Fragments From Floyd

I dunno. Just seemed like the last day of the year is the day we make plans for what comes next. And just so happens that one of my favorite tunes includes the lyrics written by the late Tommy Thompson of the Red Clay Ramblers called "I got plans." And so well before what little bubbly we might inbibe tonight before slipping off to sleep at the usual hour of 9:00, I'm feeling in a singin' mood. Cobbled together inelegantly using Audacity, here's my New Year's story. Just click on the triangle and wait a few seconds. Have a safe, prudent New Year's Eve, and may your plans come to reality in 2006.

(PS: If the CastPost player below doesn't work for you 1) please let me know and 2) you can download the mp3 file from this link (look past all the advertizing toward the bottom of the page for the file.)

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So here ya go-- almost 300 images from the last year. Some of these were never posted; some shouldn't have been. But each image is both recorded in bits and bytes and in the synaptic storage of memory. Lots of good memories, and all the more, because I've been able to share them with people across the globe. You've been welcomed to join us here on Goose Creek; what is a wonderful place for if not to have your friends enjoy it with you?

I'll put Fragments Images 2005 on the sidebar when I get around to it, and may go back and do the same for 2004, and 2003.

Here we go. Another wild ride is about to begin. See you in 2006, y'all.

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December sets a new, all time low for number of pictures taken (unless you count the wedding.) Maybe things will change soon. There will be snows, and ice along the creek, and winter clouds. Winter, looking back over my journaling life at Fragments, has been a time of more words, fewer images, perhaps.

I've just had an idea: tomorrow, maybe, I'll post this year's Fragments images in a gallery as a visual retrospective--mostly for me, but I'd love to have you join me.

Speaking of galleries, yes, Abby was not the only person in the recent wedding 'play.' You can see the newlyweds and party in their own gallery, here.

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Today marks the beginning of yet another flashback chapter in this odd life. Three years ago, I had abandoned teaching and given up physical therapy, far as I knew, for good. Then a year and a half ago, I got the call from Radford inviting me to pick up the chalk again. Now, also by passive good fortune and timing, I've agreed to return part-time to the physical therapy clinic. It will be on a trial basis by my wishes; I'm not certain how 'physical' I can be, since the hands don't cooperate so well now for many of the things that a therapist routinely does with their greatest asset--a strong pair of skilled hands. We'll see how it goes today.

This role will be a change from teaching in many ways. Teaching challenged me to dig deeply into the issues facing the global environment as we discussed these matters in class, and I dealt mostly with the class en mass, in a vertical sort of relationship between faculty and student. In the clinic, the digging is very focused on specific joints or function problems of an individual that you come to know very well. I will spend more one-on-one time with a patient on the first visit than I spent with any given student the whole semester, and it is their ecosystem of joints, bones and muscles that will be the focus of my concerns. It is a much more 'horizontal' person to person interaction that happens here.

I could make the comparison that in teaching, you always bring your work home with you and that in clinical practice, you don't. But that wouldn't be completely true. Many nights, I used to lie awake puzzling out patient problems of balance or pain and how best to adapt that person's work or home setting to give them back as much of their full physical lives as I could. (More often than not, the sleeplessness came from issues related to trying to make sense of screwy policies or personnel, and the heavy hand of the insurance companies.) I suppose to some extent, I'll be doing that again, though reimbursement and management issues won't be mine this time. There is gratification in teaching when a student has an 'AHA!' moment of insight, just as there is when a patient has a similar moment, realizing they can tie their shoes or play golf again for the first time in six months. I am expecting this to be as good a return to PT as the experience at Radford has been to teaching.

And, being a place for new beginnings, I'm thinking that my blogging schedule is a place where change is needed. I'll be working Tuesdays and Fridays, so may not post anything those days. And while mornings are my best times for blogging, they are also my best times for other writing that needs to come first for a while. So, don't be surprised if you don't start seeing new posts come closer to noon or later. If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got, they say. I need to get some different stuff from my time at the keyboard. Change comes hard, but it will come. And what better time for a change of pace and pattern than here, at the beginning of a new year.

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Traveling is a mixed bag: you encounter new people, places and experiences, but you forfeit the familiar customs and amenities of home. Perhaps the hardest sacrifice of travel for me is sleeping without my pillows. I cannot abide fiber or foam, and this has mostly to do with the sleep ergonomics of head support. My two-pillow system works for me: a contour memory foam pillow underneath with a light feather pillow on top. Coming back home to sleep in my own bed after some time out of town is a real treat. But wait: maybe all is not well in the Land of Nod.

Pillows are ecosystems, and not all creatures in the forest are friendly.

"We know that pillows are inhabited by the house dust mite which eats fungi, and one theory is that the fungi are in turn using the house dust mites' faeces as a major source of nitrogen and nutrition (along with human skin scales). There could therefore be a 'miniature ecosystem' at work inside our pillows."

It's bad enough thinking of this jungle of beasties living in your own pillow, much less those nights you spend in Ramada Inn sleeping on the sloughed skin cells and associated arthropodial poop of the past hundred guests who used that same foam pillow before you came along. Mostly, there is only mild risk of disease. However, if you have astham or have lowered immunity, the fungus, Apergillus, can be lethal:

Immuno-compromised patients such as transplantation, AIDS and steroid treatment patients are also frequently affected with life-threatening Aspergillus pneumonia and sinusitis. Fortunately, hospital pillows have plastic covers and so are unlikely to cause problems, but patients being discharged home - where pillows may be old and fungus-infected - could be at risk of infection.

Now I'm generally not squeamish about this sort of thing, bug-friendly as I am. But even so, later today I think I'll toss my feather pillow into the dryer on no heat with a couple of old tennis shoes for a bit of extra pounding. Let's just see if we can get some of that mite dust and Aspergillus to end up out the exhaust or captured in the lint filter rather than lodged in my distal bronchioles.

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This looks promising, and if you believe their 'facts', algae just might be a better solution to future energy needs than hydrogen. Initially the Department of Energy's "Aquatic Species Program" was about finding ways to sequester coal power plant CO2 emissions. But in that 18 year study, they discovered that some algae are very fast growing and have up to 50% oil content. The project has now shifted to research into use of algae as a source for biodiesel, and the future looks green and slimey.

From the results of the Aquatic Species Program2, algae farms would let us supply enough biodiesel to completely replace petroleum as a transportation fuel in the US (as well as its other main use - home heating oil)

Of course the beauty of this concept is that the sun is the source for this energy. The drawback is that it takes a considerable photosynthetic surface of growing algae to make this much fuel.

to replace all transportation fuels in the US, we would need 140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel, or roughly 19 quads (one quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To produce that amount would require a land mass of almost 15,000 square miles.

The other "plus" of this solution to our energy needs is that algae can use excess nutrients in water that otherwise would be considered pollution.

By using waste streams (agricultural, farm animal waste, and human sewage) as the nutrient source, these farms essentially also provide a means of recycling nutrients from fertilizer to food to waste and back to fertilizer.

Extracting the nutrients from algae provides a far safer and cleaner method of doing this than spreading manure or wastewater treatment plant "bio-solids" on farmland.

Keep your eye on this lowly organism--some form of algae was probably the first organism to harness sunlight and make the planet's oxygen. Now, it may have another important role to play in sustaining a livable planet.

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It was the Most Pathetic Christmas Tree ever. Even Charlie Brown would have been embarassed by this year's sad sapling. Ann and I risked our lives to get it, and had to wait for the UPS man to deliver our YakTrax to even reach it, just up the icy hillside from the barn. You can see it here at the edge of the party festivities, its top so spindly I had to nail the angel to the wall so the whole tree didn't keel over into the room. We called it our Hemi-tree, since it had branches on only one side, all the better to fit nicely out of the way against the wall in the room that gets very small when thirty people and one dog are milling about.

Now, the Pathetic Tree has been defrocked of its garlands and lights, and along with the mantle drapings of spruce, cast off to the edge of things having served its part in the season. We're getting extra mileage out of the spruce branches, however. Placed into a woodstove of glowing coals, one at a time, this is wonderful winter entertainment, and horrible. In the fire, the bristly branches become animated, twisting, curling, writhing away from the heat before the needles become incandescent orange brushes. Volatile oils and resins ignite a few inches over the blackening branches, and tongues of flame flare disembodied above, like the spirits of spruce going back to the all from which they came.

Another flame-related holiday pasttime came to memory yesterday while I watched the dying of evergreen boughs. This may be something every family does at Christmas when there are oranges, tangerines and grapefruits about. Take the castoff peels from the ambrosia-making and carry them to a table where a tall candles burns. Hold a thick, juicy piece of rind within a half inch of the flame and bend the peel sharply. This breaks open the storage vacuoles of citrus oil, sending tiny invisible droplets into the flame where they sparkle and crack, and of course with very much of this, the whole house will smell wonderfully of orange.

And I'm sorry, with one thing leading to another in these early morning rambles, I've just remembered other memories and words about the smell of oranges. "Read more" if so inclined, below.

I can remember it so clearly that if it were a physical object, I could reach out in space and touch it. I could feel its texture and mass, know from my fingers of its shape and purpose. But it is not 'real' in this way; it has no mass and is not a thing. This tactile fragment lives at a magical distance just beyond words . It has never existed anywhere but in my mind; or brain--both really, since it first harbored in the soup of cells in a very old part of my central self. There, where fragrances are known.

For fifty years it has remained in mind, holographically, somehow, as the most enduring of memories. There are not even good words to say what this neuro-nothing is, or was. It is the aura of the memory of orangeness at Thanksgiving. Not the fruit, not the orange thing itself, but the room-filling bite it leaves in air when its skin is broken-- a molecular mist mingled with other perfumer's "accords" or undertones? of cranberry, celery, old wool, silver polish and heat from the kitchen on Thanksgiving day.

Ackerman says "smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences. Hit a trip wire of smell and memories explode all at once."

What memories of the "mute sense" of smell can you conjure from Thanksgiving Days in your long-ago? What trip wires explode into memories of oyster dressing, family, cold Novembers and home? (from Nov 20, 2003)

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Here's a movie for adults. I might wannna see this one, even though, or maybe especially because Grist Magazine says it is "not at all the feel-good film of the year." Written and directed by Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, Syriana is a brave and daunting piece of filmmaking. It plunges without apology into hot-button territory few U.S. news outlets, much less Hollywood productions, have dared explore, and does very little to smooth the rough edges for a moviegoing audience accustomed to frictionless entertainment."

The global oil system is portrayed as a gigantic, impersonal machine that crushes human lives, families, even whole nations. The CIA agent, the reformist prince, the oil analyst, the federal prosecutor: they all show small glimmers of idealism and hope, but all are ultimately dispatched, leaving not so much as a ripple.

But there is an odd and rather glaring omission. Gaghan follows a long, grim chain of greed, corruption, and deceit, but he doesn't trace it to its terminus: the folks using the oil. Us. The viewers of his movie. Conspicuous U.S. consumption serves as his unquestioned backdrop -- and his silence about us ultimately reveals his fatalism about the fortunes of democracy.

Is there really so little spark left in the American experiment that public acquiescence to escalating global resource struggles is a fait accompli? There's no chance we could self-organize to use less, and twist the arms of our elected representatives until they help us? Are we so apathetic, so powerless?

"I'm not ready to give up that hope. Not yet" says the Grist author, David Roberts. But honestly, I think I've given up that hope. Our addiction runs too deep and we would rather go extinct than change in time.

I think this movie hasn't been released yet. Anyone know for sure?

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Lest you worry in your poor benighted little earth-hugging hearts that the Leader of the Free World has seemed recently to be indifferent to the global warmings, I encourage you to watch this short video of the POTUS addressing this very important matter that affects every one of us. And rest assured, his administration is deeply concerned about this problem in a deep, concerned sort of way. (Ever notice how much the POTUS seems to be trying to impersonate Will Ferrel?)

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Good News! "A Canadian company, Biolyse Pharma Corp., have plans to use up to half a million used Christmas trees in Ontario to extract a chemical found in the needles to help manufacturer vaccine for the bird flu. Shikimic acid can be harvested from the needles of pine, spruce and fir trees.  The acid is usually harvested from the star anise tree in China.

The cost of the acid has increased in cost dramatically and cost $600 Canadian dollars per kilogram.  The reason for the increase in cost has been the time it takes to grow the star anise tree.  It can take eight years to grow and there are only two months are able to be harvested.  The goal of Biolyse will be to sell the acid to companies or governments that do not have to follow the Roche’s Tamiflu patents and can manufacturer a generic version of the drug."

Bad News: Tamiflu not only is probably ineffective against H5N1, but it has a long list of potential side effects which may make it even less appropriate for consumption. The list includes, in alphabetical order: aches and pains, allergic reactions (sometimes leading to shock), asthma and aggravation of pre-existing asthma, bronchitis, chest infection, conjunctivitis, dermatitis, diarrhea, difficulty sleeping, dizziness, ear infections and problems, erythema multiforme, headache, hepatitis, indigestion, liver problems, lymphadenopathy, nausea, nose bleed, rash or rashes, runny nose, sinusitis, Stevens Johnson syndrome, symptoms of a cold, tiredness, tummy pain, urticaria, and vomiting.

Good News: This report in Forbes suggest that Chinese scientists have a new bird flu drug that is better than Tamiflu at controlling avian flu symptoms in humans and costs less than $4 per pill. But then the Chinese have said (or not said) other things health-related that have panned out not to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so let's wait and see on this Tamiflu-2.

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It is a silence unlike any other--not only a place where there are suddenly no sounds of voices, of clinking coffee cups and clicking keyboards. This is a silence of being, an emptiness of a self alone where moments before there had been others. The kids just left to return to Missouri, so I guess this is it, the end of a chapter, the beginning of that void of empty calendar that has loomed just the other side of Joe's wedding, then Nates and our seeing family in Saint Louis all too briefly, then the newlywed's visit here, also brief. And now there is only me in an empty house and all the sounds, all the thoughts and words, are mine. And I will learn again to be content with the nouns and verbs that my fingers make, that my eyes read back to me, that feel only faintly like unsilence and faintly like purpose.

And yet, there is a kind of solace in solitude for which I am truly thankful. Even now out my window, the silent drama of winter flails at the maples along the road less than the pines on the ridgetop and there is motion. The creeks run under ice and cry the muffled commotion of an infant river confined in crystal, just the way those embryo streams have done now for seven Decembers in this place. There is comfort in the sameness, even if there is no one to share it with. But while the house was full, we didn't take time to hear these things. Now that they have gone, this is all I can hear. Now that those known events have passed, the calendar is as empty and white as an Arctic plain in the sunlight. Features will rise up in time, but for now, the barrenness of obligation and engagement hold a dessert kind of simplicity and beauty. This pleasant emptiness will go on, for an hour or a day, until the last reverberations of memory and sound disappear from these past weeks of wonderful hectic togetherness.

To everything there is a season: a time to be a parent, a child, a father-in-law; a time to be simply a man alone illuminated by the flashes of sun through racing clouds that ride ahead of the next cold front bringing a whistling winter down on Goose Creek once again.

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Hundreds of Christian activists gather in D.C. to protest bills granting tax cuts for the wealthy while slashing programs for low-income people.

Christian activist Rev. Jim Wallis told hundreds of religious protesters gathered near the Capitol on Wednesday that there is a scandal this December, but it isn't the conservative-stoked controversy about retailers and others using "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

"The Christmas scandal is the budget out of this House of Representatives, a budget which is an assault on low-income people, on poor families," said Wallis, who was arrested by Capitol Hill police along with 113 other protesters--as they knew they would--for blocking the building's entrance.

Budget legislation under consideration by House members and senators has angered many religious people who see caring for the poor as central to their faith, because of nearly $50 billion in spending cuts to programs such as food stamps and child care subsidies.

"This budget and the tax cuts fill the rich with good things and sends the poor away hungry. That's why we're here."

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The sun will be up soon, and we will be heading off for our morning walk. We are now one season removed from summer and our lives have taken on a different character, a seriousness not familiar in June.

A June morning walk is a casual and spontaneous amble in no particular hurry to go or to come back. We follow our usual loop down the pasture road. We step across the creek on the dry boulders in the shade of arching Rhododendrons. There is no urgency or hurry to it. We wind our way home north along the logging road, and use our hiking sticks to keep us from slipping in the wet grass, stopping now and then to note a new arrival in the calendar of budding and blooming things. The still bright air is heavy with the familiar smells of warm earth, fields and woods, and a hundred birds sing about themselves from high in tulip poplars sprouting tiny leaves. At the end of our walk, the path downhill carries us toward the meadow where we cross the creek once more and return home.

When winter comes, our morning walks don't end, but they are no longer a come-as-you-are tiptoe through the woods. They become a deep-sea dive into cold and dark, in a submersible of wool and down. Peeking out from under scarves and toboggans like diving helmets, we trudge heavily against the stern and biting currents of polar air that washes over us like waves. Without our bulky diving suits our frail pink flesh would turn blue and brittle as December leaves, and our expedition would never be heard from again.

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...in small pockets, for short periods, find Peace. Help those you love--and strangers--to see it, know it, and take hope. Swim against the currents of this world and do good. Give gifts daily that have no price with no thought of gain. Open your eyes to beauty and to invisible suffering. Resist letting into your mind things that merely distract you from that which will last. Stand firm in your faith, and if you've lost it, find it again. Life-changing powers of charity and love can grow from the smallest seeds; babies in mangers can change worlds. Take heart. ~ Fred of Fragments

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Take three minutes of quiet time over this Christmas weekend and listen: Lo How a Rose ere Blooming (Michael Praetorious 1609) is taken from Isaiah chapter 11 which refers to the Messiah's lineage out of the 'root of Jesse, who was father of psalmist and king, David.

This is one of my Christmas favorites. Nate and I sang this acapella at the Christmas eve church service last year. This particular version has nice, close harmonies, if a bit too Barbershop-close for those who know and love the original version unembellished.

May this Rose spring up in your deserts in 2006.

Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming, as men of old have sung.
It came, a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.

O Savior, Child of Mary, Who felt our human woe,
O Savior, King of glory, Who dost our weakness know;
Bring us at length we pray, to the bright courts of Heaven,
And to the endless day!

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HmmmmDeeDee. I did good walking. Look at all those petals back there. I didn't walk fast. I look like a princess--or maybe an angel--in this pretty dress. This is boring just standing here. That man's sure talking a lot. Hey, if I swing this basket pretty fast, none of the petals come out. See? I wonder if I twirl around--my mommy won't care because they're supposed to be pink and white petals on the floor. I wonder why they want petals on the floor? Okay--here comes a twirl!

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This reassuring fabrication in the name of maintaining calm comes from The Daily Times - Malawi’s Premier Daily

Government has ruled out bird flu following deaths of thousands of wild birds in Ntchisi on Tuesday, December 13.

Oh good. They've completed all tests and have arrived at a definitive explanation for why migrating birds in this highly circumscribed few acres of hillside died suddendly.

In a press statement released Wednesday government attributes the deaths of the birds to a heavy downpour that fell the previous night.

All the birds were huddled together in a ditch and unable to fly as the waters rose? All the birds for some reason turned their heads to the sky and their beaks filled with water in a thunderstorm and they died? And so did birds everywhere die in this heavy downpour? No? Just this particular flock who had been in close contact with each other over thousands of miles of migration? Curious.

Samples of the dead birds have been sent to Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute in South Africa to establish the cause of the deaths.

Say: I thought that is what your headline was telling us--that the tests that could rule out highly-pathogenic avian flu had come back from South Africa and were negative. I hope that this outcome will be the case. But such a silly explanation as birds drowning in a rainstorm might just make the government lose a bit of credibility should a pathogen be found at fault for these bird deaths. Maybe calm and confidence are better achieved if mum's the word in Malawi til the results are in hand.

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"My momma told me to go VERY V E R Y SLOWLY" she repeated as we talked about the wedding coming up the day after rehearsing for what Abby called "the play." You know, she was right. It did seem like a chapter out of Our Town.

And when the big moment came for her to fulfil her flowergirl duties, she went amazingly slowly. Agonizingly slowly, as the bride and her father waited in the narthex of the church. Of course as the designated photographer, I had to capture this moment, and was on one knee by the first pew. As she is inching down the aisle, I motioned ineffectually for her to pick up the pace. So did her mother, standing in the circle of bride's maids facing the back of the church and her glacially-slow daughter, following instructions to the letter. But would Abby hurry? Nope. Against the rules. She did, however, still have some petals left in the basket and that sort of bugged her later in the service as I'll show you tomorrow.

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This is only a hypothetical scenario mind you:

You have rushed out of the house at 7:00, bound for the airport just ahead of an expected ice storm. In your amazing attention to last-minute details, you've remembered to pick up the large white trashbag of acccumulated flotsam that need not stay indoors decomposing while your gone. There is a turkey carcass and lots of coffee grounds amongst the paper trash, and you will toss it in the greenboxes on Allegheny Spring Road as you drive north toward Roanoke and that will be that.

But fifteen minutes later and well beyond the only dumpsters that you know of for thirty miles, you realize you still have the trash riding with you, back among your suitcases. In a mood of adrenalin-enhanced optimism, you are sure you will find more public dumpsters that you've just never noticed before (even though you've driven this road hundreds of times in the daylight.) At about this time, you are starting to become very aware of the aroma of rancid turkey bones and stale Lusianne with chickory and you crack the windows a bit, letting in the freezing moist air that soon will be full of icy drops.

It is about now that you realize the conundrum and begin to examine your options.

You have nowhere to put this garbage and you are leaving on a jet plane. You can [1] toss the bag out the window (a) in toto, or (b) one piece at a time, a toilet paper roll here, a turkey wishbone there, a shredded credit card offer farther along a five mile stretch so as to be more difficult to trace back to your address. [2] You can affect a casual you-lookin-at-somethin attitude at baggage check and have them take it from you, then leave it on the carosel in St. Louis. Or [3] you can find a deserted carwash in Shawsville where there is a tiny trashcan beside the highpower vacs, drop your bulging white trashbag on top so it looks like a fat lady in a white dress sitting on a barstool, and speed away into the night hoping whoever is responsible for emptying the trash isn't upset by the fact that this particular trash did not come from the floorboard of somebody's car. But then again, maybe it did.

We are still wondering when or if we'll be getting a summons for our crime. But hey, what would you have done?

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HAZARD, Ky. (AP) Tourists Watch Appalachian Mountaintops Removed

Groups opposed to a practice they call mountaintop removal are using a new tactic to try to sway public opinion. They're calling it disaster tourism. John Rausch, director of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia, says visitors are adding mountaintop removal sites to their travel itineraries. The process calls for coal to be removed from mountains by blasting at the top. Environmentalists says the blasts send debris into streams and valleys below. Rausch says he can't introduce people to Appalachia without addressing mountaintop removal.

[And now for the grand corporate-think finale, from those who do the blasting, make the money, and sleep well at night, mostly from homes in states that are not Kentucky:]

Kentucky Coal Association president Bill Caylor says environmental groups are giving visitors a biased view of the coal industry.

He says coal companies are creating level land for Appalachia.

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They came from Vancouver, California, and from his Tennessee college days. What a wealth in the friends Nate has made over his short span of years. Jen too had long time friends travel to St. Louis to share in the ceremony and celebration.

I wonder if it is easier in these times to stay in touch once we leave those people who have become special to us. Does the ease and availability of email, text messaging and practically free long distance increase the probability that friends from the past stay connected in the present, even if they are on the other side of the world as some of Nate's friends have been since they were together in college?

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On the eastern edge of southern Africa, landlocked Malawi was in the news a few years ago because of its drought and associated famine. Things are little better now, and when food falls from the sky, hungry people will eat. Unfortunately this manna is black with feathers--the forked-tailed Drongo--a flycatcher kind of bird that for reasons unknown, died in the thousands on one hillside in Malawi a few days ago.

Samples are being tested for the possibility of H5N1 and people are being warned not to eat the dead birds. Your children are starving: what would you do?

One bird was banded, suggesting it had migrated through the middle east. Its band was inscribed with the word "Israel." If you haven't heard this story yet, if avian flu is confirmed in the next day or so, Malawi will become front page news before fading once more into desparate obscurity. But maybe these migrating birds died for other reasons. A bunch of Toronto birds died mysteriously a few months ago; bird flu was feared, but someone had poisoned them.

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There was the beginning and now there is the ending. In between is a blur of suitcases, traffic, brisk walks always into the wind, quick conversations, hurried meals and tempus generally fugiting in a way it does when you know that the passing moments are priceless. You cannot grasp them to hold, and must be content to watch them move on. Jotted notes or journal entries bring some of those images back, and the photos of the wedding help, but they only show the who and the where, leaving the viewer or the rememberer with nothing of the how or why. And more and more, as it recedes into the past, the past few days of a thousand details will simply be 'the wedding' having earned it's mark on the calendar of a year about to end, a decade moving into its second half. So here we are back in our own present, and the seas close around the little island of time that was Saint Louis, and life goes on.

I can't pick out any one thing that someone outside the event would really care to know about; I think my blogging muscles have gone flaccid since I last sat in this desk where usually too much rather than too little comes to mind. Let's see...

My impression of St. Louis is that it was more 'southern' than I expected. Drivers were assertive but not aggressive or obnoxious. People in public places were courteous and accommodating and not in the self-centered hurry I tend to stereotype to people in some other big cities I've been to. I'd like to be there when it wasn't as blustery. We were close to a lot of things to do, but without a car and with the cold, didn't do any of them. I did go with my daughter to the Arch, quick to the top, five minutes peeking through the portholes, then rushing back by way of a wrong turn to the wedding rehearsal.

I found out while sitting on the front pew of the church in my suit at the wedding that I WAS to be the only photographer. I had told Nate I would be happy to take some candid unofficial shots, thinking there was someone else arranged for THE wedding pictures. Nope. So here is part of my inability to focus on words about the event: I have 230 images to work up by the weekend so the kids can chose a couple dozen for printing. Lighting in the church was, of course, subdued. I had my flash that I'd bought three months ago for this purpose, but I just hate the harsh, flat, contrasty lighting of on-camera flash, especially when it can't be bounced from a white ceiling. So most about half of the lot are hand-held, 1600 ISO, 20th to a 30th of a second, wide open. Amazingly, there are enough keepers in the bunch, provided lack of absolute focus and presence of little digital noise are not big issues.

We finagled an early flight out yesterday. I should tell you, it came in handy: at least a half dozen times (due to my mother's missed flight out on Friday and her lost luggage that came two hours before the wedding on Sunday) I used Delta's 800 number, the said AGENT four times to the robot voice in their phone tree, and moved immediately to a person. Here's a list (blogged previously, I think) that you might want in your laptop or PDA for travel purposes.

Now, let me see if there are any of these wedding photos I can share.

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I am looking at this 'homily' I wrote and read recently at a friend's wedding. Ann is insisting I should modify it and read it at the reception today. I'm balking. At least I'll share it with you. It is Sunday after all, and another wedding day.

It has been almost thirty six years since I stood in a church and my knees literally shook. I watched my future wife walk down the aisle, arm and arm with her father, and realized that in a few seconds, I would come under new management. I was about to make a life-long promise to one woman, two families, and most of all, to a God who seemed to place an awful lot of importance on the relationship. If we took our vows seriously, the marriage of Ann and Fred would also fall under new management. The enormity of that promise was awesome at 22; it's an awesome commitment at any age when you are about to say "I do" and "I will" to each other and to God.

And I think I saw it even then: marriage would be both the deepest relationship I would ever have with another human being; and at times it would also the most difficult. For two to become as one seemed about as possible as for the proverbial camel to pass through the eye of a needle. She and I would marry, we would combine our belongings, merge our bank accounts and toss our dirty clothes into the same basket. But could we possibly see the other as ourselves because we would not cease being distinct and selfish selves with entirely, vastly divergent tastes in food or music, in our rhythms of what should be done and when and how. It seemed certain that she and I would not see the world through the same lens.

He prefers white napkins, she insists on tan. If she wants it hotter, he will certainly want it cooler. George Bernard Shaw said "Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open." And there are times it seems the amicable coexistence of opposites is just too much of God to ask. And yet he does ask us to persist in this relationship for better or for worse, to forgive and forebear and show grace and the god-kind of love to our sometimes unlovely spouse because God has done so, often and abundantly, to us.

And so it is our hope and prayer today, J and D, that you will both ask and receive God's grace to do the humanly impossible things you'll be called upon to do as two living together as one.

Let me, then, offer in paraphrase (if King James and God will forgive me) some verses from Colossians and Philippians that speak to this matter of thriving in life together:

J and D, set apart and dearly loved,
clothe yourselves with compassion and kindness; wear humility,
gentleness and patience like a garment.

...be of one spirit and one purpose, no matter how aggravating he might be, no matter how stubborn she might seem at times. 3Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider her, consider him, more esteemed than yourself. Look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of the other.
These challenging words set high standards, to be sure-to enter into a marriage, partnership and friendship that is built on mutual respect and with love and a common and continuing gratitude toward God for each other.

It gives all of us great joy to share this day of commitment with you, J and D, and we pray in our hearts for God's grace to be granted to you as you grow together in His care and continue as our friends and a cherished part of our community.

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Icy portholes on the last jet to leave Roanoke airport, 6:15 Thursday morning. Fog all the way to the ground in Cincinatti. Miraculously, a room available when we arrived three hours before checkin. Found: the closest wireless, a mile walk into the wind; but then every walk in StLoo seems to be into the wind. Grading exams on the plane, spreadsheeting off and on between obligations and grades finally sent Friday morming. Blueberry Inn for supper with both my children and company and ate my first rueben sandwich in years and discovered Fat Tire.

Mom's flight from Bham didn't make after she waited alone all day, but she's coming today and the weather looks okay (if we leave out tomorrow's snow.) Nate has his Vancouver set and his Maryville set of friends here and they are really neat kids and I enjoy being with them. Rehearsal and dinner tonight, we'll go to the airport and pick up mom and at least she'll have all day here tomorrow; wedding at 3. We'll fly out earliest possible Monday, get back to warm up the house--low Monday night in the single digits, we're getting back just in time. Haven't heard what the ice storm did to SWVa after we left but it seemed pretty hairy as we finally took off after a couple of deicings.

Sorry, folks. These are jots and all I can get down now. Did discover that in our room we moved to the second night, there is wireless from the chair near the door. Great, I thought. I can blog now (after the wireless cafe banned access to Fragments, the reason: pornography. Thanks, blogspammertrashtalkers. But then Fragments got corrupted again (don't know the details from Sir Douglas), was down and had to be rebuilt but seems to be working fine now. Man, it's a crazy ride here. Wish we had time to see more of the city.

Will leave here earlier on Monday than originally planned, get back and warm up the house before it goes down into single digits. Man, winter is coming in like a lion for sure. Ann's studded tires come next week (thanks, Sean P for the great tip!) So that means we won't have ANY more ice all winter long!

SUNDAY MORNING: I thought I sent the above out yesterday but entries in MT were set to 'draft' instead of 'publish' and there it sat this moring--THE morning of the big event. It's okay. It seems like it should be. But man, til death do us part is some kind of committment. I wonder if Nate's knees will shake like mine did. Maybe I need to tell that story. We'll see. Home again tomorrow and life returns to that pleasant sameness that we so miss living out of suitcases. See you then.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Posted by fred1st at 6:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

@ 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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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!

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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.

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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

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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?

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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."

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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.

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** 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...

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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.

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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?

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