What trek did on Neatnik's day off

I am sitting here on my big, bouncy blue ball and I am not grading student blogs. I am not grading homework assignments. Isn't this a nice change of pace? Let us celebrate with a Monday Morning Bullet Post!

• Neatnik doesn't have school today.



• No, her school hasn't decided to observe the Jewish holiday.



• Today is Teacher Spirituality Day. The teachers will be having a retreat while the children enjoy a three-day weekend.



• Neatnik's having a playdate with Bobblehead, whose school is observing the high holy day.



• So, what am I doing on this fine and sunny child-free morning?



• Early, before Number Guy left for work, I enjoyed the crispy air for a short, fast literary jaunt.



• After my walk, I hit the showers, packed up Neatnik and her lunchbox, and visited the doctor's office.



• I needed blood work done.



• Please say a prayer for me that all of the healthy eating and walking and resultant "buffness" is sufficient to keep me off the cholesterol meds for the foreseeable future.



• I'm on enough medication for the asthma/allergies, thank you very much, let us not add more compounds to the chemical soup.



• Straight from the doctor's office, we swung over to grandma's where Neatnik disembarked. Then I came home.



• I am almost ashamed to admit that I spent some of my precious morning emptying the dishwasher and folding and stashing laundry.



• In my own defense, it needed doing and I am the only one here.



• Have I mentioned that I am the only one here! :o)



• It is nearly 11:45. My first class kicks off at one. It takes about twenty minutes to drive to the college. I like to arrive a few minutes early, to write assignments and such on the board and open up the various files of the day.



• Those time notes indicate to me that I have approximately 45 minutes remaining to myself.

I was going to post a set of three (funny) emails from a student but Blogger ate the last half of my post and since I want some time to knit before I have to leave, I shall leave that set of giggles for another post. See you in the comments.

Chili - with an i*

I am pretty sure that the entire blogosphere all of my blog peeps are entirely and thoroughly sick really tired of hearing how much time my students' blog assignments are requiring of me. All of those hours spent on working have eaten up each and every available minute which might have otherwise been spent on knitting. Or my own blogging.

Ah, well. I did not assign a blog post due this week since the students will be taking tests. I still have to grade other assignments but I am hoping to have some decent blog fodder for you soon.

In the meantime, please enjoy this picture, taken on the very last day of our vacation back in August. Yes, we ate at this restaurant and tried their chili.

Who cares about the cash?
These guys have their priorities properly sorted!

* Can you name this reference??

And so sew it goes

No, I didn't knit yesterday. There was time. I just didn't knit. I had something else that needed doing. Allow me to share with you the something else.

• I have a really nice shirt with an embroidered placket which Number Guy picked out for me many years and several sizes ago.



• Yesterday afternoon, I enlisted a bit of pinning assistance and down-sized. I added some shaping at the side seams, changing the silhouette from a very boxy one to a rather more tailored one.



• I was somewhat limited in the amount of curve I could add since I was entirely unwilling to take the sleeves and shoulders apart.



• There were two pleats on the back, at the bottom of the yoke. I ironed them square and continued the pleat all the way down to the bottom hem then I top-stitched it down.



• The shirt now looks much better. The fit is better and the great poofy-ness has been removed.



• I am not a very big fan of poofy-ness



• Especially just above my derriere.



• Just as I was looking in the mirror for the final check I thought to myself,

  This will make a great blog post, complete with before and after pictures!

• No, I do not have any before pictures.



• Because I didn't think about pictures until after I was finished with the alterations.



• Yes, that is generally when I think about chronological project documentation.



• No, I didn't take any after pictures, either.

And sew so that's what I did yesterday afternoon instead of knitting.

In which trek finds it amusing

I saw something quite amusing in my Bloglines this morning:

This morning's local weather report

# # #

Speaking of amusing, we just have to start out the semester on the right foot. Here is an email I received from Student Who Did Not Pay Enough Attention in Class on Friday, in all its typographical and grammatically incorrect glory:

To: professor trek
From: Student Who Did Not Pay Enough Attention in Class on Friday
========================================
Hey its me SWDNPEAICOF I'm in your friday class. I'm email you from my blackberry. I just wanted to know what was the assignment that was due this friday I know its a blog about [assigned ethics topic] but what did we have to do.

Sent on [SWDNPEAICOF's Data Provider] from my BlackBerry

# # #

Dude...seriously???

# # #

And so it begins...

Thought quotes

Look what showed up at my doorstep yesterday afternoon!

I really don't have much else to say. It must be getting really old hearing that I am still working on reviewing and grading student blog posts, but that's pretty much how I spent my entire afternoon yesterday, following four class hours.

One would think that getting paid to read blogs would be a really sweet deal. In reality, it is more than that. There are directions that need to be followed. I need to be able to identify who left comments on whose blogs. The students themselves need to be able to find each other's blogs. I have discovered the need to create and post some tutorials on specific tasks I am assigning for homework. In all, it is a huge pile of work. I am not complaining, mostly. After all, I am the one who proposed the inclusion of blogging into the curriculum. I am also the one who approached the department chair for permission to eliminate the term paper in favor of a semester-long ethics project conducted entirely in cyberspace.

It is tiring, however, all of this. When I feel like maybe I have bitten off too much to chew, I console myself with the following thoughts:

"This is a work in progress. Nobody can be expected to foresee each and every pitfall of a new plan prior to its implementation."

"All of the work I am doing now will make the beginning of next semester much easier."

"The students are much more engaged in this project than their compatriots ever were in the term papers."

"I am carrying around a lot less paper these days, which my flaky left shoulder really appreciates."

"Number Guy is a supportive husband who understands that I am under a lot of pressure right now - and he's all mine."

"The knitting will still be there when this beginning of the semester crunch is in the past. And I have been able to sneak in a few rows here and there. Even if it was just in the doctor's office waiting room."

"My blog peeps will also still be here and when the crunch is done and will forgive my infrequent posting in the meantime."

"I have a new Advance Review Copy to read!"

In which trek blogs

Part of me can't believe that I have blogged so little lately while still working on blogs and feed aggregator software. Truly.

I've been working on my students' blogs: checking them to see if they have followed directions, making sure that they have made an initial post, making comments on color schemes and content. My initial thought on listing their blogs so that they can find each other, was to list their blogs in the sidebar of my class blog as four section-specific blogrolls, but then the sidebar became hugely long and started to look really cluttered. Last night, I decided to set up posts on my class blog to list each student blog by section number. I think this is cleaner looking. To make it easier for the students, I stuck a gadget in the sidebar with links to the four posts. These are college students - they should be able to navigate a simple web page.

This morning, I created some new folders in my Bloglines for my students' blogs. These will be kept private: I need to keep my cyberspace "trek" persona separate from my physical world "professor" persona. Though, I have to admit that while walking the other day, I was reflecting on The Matrix and how I already have a Matrix moniker.

Do you realize that Blogger's spellchecker does not recognize the words aggregator, blogroll, and Bloglines? Someone needs to update their dictionary.

Just sayin'.

The upshot of all of this computer work is that the only knitting I accomplished yesterday was at the allergist's office. I brought a pair of socks and worked on heel flaps.

It is raining heavily today, so although I was able to get in my daily walking, I am unable to take a decent digital photograph.

Please use your imagination to picture a basic blue/purple/green sock.

While you do that, I shall return to my class management and preparation duties.

PS - Sheepie posted a couple of weeks ago about grants and blue, bouncy balls.I've been using mine as a desk chair since I read her post and I have to say that this is a great way to build core strength! As long as I remember to maintain my balance properly and not cheat by bracing the ball against my leg or the desk, that is.

In which trek pops up

Just popping up to say that I am currently completely overwhelmed with student blog inspection and grading. If you are looking for knitting content, you should probably move right along to the next blog in your blogroll.

Cynomys ludovicianus:
Farmers hate them, but I think they are cute.

In which something looks familiar

Hello? Hello? Anybody here? Hey, where am I? Oh, wait, this looks vaguely familiar. I'm sure I've been here before now. Something about the decor...

Oh, I know: it's my blog!

Hi, blog, how have you been? Sorry if you have been feeling a wee bit lonely or neglected this week. I have been very busy with class preparations - all of that beginning of the semester stuff. Of course, if I had scheduled three times as long as I thought I needed, I would have been golden. As it was, I was able to successfully fold time and space, critically disrupting the very fabric of the universe by creating a jagged rift in the space-time continuum. That's the only possible explanation for me not being three weeks behind as of the middle of the first week of the fall semester.

I'm sure that my students, were I to give them access to my blog, would agree.

No, I shall never give students my blog address: it would cost me Deb's loyal friendship because then I would not be able to post funny student emails.

Aside: Neatnik just approached me with a request for a piece of string. I found this mildly hysterical seeing as how I am at my desk, the top drawer of which always houses half a dozen or more bits of yarn. No, I didn't even ask why she wanted a piece of string. I just reached into the drawer, extracted a short length of sock yarn (too short for strangulation, and, so, safe for almost any purpose she can devise), and handed it over to her.

My first classes were yesterday. I planned to arrive early so that I could handwrite the blog address for each student on the handouts which our department secretary had to kindly photocopied for me. Despite the sideways rain, I staggered my drippy self into the computer science office and proceeded to label each blog requirements handout with the student's last name and the required blog address. In a fit of unbridled creativity and efficiency, I stapled each blog handout to a copy of the course syllabus!

Yes, I amaze myself sometimes with my incredibly high standard of excellence in stapling. Swinglineshould name a line of staplers after my humble self.

Too bad that I was working with my Monday roster instead of my Friday roster. I got the section numbers backwards on Thursday night when I was creating my attendance spreadsheets.

Yeah.

All of that educational efficiency kept me fully occupied this past week, so there was very little in the way of knitting. I think I worked four rows of cardigan panel and part of a heel flap between Tuesday and today. Since I haven't got any progress pictures to share, how about an educational snapshot from vacation?

Triceratops horridus

In which trek is too busy to blog

At the sound of the tone,
please leave a message.
:: beeeeeep ::

In which trek prepares

Although Neatnik started school last Thursday, the college, in a display of infinite stupidity wisdom, determined that it would be a good and wonderful thing to begin classes today. This means that I will meet my fall semester students this Friday and this upcoming Monday. While we all like to enjoy a few extra days of summer, this delaying of the commencement of the fall term leads directly to my last day of the semester being the twenty-third of December.

Yeah, I think it sucks, too.

Being a generally optimistic sort, however, I decided that I would put off class preparation until this week. With Neatnik in school, I would have some uninterrupted time to really concentrate on my work. It seemed to make really good sense, back in August. Today? Not so much.

I spent the early part of the morning multi-tasking the household chores with some decent walking mileage. By late morning, I was ready to hunker down and to really get going on the first day's lab assignment. It will be the setting up of the students' blogs and since I am sort of familiar with the blogosphere, I figured I'd have all of my preparatory work prepared in an hour or two.

Why is it that I always underestimate the length of time class preparation will actually require?

Despite the fact that I did not finish all of my preparations this afternoon, I knocked off around two-ish and drew my cardigan (Ravelry link) out of hibernation. The nights are getting cooler and, though I may be entirely mistaken, I think that a finished cardigan will keep me much warmer than two unconnected panels of knitted fabric.

Gratuitous vacation photograph to distract
blog peeps from lack of knitting progress pictures.

SABTC: Final update

As the summer of 2009 winds to an end, so does the Second Annual Boxtopapalooza. Clan trek has accumulated 131 Box Tops. I have received a few envelopes from bloggers this past week. Between our Box Tops and theirs, we have about 2% of Neatnik's school's goal for the 2009-2010 school year sitting in our kitchen. You guys rock. Thank you so very much.

Please post your totals in the comments and let me know if you need to know where to send them. Also, please remember that I need your email address in order to send you the snail mail address.

Thanks again to everyone who participated!

Curiosities

While on vacation last month, we saw some things that were very curious and some other things which just made me scratch my head and wonder.

On the Metro trains, I noticed this thingamajig. I am sure it is used to secure wheelchairs or something but since I never saw it in action, it remains a curiosity.

Anyone ever seen this thingy in action?

We saw quite a few Metro stations in operation, though. This is the view of one of the underground stations, taken from the top of the stairs.

Sort of reminds me of the "endless fields"
in The Matrix, but in a good way.

In the Museum of Natural History, you can learn a lot of things. You can even learn stuff from the benches. Several of the ones we saw in the nautical area had examples of sailors' knots.

You know, just in case you need to trim the sheets
or batten down the hatches whilst touring the museum.

Over in the National Air and Space Museum, they responded very well to the common habit of using one's foot to activate the toilet flush mechanism.

They stuck it down near the floor.

There were drinking fountains in all of the museums but this particular one, in the West Wing of the National Gallery of Art, was the fanciest by far.

Very highly polished, it was.

And just in case you were wondering how you stack up in the world of predators and their prey, the National Zoological Park is happy to assist you. This sign was next to a big platform scale.

Apparently, I am a female warthog.
That doesn't seem like a very nice thing
to call someone, now does it?

On the refraction of light

We saw a fantastic rainbow the day before we left Washington, DC. We were walking back to the hotel from the Metro station and there it was: a full bow with a double arc on the right side. The pictures didn't come out well at all, but I did get some pretty cool rainbow-colored ones at the National Museum of the American Indian earlier in the day.





Those rainbow splashes on the floor and staircases were all cast by a stack of prisms mounted high on the wall of the rotunda:

I don't know if the staff ever
adjusts their orientation.

If the naturally occurring rainbows weren't enough, there were some man-made rainbows there, as well.

Hanging on the wall of the gift shop

Upstairs, in the interactive room, Neatnik and I learned how to make very colorful bracelets from a little Mayan woman from Guatemala. To start, you cut a bunch of brightly colored threads/yarns/strings to the same length, make an overhand knot in one end. Next, you select one working string and make a wrap around the rest of the bunch. Repeat this half a dozen times or so then change colors, making sure to put the first working string back into the bunch before you start wrapping again.

It was very cool. I made an anklet and Neatnik made a bracelet and started a necklace.

Wonder if I should make a photo tutorial on this...

'Tocks

Today is Neatnik's first day of second grade. We were up in plenty of time. Neatnik was fed, brushed, dressed, and ready to go way before the school bus was assigned to collect her. All three of us sat in the sun porch, reading while we awaited the immanent arrival of the big, yellow bus. Said bus arrived on time and that is when things started to go downhill.

No, you read that correctly: the bus was on time but things started to go downhill.

See, there is one child who goes to Neatnik's school who lives on the local military base. Last year, the school bus was able to drive onto the base through the front gate. Apparently, this year it cannot.

Oh, yes, I quite agree: a half-filled bus of grammar school children is a tremendous threat to national security.

Anyway, the driver was rejected access to the base at the main gate. She backed up from the checkpoint and came to pick up Neatnik and then needed to change the order of the bus route, to continue around the base to the visitor's entrance gate to collect the one child who lives there before continuing on to the remaining two stops between here and the school.

All of the kids on this bus, therefore, were late today - the first day freakin' day of the new school year.

Updated, Thursday 03 September 2009, 1:16pm The bus driver made it to the school five minutes before the first bell, so the children on our route weren't actually late!

We need a humorous distraction on the blog this morning.

# # #

It must have been the heat on the day we visited the National Zoological Park, because all the animals seemed to feel the need to show me their 'tocks.

Row 1: cheetah, gazelles, maned wolf, gorilla, capybara
Row 2: elephant, orangutan, lion, tamarin, meerkat
Row 3: shrew, turtle, pelican, sea lion, tortoise

In which trek has a secret

I think that I may have mentioned ad nauseum once or twice that the mean old doctor asked me to do something about my cholesterol levels. It isn't that the numbers were so off the charts as to resemble a stampede of digits. It was more like the LDLs needed a little bit of corralling.

I knew that in the weeks prior to the blood draw I had been eating a few more treats than normal. We were celebrating things like Easter, graduations, birthdays, and national holiday weekend barbecues. These events almost always include dessert of some ilk. Frequently this past spring, the ilk in question was homemade cheesecake, which is definitely good eats but not so much good for you.

Have you ever noticed how doctors don't want to hear that you know exactly why your cholesterol figures are elevated and that it really isn't the way you normally eat and that it was just a bit of sustained celebratory dessert indulgence? No, you must prove it to the doctor. Hence the Summer of Increased Fruit and Oatmeal Bread Consumption, which is so much better than the other sort of consumption.

Combine the increased fruit intake with a markedly decreased treat intake and you will have my nutritional plan for the summer. And it worked. I was called buff. My pants became too big and I hit the thrift shops.

But as is the case with so many things in life, one must take the good with the bad. In this instance, the bad is having to go bra shopping...again. Didn't I just do this??

This time, I decided not to bring Neatnik shopping with me. I felt that I really didn't need another rendition of "Look, Mommy! I found an 'A'!!"

In retrospect, Neatnik's announcements would have been better than the department store lingerie lady politely suggesting that I try the teens department.

Yeah, all of this buffness has taken its toll. I was in search of smaller bras. The department store had two styles that ostensibly came in my size but neither one was really comfortable. They fit; they just didn't fit well. I even dispensed with my dignity and tried the offering for teens. We will not speak of this ever again.

I made my way down the mall to


A friend of mine who suffers from a similar lack of mammary endowment wears only Victoria's Secret bras. She swears by how well and how long they last. I told the nice young lady the size I needed. She never blinked. She did not suggest training bras. She smiled and said, "Come on over here, I'll get someone who can help you."

She introduced me to another lady who brought me a couple of styles to try on. They both fit and were comfortable. One was so comfortable that it felt as though someone had measured me in my sleep and custom stitched a bra to my exact measurements. What happened next is kind of a blur. It involved some $5 off coupons and the promise of frequent coupons and reward points by mail by signing up for an Angel card.

All I know is I have never before contemplated purchasing $42 bras in the past but somehow, I came home with a new credit account and three new bras. Three new bras that fit and will last for years.

So, if I amortize the cost of my new lingerie over the lifespan of same, it really was a thrifty purchase, right?

In which trek reviews Julia Child

Did you know that Julia Child's kitchen was designated a national treasure? I did not until very recently.

While we were in Washington, I took some pictures of her kitchen. When Julia moved to a retirement community in California, she donated her Cambridge, Massachusetts kitchen to the Smithsonian Institute. The entire kitchen was tagged and dismantled in Cambridge, trucked to Washington, and reassembled in the National Museum of American History. It's even online.

Julia and Paul bought the bowl in France.

I had a sketchy knowledge of her life before becoming The French Chef, courtesy of a documentary Number Guy and I watched some years ago. Unlike my brother-in-law, CivPE, I don't normally gravitate towards biographies, but seeing Julia's kitchen inspired me to learn more. I learned a bit more than I liked, actually.

Embiggen to see scrambled Rubik's cube to left of phone.

I checked out Laura Shapiro's book, Julia Child: A Life,
and it was fascinating. Julia felt very strongly that cooking requires time and love.

Massive six burner stove!

Faster isn't necessarily better. Fewer strokes aren't necessarily better.

She advocated beginning meal preparations with whole, raw foods. This was counter to the trend of the forties and fifties when ad campaigns targeted homemakers, encouraging them to opt for the speed and convenience of frozen dinners and condensed canned soup casseroles.

Lots of room to work.

As I read, I started thinking about how Julia's approach to cooking is so much like my approach to knitting. Sure, it would be more convenient and (usually) cheaper to buy a sweater or a pair of socks, but handknit sweaters and socks are as different from store-bought cardigans and crew socks as fresh homemade (oatmeal) bread and all-day simmered red sauce are from mass-produced white bread and ragout in a jar.

That's why I knit.

PS - I worked on my sock last night. Neatnik was in bed, Number Guy was reading, and I propped my book on a cookbook rack and knit right along. It was heavenly.