Wednesday, April 25, 2001
The grading for school has arrived in bulk, so time here has been precious. In the few spare (and private) moments I've had, I have continued to surf for cycling travelogues. There are so many to add to the cycling links page that I might have to create a separate page for them. Or I might have to become less retentive.
Cycling Around the World by a pair of Dutch cyclists (Paul van Roekel and Anja de Graaf) caught my eye for its clean, simple design. They include an account of a tour around the Grand Canyon.
3:55 PM CDT (GMT -5)
Monday, April 23, 2001
Owen returned from his Florida adventure last night. I didn't hear the phone, but his mother did and she retrieved him from the school at 3 AM this morning after his flight home. I have only seen the lump of him beneath the blankets of his bed. I haven't spoken to him yet, but his mother reports that Disney World is overly commercial (every ride, he says, disgorges at a gift shop), Epcot is cool, and the shuttle launch is almost as impressive as the gators lounging nearby.
The grading has arrived on the desk in bulk, so I must cut even the log short today.
3:45 PM CDT (GMT -5)
Saturday, April 21, 2001
The first full week of this very demanding schedule has ended and I am alive. Although I am very tired at the end of each day, I feel good. The classes seem to have gone extraordinarily well, maybe because I am better organized this cycle, or maybe because the euphoria of fatigue has seduced me.
When I haven't been working (and occasionally even when I am), I have daydreamed about measuring myself against different landscapes, if that's what I'm doing when I envision a day trip to one of the nearby campgrounds at Tuttle Puddle (about six miles), Tuttle Cove (about eight miles), Stockdale (twelve miles, maybe?), Carnahan Creek (fifteen?), or Milford (twenty-five?), or an overnight trip to Council Grove Reservoir (forty miles), or even a trip to Wilson Reservoir (over a hundred miles) on a long weekend. In the evenings, after work, I've browsed online accounts of bicycle trips across states or across the continent. I have linked several of these accounts on the cycling links page that I started a few weeks ago (a page that still lacks a link on the index page), but there are hundreds of other good ones out there.
My audacious plans haven't yet faced a hill or a headwind, but damn, I have enjoyed the planning, a time when no sweat or cramp or exhaustion � both physical and mental � can conspire to ravage the dream.
7:50 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Friday, April 20, 2001
Shuttle launches have become almost routine. Unless something goes horribly wrong, reports about them have fallen off the front page, or at least below the fold. However, a small boy who still marvels at the prospects and mysteries of space exploration has survived inside me, so I'm glad that Owen had a chance to watch in person as the Endeavour blasted off yesterday at Canaveral.
6:15 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Wednesday, April 18, 2001
In the wee hours before dawn today, Owen departed from his middle school bound for Kansas City International Airport, where he has by now caught a flight for Florida with about twenty classmates and a soon-to-be harried set of chaperones. He and his buds from science class will learn their Newtonian physics at Disney World and their quantum mechanics in a cramped motel room, where they'll sleep four to a room, two to a bed.
Meanwhile, Taylor's dreams of becoming an only child will be fulfilled until either Sunday, when Owen returns, or until Friday evening, when he will undoubtedly realize how boring his parents are. While Owen enjoys Disney World, Taylor will miss an hour of school so that he might enjoy the Landon Lecture delivered by historian Stephen Ambrose tomorrow afternoon at KSU.
Because someone asked, I've started to provide "name" anchors for each day's log entry to facilitate linking to a particular entry on a page containing a month's worth of entries.
3:30 PM CDT (GMT -5)
Tuesday, April 17, 2001
April's sweet showers have been piercing the drought of March to the root [thanks, Geoff] for over two weeks now and yet yesterday snow appeared in the air again. Winter 2001 just won't let go. This flurry had no chance of sticking to the ground. It just sputtered and then vanished, a last gasp, the overspray of February.
You can check here to see if you won a Pulitzer.
7:00 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Saturday, April 14, 2001
What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. No pain, no gain. If frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their asses hoppin'.
Okay, that last one doesn't fit with the theme of thriving on adversity, but it earns its place there as a clich�. Drained as I am of reason, sense, and imagination by my current load of six classes, I think that's reason enough to include that toad clich� here. Frog. Whatever. My butt is dragging, maybe that's why that last clich� belongs.
Despite the fatigue I felt at the end of each day of this new schedule, the classes have gone very well so far, I think. Maintaining that same vigor in the classroom throughout this cycle, however, will challenge my endurance.
Last night Owen had a birthday sleepover. He was joined by his friends and classmates, Alex, Daniel, Jeremy, Matthew, and Safa, in a dome tent they set up on the trampoline. Now, there's a confined space I wouldn't want to enter without laboratory-tested olfactory protection.
When they finished foraging for pizza and popcorn, the boys ran an extension cord to the trampoline, plugged in the small TV/VCR combo, and settled in for some movies (Species II and The Cell) under the stars. Later, while parents slept, Owen's uncles, bearing a ladder and water balloons, scaled the garage and bombed the drowsy innocents. The boys, being themselves unarmed and peace-loving peoples, retaliated by removing the ladder and swearing never to visit their uncles in the retirement home.
This morning, the boys lumbered off to their own homes to sleep, but not before devouring a box of pancake mix here. Owen sleeps still.
If I've linked it before, C-SPAN's companion site to the series American Writers: A Journey through History is worth a second look.
1:00 PM CDT (GMT -5)
Thursday, April 12, 2001
I set four new classes flying yesterday. Days like that both energize and exhaust me. High winds in the late afternoon and early evening knocked out the power in the building I was in for the last class of the day. This class was one of the two other classes that were already underway (it started last week). The day wore me out, so I was grateful for an excuse to dismiss the students a little early from the dark classroom.
On the drive home on K-18, I saw that the winds had leveled several billboards near the airport. There was minor damage to tree limbs in town, but no damage at home.
Spring is putting on a good show this year. Fields and lawns are greening up. Last year's journal has a photo from March 31 of a pear in bloom; this year's long winter delayed the pear trees' blooming until this week. The redbuds are right on time, so they're sharing the stage with the pears. Forsythia haven't amounted to much this year � maybe the frost nipped them � but daffodils and tulips are underfoot everywhere.
6:10 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Tuesday, April 10, 2001
I had imagined an entry for the flotsam side of this creature, one about our dinner out Friday evening to celebrate a pair of birthdays in the family. The photos were ready. They're uploaded and set on a page already. The words weren't yet ready, but only because I'd imagined too many of them, methinks.
And then someone at work bailed just days before the new cycle begins tomorrow, and then someone else called to see if I might take one of the orphaned classes. The callers said they would cross my palm with silver, so I said, "You betcha!" Then today they called again and asked "Pretty please, will you take another?" and they promised to cross my palm with still more silver, so I asked "How much?" When they said how much, I said "You betcha" again, while visions of touring bikes and laptops and cashews and everything good spun in my head.
Of course, the "how much" is a set number, and of course, I knew the number, but I did enjoy hearing them say it. Both times.
So I've spent the last two days developing syllabi for first one class, and then another, neither of which I customarily teach. And not once until now did I wonder where I'll find the energy to teach these classes.
2:30 PM CDT (GMT -5)
Saturday, April 7, 2001
I couldn't sleep last night
, but I also couldn't write. The high winds and tornado warnings that signal spring here made me restless, I suppose, but I was too restless to focus well enough to write. I decided to spend the time trying to untangle the jumble of links on bikes and touring that I've accumulated in my obsessive reading in this area over the last few weeks. The page isn't complete � I've visited and bookmarked nearly a hundred others � but I forced myself to stop in the wee hours last night when I realized that I was assigning more and more links to the "Not Otherwise Classified" category.
The result of my night's play rests here.
11:55 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Friday, April 6, 2001
Any doubt I had
about whether Taylor might have been shamming when we kept him out of school for the first three days of this week vanished during my walk yesterday when I realized he had probably infected me. I had walked downtown to a bike shop (the Pathfinder) to indulge the equipment fetish that has accompanied my current bike-touring mania. After enjoying an hour talking to Pathfinder Dave about bikes and local politics, and after fondling a Cannondale he had marked down, I began the walk home. Thursday was the warmest day we've had so far this year � somewhere in the low eighties during our three cloudless minutes yesterday. It was also very humid again � another day that started with heavy fog. I first attributed the discomfort I felt on the trek home to the humidity, but by the time I arrived home with a pounding headache, I realized I was also feeling the discomfort that signals the onset of a fever.
Taylor (the little vector) has, of course, recovered. During the three days that he missed school, his classmates took the state science assessments. Making those tests up in class on his first day back put him a bit behind on his long division, so today's classwork came home with him as homework. He arrived home and set to work on it immediately so that "it won't be hanging over my head for the rest of the evening." What. A. Geek.
He was very disappointed that during his absence he missed an opportunity to dissect an owl pellet in class, but he was all atwitter about a performance at his school by the Welsh harpist, Catrin Finch, whom Prince Charles appointed Royal Harpist last year, and who is touring the U.S. for three weeks.
Harriet, the great grandmother-in-law, turns ninety this week. The clans will celebrate tonight with a dinner outing at the Brookville Hotel near Abilene.
7:40 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Wednesday, April 4, 2001
Either I've become more forgetful
or the Mavica has become the velveteen camera. On the drive to work yesterday, I saw through the gray rain that two air-force gray C-17 transports loomed on the runway at the local airport, and I immediately regretted that I had forgotten to tote the digital camera along, an oversight that would not have happened a year ago. No problem, I thought, because I had also forgotten to stop at the school to vote in the local city commission and school board elections. I would pick up the camera when I returned to town later between classes to vote.
Passing the airport on the way home, I noted that one of the planes had departed, but that one remained. Even one of them dwarfed our tiny airport terminal.
Alas, after voting and stopping by the house before returning to school for my last class of the day, I was distracted from my mission by a visit with the kids, and the Mavica remained at home.
To borrow from my favorite member of Spit, Glance & Upload, "irreparable damage. Damn age."
8:40 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Tuesday, April 3, 2001
When I haven't been grading work for classes that are ending, or preparing for the new classes that began yesterday, I have "disappeared" huge chunks of time harvesting more links on bicycles and bicycle touring. I suspect that if I persist that two things must happen: I'll have to devote a page or pages to them, and I'll burn out before the winter malaise sets in.
I won't make any overnight bike trips this summer, but I will try some day trips. I'm most excited about one to the Prairie Spirit Rail Trail south of Lawrence (about ninety miles away). Yesterday between classes, I turned up these pages about it:
On a different matter altogether, a friend in the Big City tried to push me toward postmodernist pre-postplenipotentiary structuralism with this link offering social theory action figures, Foucault in a box. I am always the last to hear!
8:00 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Sunday, April 1, 2001
The Northern Lights didn't appear to me here last night. The boys put up the trampoline yesterday, so last night we lay there until after midnight looking up through a leafless elm waiting for the lights to appear. At about 12:30, we gave up.
While searching for news of the Northern Lights earlier in the day, I returned to
SpaceWeather.com, a site offering news and information on meteorological and astronomical events. The site has a simple interface and a homespun feel, as if it's operated by talented amateurs rather than pros. It has always provided me reliable information. Right now as I post this, the site is busy and won't connect.
8:45 AM CDT (GMT -6 or am I now GMT-5? Maybe SpaceWeather.com can answer that.)
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Copyright � 2001 by R.C. Patterson. All rights reserved. Act like it matters.
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