okay.

That was a year. A year you don't want to hear about, blog.

I am roadtripping again. Stay tuned for content!

Let's face it, this will never be a knitting blog. There are many interesting events planned for this roadtrip. First, there will be mountains, then rivers, then possibly a cave. After that, barbeque. Also, football and family.

On the way home, there promises to be tourism! Stay tuned.

Good things!

Roscoe, soon to be Mike VI, likes his new digs. I don't think I ever saw the old Mike even look at the water. It's nice to see a young, alert tiger in that gorgeous habitat.







Gris Gris likes the new rug. Hopefully not as much as she liked the old rug. The living room is still the land of a thousand greens, but it looks a little more pulled together. It also smells much better.








New bathroom! With storage! And a much brighter light. But no mirror. Well, still.








Tigers!

Things I have been meaning to blog

It may be hard to tell from these two pictures, but LSU has the most beautiful campus anywhere. Part of the beauty comes from the centuries-old oak trees and the other plantings. Mizzou brags about the campus being a botanical garden, and I saw evidence of that, but none of that was as impressive as the giant oaks standing sentinel all over campus.


The other aesthethic is the similiarity of the buildings. Most of the buildings are Italianate, beige stone with red-tiled roofs. Even the newest buildings are built in the same style. When I was at LSU in the late 1980's, two new buildings, CEBA and what we called the Classroom Building (now A.P. Tureaud Hall) were not built in the same style, but times have changed.



We tubed the Potomac. I managed not to destroy my camera.









Or drown anyone.







My cell phone battery died right before I went to the Gee's Bend quilt exhibit at the Walters in Baltimore. The quilts were certainly impressive from an artistic and stitchery point of view, but a person wonders who needs a corduroy quilt in South Alabama... even in a house heated only by a wood stove. And a person wonders who would keep an avocado green corduroy quilt long enough for it to become art.

The river rolls all day

Yeah. That's me. That's a big ol' cruiser bike. I rode it about 6 miles down the Missouri, on the Katy Trail. Then I rode it back 6 miles. Do I look tired?

It was a pretty cool Mid-Missouri weekend: a little school work, a little fun, a little laundry, even a trip to the grocery.

Photoblog

The building where we have been working. For 12 hours at a time. That's not AP style, BTW. I'm definitely glad it's Friday! I finished the rough draft of my story on Teens & Technology and I went t-shirt shopping and picture taking.











Artsy-fartsy column picture! These are historic columns that are all that remain of the original Mizzou. Not a bad touch on an essentially bland campus.











All that construction is where the new Reynolds Journalism building will be. I'll grant them that their J-school buildings are newer than LSU's, and they probably smell better, too. An astonishing percentage of Mizzou students are there for Journalism, which also makes a person wonder.




Can't complain about the weather, though. I thought Missouri would be worse than Maryland, but it has been beautiful. Too bad I spend 12 hours a day in a room with a computer.

Re-grets

Today was pretty amazing. The institute is definitely getting more intense, in a good way. We actually had a straight-forward old-school LECTURE. No bells, no whistles, no audio-visuals. Kind of interesting, although I am clearly spoiled.

We also had a discussion of credibility in journalism that was poignant. The professor pointed out that journalistic credibility has declined since 1985... yes, and my students were born in 1991. They don't find anything credible--not journalists, not teachers, not their parents. Although they lack independence and basic life skills (some of them), they don't believe that the generation above them has any knowledge or ability. I find their cynicism charming, in some ways; irritating in others.

We went to KOMU, the TV station owned by Mizzou. THAT was fascinating, and filled me with regret. I could've taken a job at WNAT/WMIS when I was 15; I could've worked in radio (yes, I have a face made for radio), I could've learned to produce TV news. There's no good reason for why I didn't do that--I just didn't like country music, and I was afraid of being on Franklin Street alone at night. It was a fearful time in Natchez, right after Bobby Irby's murder... but that's no excuse.

I love what I do now, and I wouldn't want to trade my time at Olsson's for anything; I played Suzanne Vega's guitar, for goodness' sake! Today, though, I did play alternative universe in my head for a little while.

I. Have. Homework.

Like, seriously. Not grading papers or writing lesson plans. Honest-to-goodness homework. Whose idea was this again? Oh, right. Mine.

Sunday night was just dinner, too noisy to really get to know people. Monday was mostly people talking to, or possibly at, us. We learned that we are going to find an angle on "Teens Today" to write about. We are, er, not enthusiastic, but we go out, mostly in pairs, to accost young people. Now, one of my main problems with this is--when did I become a NOT young person? Cause here I was, thinking, man, I'm young! Also, I'm youthful. Apparently, those kids I teach are a whole different generation from me. Who are, of course, much worse than we ever were. And I have a problem with that, because I was bad. Yes, I was. No, I'm not going to tell you about it. A lot of my kids are better behaved and more responsible than I was, although I was probably smarter.

Well, so we got through the initial fear of talking to people and started to think of angles and stories. More on that later.

Today we walk into our classroom and find our name tents have been moved around. They moved me from the front to the back. Now, they were probably smart to do that, because I was enjoying the back row. On the other hand, I'm not good for the front row because I can't keep my mouth shut. But, we learned about design today and that was lovely. Now, I have to go do my design homework and then get some sleep. If I'm lucky, I'll get some pictures tomorrow--it is supposed to be a lot cooler, and we may get a little free time during daylight hours.