Shaping up the spring semester. This will take between now and, say, May, to achieve. Perhaps April, if I am lucky. But the process has begun. One class is in good shape, and another is more or less all set — and I’m grateful for help from colleagues that allow that to be true. By tomorrow I’ll have some pretend momentum on my third class.

It’s also possible I’m fooling myself.

This morning I also did the traditional monthly cleaning of the computer. Many things were swept from the desktop. More files axed from the “downloads” folder. Other files and folders were reorganized in a tidier bundle. So determined was I to bring order to chaos that I did not bother at all to consider how I will never find all of those files again.

And so it was that I have 57 files and folders left on my desktop. I could get that down to 50 if I wanted to try.

Let’s try.

Ha! Forty-three items. Don’t ask me to hit 40.

There are also nine windows open — spreadsheets, word docs, browsers and such — and I can’t reduce that number. I’d just have to re-open one of them right away, and who has time to allow anything to load these days?

Go look out the back windows! Hurry!

I’d just seen it through the narrow slats of the closed blinds facing the front yard, too. Or, at least, I thought I had. I looked back to the east, though, and this was what I saw.

It was a plague of grackles (Quiscalus quiscula). Grackles have magnetite in their heads, beaks and necks. The magnetite allows the bird to use the earth’s geomagnetic fields to navigate flight. If I am reading the Audobon site correctly, they are around here year-round, this isn’t even their migratory season. I haven’t seen them in such large groups before.

I’d like to thank the two hawks who live in the tree line behind us for running them off.

On New Year’s Eve I finished out the best most humble little year of cycling I’ve ever enjoyed. It was one of those get-to-and-over an arbitrary number rides.

The purple line is what I actually did over the year, and despite the not-at-all consistent nature of that line, I was able to best two of the three humble goals I set at the beginning of the year. The final one proved just out of reach, but I am pleased with the effort.

I am still working my way through all of the Zwift routes (a project put on pause since last spring allowed for outdoor riding). So there I was in a simulated New York. I managed to claim a green jersey for holding the fastest sprint segment on the route.

I assumed that was only because all of the fast people were out celebrating.

So yesterday I reset the spreadsheets for another year. A blank slate. All of that progress goen. On yesterday’s ride I worked my way through one of the Neokyo routes. Beaches, villages, countryside, downtown, a casino, more beaches. It was fast, but challenging. No special jerseys for that one. But, for this brief moment at least, I am ahead of where I was at this same time last year.

And that’ll be this year’s spreadsheet and graph, trying to stay ahead of last year’s marks. My legs are ready, he said while sitting in his office chair.

This is not for the historical marker content, which will be here tomorrow, of course. But I did see this one on our New Year’s Eve walk. It was at the other end of Main Street, in a neighboring town, which we finally explored that evening. It isn’t a part of the marker series because, though it is one town away, it is in a different county, which is beyond the current scope of the marker project.

But those Christmas lights, hanging from the tree above, they sure did do a nice job of lighting that stone, didn’t they?

One name at the top of the list has a star on either side. That’s Pvt. Elmer Morgan, who died in France just after the war ended. His body was brought home, where he received a full military funeral, with firing squad, horse-drawn caisson and a band. The old books say everyone turned out for the services. Assuming he shipped out with the unit — Company E, 303rd Ammunition Train, 78th Division — in May 1918, he arrived in England after 11 days at sea. They were quickly moved through England to Calais, France. The food was bad. Also:

Other disillusionments were in store for us. After dinner word spread that the canteen near by sold beer. A large percentage of the company immediately grabbed their canteens and departed swiftly in the direction of that establishment. The first one of the shock troops who reached his objective, came out with a glad smile on his lips, carefully removed the stopper from his canteen, took a long breath and raised it heavenward. After one swallow, he removed it and spat, remarking sadly “This ain’t beer.” Another dream shattered.

They marched and trained and built things on their way across France, it seems. Dodging the occasional air raid, learning to throw hand grenades as they moved. And, once, the King of England drove by them. In September 1918, they made it close to the front, being very near the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. They found themselves, as engineers, pretty close to the front line throughout the fall of 1918, working on bridges and railways, braving shelling and the occasional gassing panic. The last weeks of the formal war seemed to move pretty quickly for them, they seemed to be hampered more by lice than the enemy near the end, and then …

That night our slumbers were rudely interrupted by a modern Paul Revere, mounted on a spirited motorcycle, who dashed madly through the town yelling at the top of a very excellent pair of lungs, “The armistice is signed!” With shouts of **Get off that stuff!” “Where’d you get that stuff?” “Take that man’s name!” we rushed to the windows. But he was gone. From farther down the street came a volley of pistol shots, but whether the owner of the revolver was attempting to celebrate or trying to shoot the bearer of the glad tidings no man knoweth. Grumbling “same old stuff” we returned to bed.

The joke of it all was that the report was true. The next day as we marched through St. Mennehould a K. of C. Secretary (for some reason we seemed to place more reliance on his words than on those of any one else) confirmed the rumor, and if that was not enough a stray copy of the Herald was sufficient to convince the most skeptical. The armistice was really signed …

They kept drilling, kept working, and kept experiencing the war, even after it was over. The weather was the weather, the destruction they saw, and attempted to repair, was overwhelming, and so were the returning refugees and prisoners. They also briefly saw Gen. Pershing, and a circus — not one in the same. In February 1919, this dirty, grueling peace time, was when Elmer Morgan died. But it isn’t mentioned in the unit history. I wondered if I was skimming the correct book.

I did a few quick searches of the other names, in the order in which they appeared.

William Adams was a private in a depot brigade. Soldiers passed through those units as an administrative and supply function. Adams might have been one of the last friendly faces some of these guys saw when they were preparing to leave for the war, or one of the first ones they saw on their way back. He died in 1952 at 59.

If I’ve got the right one here, John W. Blake was a veteran of both The Great War and World War II. He was a machinist, and lived to celebrate his 90th birthday, in 1987.

Jesse Borton is our first Navy man. He was an electrician during the war. He died in 1958. I infer from his wife’s obituary that they lived in Wisconsin for a time, which is where she is buried. He is interred in California.

Lieutenant Harry B. Chalfant served in an ambulance company, the 165th, in the famed 42nd Infantry Division. He attended the University of North Carolina. He married a younger woman in 1936, and she died in South Carolina in 2006. Harry was in the Navy during the war, and worked in the lumber industry after, managing projects across South Carolina, before they retired to Florida in 1972.

Webster Coles returned from France, married his sweetheart and sold cars in his hometown. He died in 1959.

Another man, Lawrence Elliott, was also a car dealer. He turns up in an old newspaper clipping from 1950. Seems he was on vacation in Florida and there was a boating mishap. He was fishing just outside of Fort Myers when his boat tore itself apart. He was stranded in the swamps for 18 hours. He made it through, though one of the men he was with did not. Elliott lived to see the Reagan administration.

I wonder what it was about the local guys and car dealerships. Here’s another one. Allen C. Eastlack went in with his brother and dad and, at 18 or so if the math works out, landed one of the oldest Ford dealerships in the nation. It dates back to 1913, and is still in their family. Allen was an ambulance driver in France during the war, then came home and helped start the local Rotary Club, was a hospital trustee, member of the American Legion and mover and shaker in the local Republican party. He died in 1965. It looks like he lived right across the street from the dealership. Today there’s a bank where his home was.

John Orens died in his home at 66. He worked in a dress factory and was a local fire chief for almost two decades. His wife died a few years after he did, but I think they might still have some daughters alive today.

Already in his 30s, Clarkson Pancoast was an old man by the time he shipped out to France with the 13th Engineers. They were attached to French forces. Looks like they worked with trains and the railways. He came back home and died in 1937.

Samuel Richman died, on Armistice Day, 1921, at age 25.

Harold Stratton liked to go fast. He raced cars at a local track. He might have been a member of a prominent Stratton family around these parts. Possibly, his grandfather, or an uncle a few generations back, had been a congressman. He was born in 1893 and lived to see men walk on the moon. He died in 1973, 80 years old.

Walter Scott sailed in the Navy, came home and became an engineman, and died of pneumonia in 1961. His widow survived him by four decades. His brother Raymond Scott was a coxswain in the Navy. He came home and he and his wife had three children, the oldest of which just died two years ago. Raymond was 73 when he passed away.

Clarence Stetser is buried not too far from where I am writing this. He died in his 50s.

Charles Standen was 87 when he died. He was a husband, a father of six. He had seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren when he passed away in 1985. It still says “PFC, US Army, World War I” on his gravestone. His service seven decades prior is what was written in stone.

It’s a thin guess, but I think George Tighe might have served in the Navy. If I have the right man, he lived around this area until he passed at 89 years old.

Elvin Wolfe came home and took up a rural postal route after the war. He did that for at least two decades. He died in 1957, in his early 60s. His widow outlived him by almost 30 years.

The last name on the plaque is Sgt. Schuyler Wilkinson. He served in the national guard, the 104th Engineer, specifically. They were called up in June 1917 and shipped out a year later as an element of the AEF’s 29th Infantry Division. They served at Moatz, Grandchamps, Coublanc, and Lafford, principally attached to the French Army’s V Corps. They provided engineering support and combat engineering to the French and the Big Red One. They were returned to the U.S. in May of 1919 and Sgt. Wilkinson went home and raised a family of three children with his wife. He died on a trip to Florida in 1966, aged 73. Their three daughters all died within the last decade. One of them was a secretary, another worked in a nursing home in Georgia. The last one to pass away, Miriam Wilkinson Parker, was an educator. She did her undergraduate degree where I know teach. She took a master’s degree from the same university where I obtained my undergraduate degree, 880 miles away, and just 40 short years before I enrolled there.

Small world.