook. In that context, my confusion over whether it is the 25, the 26 or the twenty-thirtheighth is not the biggest problem in the world.
Oh, you didn’t even notice, but I’d mistakenly dated the blog. You didn’t notice, did you? Oh, good. If you had I would go out back and make a flogging spectacle of self-flagellation. So, a thousand humble apologies.
Beyond maintaining a straight gig line I don’t recall having any sort of obsession of minute detail before I built my first web page. I blame Tim Berners-Lee and the summer of 1996.
Anyway. Hit the phones today, in a terribly exacting way. Tis the season to call all of the high schools in the region and remind them about the upcoming journalism workshop for high school students at Samford. It is a tricky thing, catching teachers on the job. Often they are in class, as you might expect.
Some of them have voicemail. For others you must simply leave a message the old-fashioned way, with an office aide, and hope it gets through. Those I’ll be calling again next week.
The workshop, though, is a strong one. We’ll have several hundred students for a day of magazine, newspaper, yearbook and broadcast sessions. The high school students get to meet our faculty, visit our beautiful campus and hear from industry leaders. They get war stories, advice, the chance to get a little insight on what kind of work they could do one day and so on. It is a fine workshop, I’m glad I’ve had the chance to work on it the last two years.
Somehow, during the day of calling, I managed to get the operator. That’s not right. I landed in the operator’s voicemail. This would surprise most people, as we still think of the operator as a bank of individuals with a nasal voice sitting at a giant console full of patch cords. Operators have voicemail?
And what would the function of that be, anyway? I needed your assistance with a particularly tricky area code, and also, was feeling a bit lonely and wanted to chat. But you’re not there. So … I guess I’ll just Google it. Thanks, though.
So I left a message in a nasal tone, asking if they could ring me back and put me in touch with someone in Peoria.
I don’t know anyone in Peoria, but I’ve always been anxious to learn how a great many things played there. This would seem to be the time to find out.
I’m still waiting for the operator to return that call.
Made jambalaya for dinner. We’d picked up fresh sausage at the meat lab recently and I’d mentioned it to The Yankee. She thought that might be a good idea. For jambalaya, though, you need musical accompaniment. I considered Pandora, but I guard my minutes there carefully now. To the App Store!
You want zydeco? There is no app for that.
You can, however, get a stream from the legendary WWOZ. (Rush right now to grab yourself a wonderful community-supported radio experience.) It was jazz night, and that works for sausage and Cajun concoctions. Ultimately I think the Italian seasonings in the sausage muted the festivities in the jambalaya, but you live and learn.
I listened to jazz, from New Orleans, almost 400 miles away in my kitchen tonight over my phone, via my wireless network. This modern world, and the Internet will never cease to impress me. I credit Berners-Lee for that, too.
