Fragments From Floyd

My head and heart are pulled in so many directions this morning, a day flushed with the feeling of fallness and all the energy that lets go in me. I want to write, to read, to study, to photograph and I want to just sit on one of the porches--no, all of the porches during the day--and take in October. But my seat needs to be planted at the dining table where I must be surrounded by five four-inch stacks of lab reports to grade and record--I'm guessing six hours of work--before Monday. Responsibility makes for an impotent muse.

If I had time, I'd talk about Bioneers, discovered via a sent link. I like much about their purpose and hopes. There seemed to be a new-agey feel, a Californishness about it all--a perception supported upon finding that the audio broadcasts are co-produced by Michael Toms and New Dimensions with which we are familiar from NPR. I do look forward to listening to the second audio file entitled "CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION" that interviews Bill McKibben. Heck, I may become a Bioneer myself.

There is much physical work to do today, if I can balance that against the rooted eye-hand work of paper grading. The garden is spent and should be tilled (except for the turnips which continue to put down their rounded roots for a future soup meal, recipes thanks to BJ.) The woodpile relocation program is well underway (I'd better get some BEFORE pictures soon) and the room addition to the back of the house (no, not a swimming pool or water garden as some had guessed) seems imminent, if possibly delayed in its start by Hurricane Wilma.

If I weren't distracted by work duties, I'd love to tell you about this week's lab--a microscopic scavenger hunt--and all the neat creatures my students and I discovered in pond water samples. Makes me want to go back to school and get a PhD on Rotifer taxonomy. What an amazing, small world where Horton Hears a Who. We had quite a lot of fun, in a most unsophisticated unacademic gee-whiz sort of way. And I heard those incredibly rare words an instructor can only hope to hear once a decade, where upon leaving a bio lab period, students are overheard to say "That was KEWL!"

But I can't talk about any of this. My self-imposed schedule has me doing 8 lab notebooks at 8, 1 and 7 every day til 120 of them are done. So I'm already ten minutes tardy. I gotta go.