Fragments From Floyd

Still Life

I am at times apologetic about how many pictures I take (and show) of the barn. Can't say exactly why, but maybe because it is a kind of constant in the way of a mountain or lighthouse--not permanent, but relatively so, fixed and visible from most places in our sea of pasture grass and steep woods.

Our barn lighthouse stays the same while the seasons change around it. They flow like the current of an invisible river, morphing through spring shower, through the swirl of autumn leaves and under an early winter ice storm. The old barnboard weathers in place, grows character through decades. There is something here that speaks both of permanence and of the inevitability of age: what goes up must come down.

The old barn is a temporary fixed point on our terrain. Even mountains don't last.

Sounds Like a Plan

The weather monster is still breathing its cold breath down our necks. But will it foil our plans for world travel and mid-continental nuptials? Maybe. But not without a fight.

Instead of waiting an hour for scantron answer sheets to be graded after my exam today, I will grade them manually, and will do so from the airport motel tonight. From our room, I'll post grades to students, and email my spreadsheet to the registrar to transcribe onto the official paper rosters (this was an interesting negotiation with a true bean counter.) I'll be able to get home from RU in time to help get the pooch to Puppy Camp. The baddest weather isn't expected until late evening, by which time I'll be clicking away in my laptop tallying up my students academic fate. Gonna miss 'em, and that's the truth.

In the morning, if we call by 4:00 we hopefully can get the empty seats on a 7:00 flight that goes not north to ice-infested Cincinnati (like our original 12:00 departure) but south to rain-soaked Atlanta. We'll be in STL by 10:00.

By the way, though I can't make plans as they have largely been made for me, I hope to have a bit of settled time mid-afternoon Friday (3:00-ish) while some of the family goes to the airport to fetch my mom. Those blogger buddies who have mentioned a possible meetup can reach me by way of the front desk at Cheshire Lodge. Hope this works out but I am not in the drivers seat on this one. There may be ceremonial functions to attend. Maybe I have to help shred the confetti, I dunno. Also, Monday we made plans to not leave til later so we could spend time with MO relatives who now don't plan to be around on Monday. So looks like time to fill there as well.

Meanwhile, let's get packing. Hope to post a time or three from the road. STL motel isn't wireless but I have found the motherload of Barnes and Nobles, Panera Breads and Starbucks within a three mile radius of the motel. So I will get well-read, corpulent and overcaffeinated whilst I blog! See you on the other side.

The Icing on the Cake

When Ann stays over at the hospital, as she did last night, I usually sleep like a baby. I take up every square inch of bed; I flop and flail not worrying about anybody else; and I dream deeply. But not last night.

I woke up like a shotgun blast: what will happen if we can't get to the airport on Thursday?

This is a problem new to us. All our long married lives, we've managed to work around such issues by scrupulously avoiding taking trips in winter. But lo, our children have inflicted the matter upon us by the choice of their wedding date. Seems perhaps there is a reason for so many JUNE brides, ya think?

The worst possible combination of weather seems headed our way for 'after midnight Wednesday and into the day on Thursday." It includes snow and sleet, then sleet and freezing rain, then freezing rain. Thursday morning, we have to get the dog west to Floyd to the vet, then back home to pack, then east to Roanoke for a 12 noon flight out to Cincinnati and on to St Louis.

The very reality is that we might be damned if we do, damned if we don't. We can't drive 35 miles in an ice storm. We can't miss our son's wedding. But given the choice, he will get married whether we're there or not, though we'd all hope we could be. But we don't do anybody any good if we're off in the creek somewhere complicating what should be a joyous and memorable event 700 miles away.

And all this is complicated by the fact that I have a final to give and grade on Wednesday afternoon, leaving us no options to take an earlier flight (out of some airport other than Roanoke) or to help get the dog to the vet (a two human job in the past.)

I confess reluctantly, this little matter is nigglingly oppressive but out of our control. So I spent the wee hours preparing to accept that which I cannot change, knowing those who want us with them would rather us be safe at home than off in a ditch somewhere between Goose Creek and Shawsville.

Sights Better Left Unseen

My momma always said not to chew with my mouth open. Nobody wants to look at your food before it goes down, she said. And even a little kid could understand the logic of that bit of parental wisdom. Green peas and bright orange carrots, a bite of ground chuck and a big swig of milk just sort of lost their aesthetic appeal when masticated into a slurry of gray goo before being swallowed. What must the contents of a postprandial stomach look like? I couldn't imagine that anyone really wanted to know. But then while at Auburn years later, I heard about but never saw the fabled cow with a glass porthole in its side so you could watch the digestive process. I'm beginning to think that might be a land-grant college urban legend.

So, all of this came to mind this past week when we brought our new vacuum cleaner home and ran it over our Tsuga-enhanced carpets. You see, it's the new-fangled kind of dirt sucker that has the clear canister to contain all the inhaled suckings rather than the old-fashioned discretely opaque if expensive disposable paper vacuum bag. It is like vacuuming with your mouth open: all that slurry of dog hair, dust, firewood kibble and ladybugs appear unbidden in a disgusting gastric melange that human eyes should never see.

Speaking of which: ever wonder what your head would look like if it was run over by a steamroller? (Not really, just the photographic equivalent, perfectly bloodless, utterly bizarre and Safe For Work.)

I Only Have Ace for Yew

So. I have this little thing I've written and recorded and wanted to post as an audio file--heck, let's call it a Podcast and be oh so au courant. Now, I find plenty of places to put the piece in various directories for people to find it, though it is really only a few Fragments visitors that I anticipated possibly hearing it. I can upload it to my server space for storage if that's what I am supposed to do. Then do I just post a link to it from any of the various podcasting directories? Is this the most elegant way to do this?

This file is largish--a 5 MB mp3 file--and runs five minutes play time.

Suggestions about what to do with it that wouldn't make me look like the rank newbie that I am?

NOTE: The title has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this post, but may serve to call off the legal team being assembled to wage a litigious battle against this site and its author. Apparently, copyright violations issue from yesterday's use of the title "I Only Have ICE for YOU" and the originator of that phrase who also lives here in Floyd County may sue for damages. SO what I really meant to say just was exactly the title as it appears above. My hands hit the wrong keys, okay? It was a simple, honest mechanical-grammarical error. Nothing more. Call off your dogs. Sheesh! ; > ]}

UPDATE: I have found a home for my sound file--a story that Floyd Press readers will read this week while I'm in St. Louis attending the wedding of our final bird to fledge the nest. Go here to listen to Kodak Moments. I'm still open to other methods for soundfile storage and listening. Don't be shy.

I Only Have Ice for You

Long story short: Our Subaru fortunately stayed on the road, but didn't make it all the way up the road to our friends' house on Masons Knob down near Roanoke. And it may be there until we return from St. Louis a week from tomorrow, given the lack of thawing 'tween now and our last opportunity to get over to pick it up on Tuesday. (I'll spare the harrowing details since mom may read this and offer the lecture once more about how we should never have left the balmy south where they don't do winters.)

Given our slickery experience yesterday, Ann wasn't comfortable driving the clunky old Dodge 4WD so I just got back from taking her to work (a 2 hr round trip) only to find our road as bad as I've ever seen it. I called VDOT (on a Sunday? don't hold your breath) and left a request for "cinders, please, and ASAP." I do have to go back and pick her up this afternoon.

But the good to come from all of this is that Santa has deemed it a good return for his investment to give both Ann and me a pair of YakTrax for Christmas, having borrowed these from our friends so we could get from her truck with chains to her front door. Good choice, Santa. Better that than giving us a coupon for $10K to the orthopedist for a compound wrist fracture, don't ya think? Considering giving a pair of these emergency non-slip easy-on ice grippers to those on your gift list who 1) walk outdoors in winter at all, and 2) who have bones. This is the kind of thing you think of only after you realize it is so slick that, even though it's only a hundred feet from your car to the office or home, you can't get there from here.

Which reminds me to recycle my ice horror story-- that is a family winter favorite--later this week. If I'd had the YakTrax, though, there never would have been a story. That'da been a shame.

Sounds Like Christmas

I don't know about you, but listening to seasonal music on the radio any more this time of year puts me in a bad mood. The few stations I reach by way of my dashboard buttons go to 'whip them into a buying frenzy' mode. Guess that's why they're called "commercial" radio. But I get more than enough Santa presents elves raindeer snowflakes shoppers with their treasures in about a half hour. After that, for the month of December, I don't turn on the car radio.

But at home: here's a winter music suggestion. Go to Pandora. Create a new channel. In the window, type "Lo How a Rose Ere Blooming" and chose Mannheim Steamroller. You'll get an endless stream of nicely orchestrated instrumental music that is both soothing and inspirational. The season has engendered a wealth of creative works in good music; too bad that's been replaced with Mercenary Musak for Merrily Making Money. Ho ho ho.

Southern Snows

I saw a flat glassy surface, cobalt blue, reflecting-what?-maybe the sky or perhaps it was the underside of a frozen lake I was looking upon from below. And I could hear what sounded like bacon sizzling, spattering, far off. The sound might have been coming from this broad glistening frying pan surface before me but every time I tried to look at it, my vision carried past it or through it. Gradually I realized that I was waking from a winter dream.

The peppering of several forms of ice fell from three thousand feet, drop by grain toward the metal porch roof. Sleet, freezing rain, little balls of snow-I can't say what it was that I was hearing exactly in my dream last night that was still crackling this morning on the skillet lake of ice. I am no Eskimo and I don't have a hundred words for snow. Language fails me when it comes to winter. You see, I grew up southern.

Birmingham, Alabama, in my youth was not a place to experience real winter. When it happened-only two or three times in my childhood-snow was as magical as any fairy tale I had ever heard or imagined. It began when I awoke to find the walls of my bedroom radiating a strange pink glow and I was almost afraid. I listened for clues and could hear nothing-more nothing than I usually heard in our suburban neighborhood. There were no street noises, no distant city noises-a silence that I always remember when I hear Silent Night. All is bright.

In that first snow of a lifetime, I discovered that some of the things I had imagined about snow were not true. Not all snow compacted into tight round balls perfect for throwing at little brothers; and dry snow was not perfect for building forts or round-bellied men with corncob pipes. I might as well have tried to press a cup of dry flour between my mittened hands. I settled for throwing up handsful of the powdery confectioner's snow and watched it sparkle in the brittle dry December air. When finally the snow at last began to clump and stick to my boots, I could hardly wait to build my first snowman.

I didn't know how to start. With a few hints from the grown-ups, I learned to start with a nucleus of snow and roll it so it would gather more and more snowman skin, roll it until it became so massive and lumpy you and the next door neighbor kids couldn't roll it another time. But finally, we had made the base. Roll another one until it gets so big that if it were any bigger, the gang couldn't lift it up to the second level for the belly part of the abdominal snowman.

As the lumpish snowman parts rolled over and over and began to grow to respectable size, the snow also picked up grass, leaves and twigs, and even acorns. I was appalled. I had never seen such dermatological flaws in any of the pictures of a snowman in my story books of northern snows-books that planted in my young mind the ideals of true winter. This leprous lump was definitely not Frosty.

Even childhood fantasies, when finally birthed into the real world, may not be what you had anticipated, afflicted to one degree or another with warts and a rash. You just build your snowman with frozen hands and hope for the best. And you learn, in time, to ignore the acorns. Think of them as freckles.

This is a snippet from the possible future book whose tentative working title is "Nothing Ordinary: Reflections from Nameless Creek." Maybe I can compromise: find blog posts from the work on the manuscript! See--I'm working, boss. The blog posts are just little fragments from the magnum opus. Well, medium opus.

Zazzle Operational

Apparently there is a delay between getting something in 'in progress' status and getting it to 'publically accessible' status. The zizzle judges have to deem a shopkeeper's offerings as acceptible. Oh joy, my Winter Walk stamp (see yesterday's post) has been approved for purchase, for all of you who asked about it yesterday.

I'll put up two more very soon. Come and get 'em.

If I Only Had a...

The eternal quest for my replacement brain goes on. What digital organizer will help me compensate for the X shaped plots of rising units of information and falling units of cerebral information storage?

For years, this job belonged to Ecco Pro--an outliner that works wonderfully well at text storage but was left behind when URLs and images and such came to the digital world. I even tried to resurrect Ecco a month or so ago because it is elegant at creating brainstorming outlines that match the way I think when I have projects to plan. But what to do with clips and pix and web addresses and such?

For this need, I've been using OneNote for more than a year, more or less. Used with FireFox, it doesn't import web addresses when you collect snips of info. I must say, OneNote (which I was able to get for about ten bucks via academic discount) was wonderful on the overhead projector this year in class where I copied the lecture note handouts from Word onto OneNote and then supplemented those notes with additional weblinks and images stored in collapsed and invisible form in indented levels of each topic outline. However...

I am giving a new PIM called EverNote a hard look. I kept seeing it mentioned, but was put off by its first appearance, not realizing that there is quite a nice program here for information organization and retrieval that may well be the compromise between Ecco and OneNote. Like most such programs, it is hard to evaluate it until it contains a growing bank of information. But the best thing is--IT'S FREE! There is a FireFox extension that lets me select text and images on a webpage and automatically create a new EN note and weblink of the info. If I use it for nothing else, I'll use it for this. Check it out. It will be worth your time. Review here and User Stories here.

Stationery Front

Well I've futzed around now in this time in which I have sworn at all costs to avoid excessive distraction and what do I have to show for it? Very little. How little? Exactly the size of a postage stamp, actually.

Yesterday in an email, Fragments reader Judith pointed me to a page on CafePress where bloggers are displaying their wares, and she was especially interested in the postage stamps--about which I had blogged some months ago: these things are actually Post Office officially-sanctioned stamps! She allowed as how if there were FFF stamps, she might actually purchase some. So I set out to see how much trouble it would be to make it so. Lots. Lots of trouble, actually, but I was determined to see it through to the end, though CafePress's instructions were mind numbing and I ended up at Zazzle, finally, with a usable product displayed here. I have two other winter scenes ready for stamp-making later today, one being the 'burning bush' image of the ice covered spicebush by the barn that folks appreciated here last year. No, it was two years ago. My, how the winters come and go.

So, you can click this link (or the image to the left) and go to the purchase page, just to say you've seen it. Way I figure, I get nothing out of this until about 20 people order a book of stamps. Get rich scheme, this aren't. But it is sort of cool to see my own images where I'm used to seeing pictures of presidents and famous places. Hey, Goose Creek is famous, if you lower your scale of reference small enough!

Update: Not quite ready for prime time. Link to purchase only works for me and right now, it looks like I can only make the product publically available AFTER I purchase it myself. This smells fishy. Sigh.

End with a Whimper

This aborted week is hardly a triumphal exit to the semester. The Wx guys scared me away from Radford on Monday with the dire predictions of heavy snow that never showed up. So there's one missed class during the last week in which I'd hoped to cram two weeks worth of important material on energy flow and nutrient cycles. Now, we're told to expect (worse than snow...) freezing rain Thursday night, increasing the likelihood that today may be my last class of the semester. Might be. The uncertainty makes it hard to know when and how to 'say goodbye' to my class. Ah well.

It has been good--far better than I had expected. And there are at least two large reasons to explain how well the semester has been, especially compared to the rather dismal experience of my first semester back teaching in August 04.

First, this group, though larger than last years, was for the most part if not brilliant at least respectful (with the exception of the two girls who chatted and giggled through every lecture they managed to show up for.) There was a core in the class who cared and wanted to learn, and to whom I could aim my enthusiasm and my stories. And I think some in the class 'grew up' to the needs of the larger world this semester. They know that the choices they make in environmental footprint and with their vote can make a world of difference for their children's children. That is gratifying.

Second, the information technologies helped rather than hurt me this time around. I had the laptop this year, and what a difference that has made, especially with wireless connections both at home and school. BTW, the IBM Thinkpad is doing great, and I am so happy I didn't go to Dell in a hatbox. Also, using Gmail for student communications has worked out well; and finally, the wiki was the way to go for coordinating student communications and for making lecture and lab files and outside reading material easily available. I'll do that again next year for sure.

I will be changing hats now. I've agreed to work part time in a Physical Therapy private practice starting first of the year. It will present a new set of challenges, especially after having been away from the profession now for almost three years. I'll be free of the tyrrany of never-ending lesson plans and the need to stay current with events in the natural world. Sometimes, though, those pressures have driven me to dig deeply into subjects where my passions lie. Maybe I'll find new passions and rewards in caring for my patients as I have in attempting to educate and inspire my students. They are really not all that different in a way. We'll see how that all works out in the blogging sphere. I'll have more time to blog. The subject matter is likely to shift. We'll see.

HumpDay Snips

@ My son is about to tie the knot. I do hope he knows how. Do you? Tis a very useful skill in some settings, hopefully, not weddings.

@ Dogs do laugh after all. I've always thought so. But do they laugh sarcastically, ironically or snidely? Do they understand paradox (or in their case, paradogs?) It's only a matter of time until we'll be able to converse directly with our beasts. Isn't science wonderful?

@ Some cosmic desktop images. Only in our times... via hubble

@ Instant ValleyGurl (or Guy). Just plug in your favorite blog, and like, a totally vulgarized, er ValleyGurlized, version of your blog! Way Kewl!

@ Go play with your TiddlyWiki. You won't go blind, I promise. This is neat technology; I wish I could fathom why I need it. Still, the hyperlinked "non-linear personal web notebook" is built into a single, low molecular weight html file that you can download and customize for your own purposes--provided you are a tad (or is it tiddly) more geekly gifted (and patient) than I am.

@ Gandhi's Seven Deadly Social Sins: Politics without principle • Wealth without risk • Commerce without morality • Pleasure without conscience • Education without character • Science without humanity • Worship without sacrifice

Distraction Meditations

It must be some kind of perverse law of the universe that the harder a person tries to tune out that which is noise, the more noise they seem to find to tempt them away from center.

Today, we get the first of our Netflix DVDs--one disk from MASH Season 4. (The Samsung that arrived last week works just fine connected only by a coaxial cable after all.) For testing purposes, I checked out two DVDs from the Floyd library--two I had actually heard of: Beautiful Mind and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The first was not what I had thought, knowing ahead of time generally what the story was about. I watched it alone; Ann would not have tolerated the tension. For her, a story has to have a known happy ending without any conflict throughout. She leaves the room when the music hints towards a minor key. The Tiger thing was just loopy; I can't believe it was well-spoken of. I enjoyed seeing the countryside of China, while the Fying Nuns with swords was absurd.

Worse than Netflix, because I don't even have to get up from the computer where my focus is supposed to be on some writing projects, into my life comes Pandora. This is the coolest song machine I've run across online, and FREE. You can create up to 100 'stations' where each station is based on an artist or particular song of your choice. The Pandora algorithm goes out and fetches music similar to your station's reference song or artist and plays them in sequence, without skipping or ads. Yesteday we listened to two hours of very nice Christmas music by simply typing in one of our favorites. Some of it was too high-opera, so we told Pandora 'no more like this' and our next time through will fit our tastes even better!

Oh yeah--there's one more serious distraction: the temptation to write blog posts about my distractions. Sigh.

Winter Visitors: Ice Goblins

Fluted. Filigreed. Lacey. Cancellous. Ice forms along the creek, clear as glass, blue-green as a glacier. How granular and rough it is here at the top of a rocky ledge; and just there in the shadow of the bluff, a smooth, flat sheet protects itself by reflecting the pale pastel light of a weak winter sun. Ice buttons and balls, goblets and goblins form on the drab grasses at water's edge, trimming the stream with translucent ornaments that are different each day. Air bubbles crawl downstream rodent-like under thin sheets of ice in a warren of liquid and crystal.

Snowed In

It is snowing. Or sleeting. Then both. We walked early, before I had eaten anything for breakfast, I realized half way round. Already there was a fine dusting and whiteness that didn't overpower what little color remains in the weak greens of balding hemlocks and the hanging dregs of beechleaf-- a most delicate white highlight to a graying world.

The dog almost caught a squirrel he surprised down under the overhang of the creek bank. (I warned him what could happen if he messed with them.) He relented and chose mole instead as his quarry du jour. Tsuga, the yellow lab, is harder to see in the snow when the tauny colors of pasture still show through, easier when it goes all to white, but fainter by far than our Black Labs have stood stark black against snow.

Only pure ice is harder to walk on than this thin icing of snowy slush. There is no depth of snow to hold your foot on the slope when you slide. I almost fell several times and knew Ann would scold me, as she did, since I had neglected again to bring a hiking stick. I have to weigh the pain on my rear in a possible slip against the certain pain in my wrists on the stick, there where once there was cartilage separating the old bones. But we can still walk, up slopes, fording the creek flowing clear with yesterday's rain, then back toward the house where the battery powered candles flicker in all the windows--a comforting sight that reminds me I should have one more cup of coffee and then something for breakfast.

Back warm, dry and fed now. Snow swirls swiftly left to right outside the window over the frame of summer's butterfly bush, slower and right to left across the road by the barn. I will find "In the Bleak Midwinter", put on the headphones and make a December memory.

Everything is flowing -- going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks... While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood...in Nature's warm heart. ~ John Muir

Omnivorous Opportunists

We talked in class on Friday last about 'relationships within plant and animal communities' including parastism and predation. Somewhere in my browsing, I came across this surprising image of a typical gray squirrel who had decided to pick up something different for a snack. No sir, for lunch today, why not pick up something without a tough outer husk. Nuts to nuts--let's do barbeque bird! Of course we don't know if he found this bird dead or dying (which I told the class was likely, as squirrels are not terribly well adapted at prey capture.) Then I had to, er, eat my words the next day when I read this account of squirrel aggression from BBC:

"A pine cone shortage may have led the squirrels to seek other food sources, although scientists are sceptical. The attack was reported in parkland in the centre of Lazo, a village in the Maritime Territory, and was witnessed by three local people. A "big" stray dog was nosing about the trees and barking at squirrels hiding in branches overhead when a number of them suddenly descended and attacked, reports say.

"They literally gutted the dog."

The horror! The squirrels ate little PheePhee! There was nothing left but her pink rhinestone collar!

ClosTrophobia

Here's a new mutant antibiotic-resistant bug to beware of. The chief symptom of C.diff is severe diarrhea, and nothing to take lightly as it can do worse than that. I told last year's bio class about a serious outbreak of Clostridium difficile in Toronto hospitals where it caused quite a few deaths (though we didn't hear very much about it in the states.) Now, it is showing up 'in the wild' so to speak.

"We're not sure yet but we have been hearing reports of people who have never been in hospital, or not recently, and even some who have not had antibiotics -- people we have thought of as low risk are getting CDAD. We're also trying to sound the alarm on that," added McDonald, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC.

Clostridium difficile is the leading cause of hospital-acquired infectious diarrhea. The organism can also cause colitis, resulting in colectomies (removal of part of the colon) and even death.

Unlike other bacteria, which can become resistant to the drugs actually used to treat them, C. difficile can develop a sort of resistance or reaction to antibiotics used to treat other problems, such as pneumonia.

"The major risk factor for getting C. difficile-associated disease is having received an antibiotic for some other reason," McDonald said. "They kill the healthy bacteria in the large bowel and, with that, allow the C. difficile organism that person has in the intestine to overgrow. The antibiotic knocked out the healthy bacteria that are usually keeping C. difficile in check."   link

The take-home lesson for the average person is--be very cautious about taking antibiotics (especially Clindamycin) unless absolutely necessary. The cost may outweigh the benefits.

One is a Bun

Remembering means hooking some thing or fact into memory in the first place. And you have to have something to hang it on, don't you? I bring this up because my students, I discovered to my great concern, have forgotten how to remember! A few of them followed the resources I provided to learn how to remember, how to avoid procrastination and how to take notes,while most of them put off forgetting to write anything down and did nothing. But as I was saying, there are some time-honored methods of remembering lists of things. Read on.

Below is one of the oldest mnemonic devices anyone can remember (?) and it works because it is so easy! Simply do this simple rhyme, and image the most exaggerated and remarkable possible image for your shoe, gate, and hive. Then see the thing to be remembered -- the gallon of milk from the store, clothes from the cleaners or email to your daughter-- as.being eaten by, sat upon or otherwise strikingly associated with your hook words. You WON'T forget how to count. You WON'T forget the rhyming word after a little practice. Now, just make a firm mental connection between the THING and the HOOK and you have your list remembered for as long as you need it.

You'll be surprised how actually getting the thing into memory in this visual way will help you past those nagging feelings that there was something you promised yourself you wouldn't forget--that you never remembered to start with! Okay. Here we go: this may take you all of two minutes. Rehearse it a few times til you can write down the ten words without faltering.

ONE is a BUN

TWO is a SHOE

THREE is a TREE

FOUR is a DOOR

FIVE is a HIVE

SIX is TICKS

SEVEN is HEAVEN

EIGHT is a GATE

NINE is a SPINE

TEN is a HEN

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Audiophile: I talked with the RU media guys yesterday. No digital recorder was available. The conclusion I left with was the one I went in with: get a decent mic. Recommended: Shure SM75...a great mic ('used on the US Presidential podium for 30 years') but over the $79 cost I'd need a main cable, then perhaps a couple of resistance-altering connectors to plug it into the computer jack, and a desktop stand. I may do that soon, but in the short run, I decided to replace my old headset mic with this Logitech Headset. It gives good voice quality (I used it in the RU library) but I'll need something else for outdoor sounds. Speaking of voice recording, check out ODEO. This may become the easiest path for me to enter the podcasting arena.

Videophile: The Samsung DVD-VCR machine arrived and yesterday, gleefully (I love reading owners manuals!) I replaced the very old VCR with the nice shiny new DVD player. But hey--the directions show this three-pronged yellow, red and white cord going from the player to the TV. Our 8 yr old TV only has a coax connector on back. For a while there, I figured I'd be either shipping the unit back or (oh dread) telling Ann that NOW we have to replace the television as well, in this cost efficient approach to limited but adequate entertainment. However, I connected the coaxial cable and at least the VCR works. Today I'll bring home a DVD from the library (not a lot to chose from) and see if the player works as well without the red-yellow-white thingy.

Blogophile: Things are a bit screwy in the blogosphere for me. I'm getting a kind of blog spam that does not show up in the comments page of Moveable Type, but the 10 random letters of various p*rn and herbal vi@gra peddlers appears on the comments sidebar on the front page. I can remove them when I notice they are there, but each one takes about three minutes, and Thursday I had 15 of them. That, and as way of apology, I have not been able to respond to comments because they are not coming to my email box like they're suppose to. So for those who would ordinarily have gotten a response via a simple reply on their comment email, sorry for my laziness not cutting and pasting to reply to you.

Meteorophile: We have Wx headed this way, although Intellicast and Accuweather don't see eye to eye on when, what and how much. But it looks like Monday might be a sloppy day of snow and slush, and there seems a pretty good chance it might be the first and only day this semester I won't make it to class. Looking ahead, AccuWx is calling for ice on Dec. 15--the day we drive to ROA and catch the plane to STL. Oh dread.

Naturophile: These hundreds-of-years-old depictions of the creatures we saw or imagined we saw in the world of nature I find very interesting. We laugh at the fears and superstitions of the people of those times and snicker at their ignorance of the living world we so take for granted and know so 'completely.' But I wonder: two hundred years from now, should our species last so long, will our great, great, great grandchildren look back and be amused at our ignorance, or will they be rightfully and unforgivingly appalled by our indifference in the face of all the knowledge we possessed of how our actions and inactions would create irreversible consequences in the natural world they would inherit?

Lice President

I think I've found a better way to chose among the (sigh) candidates in the next election. This way, nobody can blame the other guys for their lousy choice for president and 'lice' president. And this method is bound to work no worse than the one-citizen-one-vote method has worked in 2000 and 2004. via answers.google.com

"In the Middle Ages in Hurdenburg, Sweden, elections for mayor were decided by what might be called the electoral college of vermin. The candidates sat around a table, their heads bowed forward, their beards touching the table. A louse was placed in the middle of the table. The owner of the beard it chose to nest in became mayor for the following year."

...And all across the country when this new vermin-voting electoral method was announced, the Gray Old Party connived to find methods to behaviorally condition lice, to chemically modify them to prefer elephant blood, bribe them with postprandiol louse-liquours, hire them as top-paid corporate CEOs, or convince them that republican beards lead the way to s'curity for their children. Meanwhile, over at the donkey flea circus...

Chestnuts Roasting: The Audio File

So, yesterday I went down-mountain (no fog on Bent Mountain! I could hardly believe it...) to Roanoke to the NPR radio station, WVTF, to record a couple of little essays. One of them (which you've read here) ends with a paragraph that contains some sound imagery:

..."From these first brisk, gray fall days until the crocus and bloodroot pop up in the sunshine of April, the stove will be the first thing we care for each morning, the last duty we attend to every winter night. Before bedtime, we will sit in our chairs and watch the flames leap behind the glass door of the stove, and nod in the drowsy glow. From our bed in the dark, we’ll hear it purring contentedly in ticks and pops as it warms, and we will fall asleep in its flickering light."

Rick, the station manager, thought it might be nice if I could send him an audio file of those comforting stove sounds to play as the piece ends, as a sort of seque from the story into whatever comes next. I think it's a great idea, but I don't really have the equiptment to do it. So first, I'll be checking in the media department at Radford to see if I can borrow a digital recorder capable of getting the bytes onto a CD I can send the station. Failing that, I'll be begging to borrow from somebody locally. You were warned! Or...hmmmm...maybe this is a purchase I can justify as a 'business expense' whilst wearing my writerly hat, ya think?

The woodstove piece will probably broadcast fairly soon (while it is cold and wintery, of course) and when I find out, I'll let you know. Failing that, the station has been saving the files in a publically accessible place so folks who miss the live broadcast can listen later. I'll send you that info too when the time is right.

Friday Jots ~ 02 Dec 05

** We have DVD! It arrived yesterday: a Samsung VCR-DVD player that got good marks in various reviews. In January after things settle down a bit around here, we'll subscribe at the lowest possible end of Netflix and have our old TV reruns and classic movies for the rest of the winter. Also just today, I reaped the benefits of a blog meme I was invited to, but didn't participate in: Thanks to Tony at Milkriver blog, we all have this long list of "films (bloggers) have seen that they think are wonderful, that they would watch over and over, but which are obscure enough that the average person probably would not know them by name." And of course, Ann and I have never seen 99% of the movies 'everybody' knows by name and has seen in the past twenty years. Granted, 98% of them, we'll chose not to see even with them delivered effortlessly and inexpensively to our door. But hey--that still leaves quite a selection for our 30 minutes of Passive Entertainment a couple of times a week.

** Construction on the Spare Oom is lurching along as you'd expect in this uncertain season. Flooding on Monday washed the road away up top on the Daniels Run side, but the DOT guys had it fixed by Tuesday morning for the gravel to be delivered. I'll have more pictures over the weekend. The walls are up, half the gravel is down in place where the concrete floor will be poured once the room is under roof and can be kept warm. And by the way, our local concrete company has the tints to add, and we're deciding on a color. Current preference: something taupe-ish, a combination between the color of the shedding pelt of a Yellow Labrador Retriever and the shade of road dust from Goose Creek Run.

** Against my better judgement, I rushed to upgrade Firefox to 1.5. Results were odd, producing one set of issues on the desktop and another on the laptop. On the desktop, hardly a ripple; even Google Desktop still works, while (as is more typical) it is broken on the laptop. Perhaps worst of all the losses is that TinyUrl extension doesn't work any more. Man, I've used that a lot this semester, especially when including a URL in lecture notes so the string doesn't run half way down the page. Meanwhile, I'm sustituting BURL, which unlike TinyURL, puts a little of the original site info into the shorted URL to tell folks more about where the link will lead them.

** I mentioned yesterday my feeling of coming to the edge of uncharted time ahead and wanting to fill it appropriately with both productive and satisfying projects. I have been talking a lot to myself about priorities and time management issues, which, paradoxically is a harder thing to do when you have vast stretches of empty time than when you have a crowded agenda, it seems for me. Along those lines (and I feel certain there will be more to come in this vein) I found this piece from a young man who discusses his time management methods that allowed him to complete four years of a double major in three semesters. I'm less interested in volume of work per unit time as I am having it be the quality of work I want, with the desired results. And there's the rub: knowing what one wants to have, get, be. Hence, the navel gazing that has me looking a my goals. What is it that I want to come out of this wonderful, unspokenfor time ahead? If I don't know my target, how will I know if I hit it?

** Well, I see my 6:00 deadline is approaching, and this is when my new and more demanding schedule says I stop blogging and spend an hour on today's lecture. Then breakfast (and more coffee, of course), walk the dog, shower and dress; and if I'm disciplined with all this and stay on task, I've allowed myself one more blog post at 8:00. I have a weekend project I want to tell you about. See you later. Unless I'm a sluggard and futz around in the browser and get distracted by those emails I need to respond to and upload that new freeware and go back and reprocess those images from last week I wanted to print as Christmas gifts and reconcile the bank account that is sitting under my computer keyboard and...

Times of Our Lives

I feel it. Change is at my door. And opportunity. I have to give this more thought before I try to write about it, yet I'm certain that when the very next page is turned, a new chapter begins. But the page is blank. What will I write there? How should I script the next eight months? What do I want to have, to do and to be next August?

What can you see from the highest places in your life? Those are the views to hold to when conceiving uncharted futures. Stand in those high places where the air is clear, beauty is so intense it is almost painful to the eye, and the things of man down below are tiny and far away. Step off the edge. Soar.

Ethics in a Pandemic

According to the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics "plans to deal with a flu pandemic need to be founded on commonly held ethical values. People need to subscribe in advance to the rationale behind such choices as: the priority recipients of resources, including hospital services and medicines; how much risk front line health care workers should take; and support given to people under restrictions such as quarantine. Decision makers and the public need to be engaged so plans reflect what most people will accept as fair and good for public health.

"A shared set of ethical values is the glue that can hold us together during an intense crisis," says Peter Singer, M.D., Director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics (JCB), which undertook the advisory report. "A key lesson from the SARS outbreak is that fairness becomes more important during a time of crisis and confusion. And the time to consider these questions and processes in relation to a threatened major pandemic is now."

The report concludes that flu pandemic plans universally need an ethical component that address four key issues:

1. Health workers' duty to provide care during a communicable disease outbreak.
2. Restricting liberty in the interest of public health by measures such as quarantine;
3. Priority setting, including the allocation of scarce resources such as medicines;
4. Global governance implications, such as travel advisories.

It is consideration Number One that I've been wondering about. Both Ann and I are healthcare workers. Even physical therapists can be recruited to duty in an emergency. Ann for certain would be essential staff during a medical crisis. What would we do should she be 'required' to stay quarantined on the job at the hospital, at tremendous personal risk, for four to six weeks at the height of an outbreak in the New River Valley?

In light of recent events like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I have to wonder: how strong are our 'commonly held ethical values?' How do they compare to the social glue and moral foundation that existed in 1918? What effect have the 'me' generations had on the 'us' way of thinking?