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Monday

Monday / photo / Rowan — No Comments
13
Jan 25

Syllabus complete

I spent a full day happily typing away at the keyboard today. A full day at the home office. A full day and then some. It was productive. My new class is now prepared!

Except!

I still have to make the Canvas version of the class. But that’s just a lot of copy-paste, date setting, triple-checking the details, typing some fine print and so on. That’ll be all day Wednesday, I’m sure. The readings and videos are set. The grading schema is established. The first five or so classes are essentially prepared. I’m feeling pretty good about it.

Best of all, I got the thumbs up from my lovely bride, who said it looked like a class plan.

So, good. I turned to the other class. I’m teaching what I taught in the fall, and only one thing has changed in that class, so it’s a straightforward prep.

And I also copy edited two things for her. Funny. I asked her to look at a syllabus, which was about nine pages, without all of the boilerplate. She wrote a few notes on it. She sent me two documents, 12 pages, and I sent back a lot of track notes. I’m note sure that was an equal exchange on her part.

It got up to 44 whole degrees today, the warmest it’s been in a month or so. The long range forecasts suggest we might get a few more days like that this month. But before that, a bunch of more days at or below freezing.

So I went outside to bust up some ice from a great big puddle. It bested me yesterday, but not today! Showed that ice who’s boss, is what I did. Then I looked up to this beautiful view.

That’s a random moment in the middle of January, and it still looks like that. We’ve got it pretty good, I must say.

It’s time for the site’s most popular weekly feature, it’s time to check in with the kiddies! They’re happy to be back in their regular Monday spot, let me tell you.

I caught Phoebe getting ready to be wacky. The crouch-down pose is a big favorite in our house.

And Poseidon, we ran into him on one of his regular inspections of the guest bathroom.

You never know what’s going on with shower curtains. You’ve got to jump on cabinets and sniff them and look over them some times. You never know what’s going on with shower curtains.

Nothing was found.

But the kitties, as you can see, are doing well. Hope you are, too!

adventures / Caribbean / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
6
Jan 25

Snow day

It snowed, as forecast.

Not that you’d doubt it, because you’re trusting souls. And I, being forthright with the readers here, have given no reason for you to not believe me. But maybe you haven’t seen snow in a while. Here is a bit of hastily gather evidence from this morning.

We enjoyed chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, as is the snowy tradition.

By last night, we were hoping for snow just to have the pancakes.

It was a pleasant sight, and not nearly as bad as anticipated. The birds are out eating seeds. The roads are more quiet. Much of everything is closed for the day. The power never blinked. My kind of terror dome.

This afternoon, when the snow had finally exhausted itself, we went out to shovel the driveway.

Oh, I prepared the snow blower, but we only had three, maybe four inches of snow. That didn’t seem worth putting oil and gas in the blower, honestly. So I shoveled the sidewalk before my lovely bride realized it, and had gotten started on the driveway when she came outside. So we did that.

Then I looked over at our elderly neighbor’s driveway. It was cleaned. And then I thought, you know, another of our neighbors is out of town right now. Won’t be back until tomorrow, and has two or three new joints. Maybe that person shouldn’t be out there shoveling day old snow after a week of transnational travel. So we shoveled that driveway, too.

I thought it’d be a nice surprise. A nice mystery. But I looked up, and they have a camera covering the driveway, of course. Technology.

Once again in our yard, I did a quick inspection for snow related issues and noted the patio table, with some delight.

For some reason I want waffle fries now, though.

And that’s been today. Tomorrow will be different.

Ten years ago today, we were doing this …

Reading as we lazily sailed to the south Caribbean.

We might have been smarter in 2015 than we are today.

cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
30
Dec 24

Libraries and books and classes and things

So let us reset the scene. We have moved through Christmas. Everyone has returned home. No one knows what day it is. My grading is done. Final grades have been submitted. I have turned my mind fully to spring classes.

Fully is probably overstating it. But I’m working on stuff. One class is all but done. Twenty percent of the new class is done. Soon enough that one will become a sole focus.

Also, I want to go to the local small town library. I’d like to explain the library situation to you. We live in an unincorporated community. The small town next to us has a library that you might categorize as, “cute.” It’s staffed entirely by volunteers. It is open 26 hours a week — 20 in the summer.

In the county seat, over in the other direction, there’s a “Free Library.” That’s in the name. And it’s free if you live in the city. If you live in the county, as I do, that costs $15 a year. The free library is slightly better appointed than the cute library.

In the next county, where campus is, there is of course the campus library — currently under renovation. And there’s a library system, six branches of varying size, I’m sure. If I want to join that library, because I don’t live in the county, I could pay $100 a year for a membership.

But!

That larger library system is a member of consortium of 22 libraries and systems. If you’re a member of one of those, you have privileges at the larger system.

My cute library is not a part of that consortium.

You know, being out in the country has it’s benefits and its drawbacks. As I have documented, for the first year we were here we didn’t have garbage pickup. We don’t have road clearing. Somehow, the library thing is the one that annoys me.

None of this makes any sense, none of it matters, because there’s always the ILL, the Interlibrary Loan system.

Interlibrary Loan is a miraculous system. You simply find a title somewhere that you want, that’s not in your home library. You tell your library. They fetch the book for you, and then you get what you requested. The only thing is that ILL operates a little differently everywhere you are. Local rules and resources and all of that. My last campus library, for example, you had to go over to the library to pick it up. The place before that, they brought it to you. It was awesome.

Whatever it is, I have this feeling that the process here will be the weirdest one yet. I’ll find out in the next few days, maybe next week.

The bike riding continues. Last week I wrote of the speculation of trying to hit randomly collected goals that were just a little out of the realm of comfortable possibility, but definitely possible because I could see it, right there, on a spreadsheet. A document that serves only to taunt me.

Well, I decided to reach for all of those goals, most miles in a December, a round number, the circumference of the the planet (at this latitude). They were close to one another, but far away from me. And so I set out for it. After 40 miles on Christmas night, a bit more after that, 110-ish miles this weekend, there was a bad ride this afternoon, and then another one tonight.

The problem is that the ride earlier today was bad because I’m tired. Legs are almost dead. I am probably under-fueled. And the basement is a bit demoralizing at the moment.

Also, I have another long ride tomorrow.

Those big goals might have been a little ambitious. But you can’t get close and just stop, even on your arbitrary goals that mean, in the end, nothing at all. That’d just be rude.

And a bad way to end a year.

Stupid spreadsheet.

cycling / family / Monday / photo — Comments Off
23
Dec 24

The assemblage of the 23rd

The in-laws are here for the holidays. My mother spent Thanksgiving here, and they are here for Christmas. It still feels strange to not travel everywhere for the holidays, but it is also nice to make some of these moments in our home.

And don’t underestimate the practical value of not being constantly on the move. That’s not what it is about, but sometimes that’s what it becomes, which is not what it is about.

If that makes sense.

Anyway, they arrived safely, brought some cold down with them, and we will have a fine old time this week.

I walked by the Dickensian village at just the right time today. I enjoy the village. I’d vote to keep them out for longer, just for the classic scenes and all of the little activities and details you can find. The designs are charming, the lights in them, in the evening, are a delight.

And, today, the sun streaming in was creating these lovely little shadows.

I wish we had the space to display them all. (We have a lot.) Alas, we have a Catzilla.

When I hauled the garbage can to the end of the drive last night, I looked up to see …

… not drones. (That’s Orion. And if this confuses you, get an app, or crack a book.)

Let’s talk about the bike. I did nothing for the first two weeks of December. It was, I thought, an uncharacteristically long lull, and it felt like it. I rode 21 whole miles the weekend before this, just to see if my legs and feet could remember how to make tiny circles. I got in 70 miles on two days last week, just to see if I still could. This weekend I pedaled my way through 72 more miles.

Now we get to the problem of the spreadsheet. Since I log all of these things — in about three different ways — I know precisely where I am. I know what the trend lines look like, what’s possible, what is beyond reach and, dangerously, what might be feasible, if I stretch.

And that’s always the dilemma. Is it authentic if I see those benchmarks coming and push just a little more to get there. Even if only barely?

This is what I can get to, if I ride a lot in this last week: a new-to-me round number. It’s a small amount, so I don’t even want to say it aloud. I could finish the year with the number of miles equaling the circumference of the earth, at this latitude, anyway. (Next year I’ll finish my first equatorial circle of the earth.) Doing all of that also means I could also set a new record for the month of December.

In all, it seems unlikely. I had that lull to start the month, and time is short.

But if I push, I thought as I pedaled through 30 more miles today, if I could somehow get 300 more miles this week …

That’s not a lot. Except, to me, it most definitely is.

That spreadsheet just sits here, taunting me.

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16
Dec 24

Noisy videos

We aren’t getting drones. We are seeing flyovers from the Royal Canadian Air Force and advance elements of the 38th wing of Canada geese. They make a delightful racket.

(Delightful because they just fly right by. Keep it moving, geese.)

That was Saturday. Saturday night, if you’ll excuse the quality of the shot, Santa came through the neighborhood.

They do that every year. Isn’t that charming?