posted 2008/05/04 at 19:29
About a half-hour ago I finished the last of my students' portfolios from this past semester; I'm waiting a little while here to allow some people who had problems submitting things to me to get some last papers e-mailed to me, but then tomorrow afternoon I'll be submitting their grades. Contrary to what I thought earlier, I actually do get a week off before the next semester starts, and I probably need that time off right now more than ever. In addition to catching up on reading and writing and cleaning and all sorts of other things, I'm going to need time to just relax, kick my feet up and do nothing at all.
As I expected, the end of this semester was more painful for me than it was in previous semesters, and I'm not referring to having to grade all those extra portfolios here. I take a very deep interest in my students, and I try to do all that I can to enable them to succeed, not just in my class and their other classes, but in life in general. I take care of my students, and earlier this year after Dad died, well, a lot of them took care of me. I know that students coming and going is an unavoidable aspect of my job, and I'm looking forward to having a new group of students to teach here a week from Monday, but after losing Dad a couple of months ago, moving on from this group of students is kind of hard for me.
I think Heather summed it up best when she talked about how hard this Spring is for her. I commented here a week ago about how the trees in our backyard are starting to bud leaves, and Heather pointed out that it's a sign that the cycle of nature, like life, goes on. For her, as it is for me a good part of the time, it's still hard to think of life going on without Dad physically here with us. As much as I know that I'm ready to move on with life after Dad's death, and as much as I know that I have to move on, a good part of me still doesn't want to move on quite yet. I want to hold on everything, from the good of my students' support to the bad of the painful grief, because I'm familiar with it. Moving on means moving towards the unknown, and I fear that I'm not strong enough to handle the unknown quite yet. I have to move on, though. Somehow I have to move on.
Labels: dad, personal, weather
posted 2008/04/27 at 20:36
This past weekend I've just taken some time for myself and tried to decompress. For the first time since Dad's death I didn't have anything that needed immediate attention from my students, although starting Wednesday I'll have some fifty or sixty portfolios to look at and get graded by the following Monday. I also start teaching Composition I at MCCC that Monday, so over the next couple of days I'll have to look at the required textbook for that class and try to figure out some kind of lesson plan. Yesterday and today, though, I kind of took some time for myself here to relax and unwind, play some video games, do some shopping, and watch a bit of television. (Unfortunately I was out shopping during the Red Wings' game Saturday and wound up missing Darren McCarty's first fight since rejoining the Wings, guh.) I'd wanted to do some cleaning in my room, but that didn't wind up happening and I'll probably have to get to it two weeks from now.
Leaves have begun to spring up on some of the trees in our backyard, and I can't help but think of how Dad's not here to see them now. As we've been going through his stuff recently, we've unearthed a lot of the sketches and paintings he used to do back before he started his own business; I had pretty much forgotten he'd ever done them, but once I saw them I remembered, "Oh yeah, I saw those when I was a kid." He had this way of drawing leaves on trees when he worked in pen-and-ink where we just made these curlicues all over the place, and somehow it worked; I remember trying to imitate that style when I was young and failing at it. (As always, stick a writing implement in my hand and all my manual dexterity goes to crap.) I'll probably put some of his work online here on the .org soon -- I've been meaning to do an online tribute to him, but time just hasn't been on my side for that -- but it's painful to realize that twenty years ago he just stopped doing that stuff because he got so wrapped up in running his business that he cut all his fun, all his social activities, out of his life. (In case you were wondering where I got that from ... yeah.)
As I see spring turn to summer here (although we may be getting some snow overnight after hitting 80 on Friday ...), I can't help but wonder if Dad was able to appreciate the changing of the seasons. We had that lunar eclipse a few days before his death, and I can remember him and Mom taking a look at it after I pointed it out to him, but a full lunar eclipse is one of those rare, irregular occasions you kind of make a point of observing. Even coming from a family of Wiccans, I don't think we do all that much to recognize when the seasons change and all the beauty that's out there waiting to be explored. If I were to pass away suddenly, I wouldn't want it said of me that I was too wrapped up in my work and my other pursuits to be able to enjoy the simple beauty of the first green leaves budding on trees in the spring. I think I'm overdue for a trip to Wildwood or the Toledo Botanical Garden. I'll do what I can to make that trip before I start getting weighed down with portfolios.
Labels: dad, personal, weather
posted 2008/02/13 at 17:04
I finally got a "good" snow day yesterday. It had been snowing pretty much since I woke up, and as the afternoon dragged on things really got a lot worse, to the point where we had a winter storm warning here in town. I kept checking MCCC's Website to see if they were going to cancel, but they kept saying that they were open. Finally, just before I was about to go out and clean off my van, I called the secretary of my department to see if things were any better up in Michigan. She said that she'd call the person who makes the decision about when to close campus and call me right back, and sure enough the campus was in the process of closing up. That saved me a lot of hellish driving and gas money, although in order to make up for the snow day the universe seemed to turn everything else against me that day, from huge mistakes I made in the stuff I was working on at home that day to the Red Wings' awful performance that evening. I should be careful what I wish for, I know.
I dislike the cold and snow enough to start with, but these past couple of winters I have been getting the absolute worst cases of winter skin I can ever remember having. The back of my right hand is almost always super-dry and covered with tiny cuts, and no amount of moisturizer seems to make things better. What makes this all the more inexplicable is that I've been spending far more time indoors than out these past couple of winters since I'm not traipsing around UT's campus all day and all. I don't know if this has something to do with my age or something related to conditions inside the house, but it has become an absolute pain to deal with here. When I stop at Kroger on the way home from work tonight, I may very well pick up a couple of medicated mositurizing lotions, just to see if they'll help any more than the moisturizers I've been using.
Looking at the forecast ahead makes me want to go kick around Punxsatawney Phil. Perhaps I got spoiled by having a couple of thaws so early in the season, but it looks like we're not going to climb above freezing for a long time now. Between the blowing and drifting snow on the roads, snow-blindness (which has always been a huge problem for me since I'm so nocturnal), the cold, the dry air and what it's doing to my hands, and everything else related to the cold and snow, I'm beginning to question the wisdom of me staying in this part of the country any longer than I absolutely have to. I enjoy the familiarity I have with the Northwest Ohio region, and I still think that there's no more beautiful land on this planet than what you'll find in the upper half of Michigan's lower peninsula, but worrying about hurricanes or earthquakes instead of freezing my you-know-what off would at least be a nice change of pace.
posted 2008/02/06 at 19:27
Twenty minutes into my class tonight, MCCC's PA system (which sounds about ten times worse than any drive-thru speakers I've ever heard) crackled on to say that all classes for the rest of the night were canceled. Not only was I not able to explain my class' next two assignments to them in depth, but given how bad the roads were at that point, I didn't even get home much earlier than I do on a normal night. Now I'm forced to consider whether I push ahead with the same lesson plan for my Tuesday/Thursday class tomorrow night, or if I cut that class short as well just so I keep both classes going at the same pace.
posted at 17:13
I don't like talking about the same topic twice in a row unless it's something on the scale of politics, but I can't help but write about the weather again today. My drive to and from MCCC takes a little over half an hour, and the intersection of US-23 and Ida West Road, where I get off of/onto US-23 up here in Michigan, is almost exactly the halfway point of my drive in terms of time. When I left the house a little over an hour ago it was raining fairly steadily, and between all the rain of recent days and the snow melting, we're actually seeing our street starting to have serious flooding issues. It used to be that our street never flooded, likely because we were all using well water, but several years ago Toledo mandated we all switch over to city water. I used to think the awful taste of the tap water was the only problem caused by this switchover, but I think the fact that we're not using well water any longer may be contributing to the flooding problems we've been having lately. (At least all the houses are significantly higher than street level, and very few houses in Toledo have basements since we're basically built on swampland.)
The rain was bad enough as I left here, and as I drove into Michigan it got so heavy that visibility became a serious concern. About halfway up US-23, though, the rain got heavier, and little ice chunks began to show up on my windshield. I literally drove right into freezing rain, and in the two miles before I got off of US-23 I counted a half-dozen cars that had slid off of the road. I immediately slowed way down and basically drove in a crawl up here to campus, thankful that I always budget a lot of extra time to get up here in case I run into circumstances like these. Things have since switched over to a heavy snow, and I can tell that driving home tonight will not be fun at all. Before I leave here I may try to get onto a mapping Website to find an alternate route home that doesn't require highway driving, because trying to drive home in this is going to be a serious test of my abilities. Is this the universe's way of getting back at me for saying the fog wasn't so bad to drive in earlier this week?
I can't say that I'm too happy with the college for not canceling class this evening. We don't quite have blizzard conditions here, but the snow is steady and the roads are going to be icy as all get-out by the time I let my class go tonight. If it weren't for the fact that I get paid by the class, I probably would have canceled class tonight just for the sake of my students. I mean, yes, part of the reason colleges have fewer snow days is because we want to get students accustomed to how few snow days there are in the work world, but the measures by which campuses are and aren't closed still feel way too against the students and teachers to me. Most of the people going to college are fairly new, less experienced drivers, and so I think it's in the interests of the school to be a bit more lenient when it comes to canceling class just to help keep the students -- and those who can't avoid driving in these conditions -- safe and secure.
posted 2008/02/05 at 17:21
I don't want to say that I dislike driving in fog, but it's not exactly my favourite weather. Driving in the fog in Toledo isn't so bad, but yesterday we had just a tremendous amount of fog all day long, and getting up here to campus proved to be quite difficult. I'm used to driving in the fog in the suburbs and such, where there are always lots of things lit up to help keep me on track. Up here in rural Michigan, though, the lights just weren't there to help guide me, and then to make matters worse we still had a considerable amount of snow on the ground. Between the whiteness of the fog and the whiteness of the snow, I had problems even orienting myself to where I was, and I think half of the time I was driving last night I was doing so merely out of memory of having made this trip so often these past six months or so. It wasn't as much of a problem as driving on icy roads, but it was fairly difficult. I suppose I should just be glad that all those years of video gaming have helped me with my reflexes, and that I still have perfect vision with which to see things. (It got worse when I drove home late that night in the dark, but I think it was actually harder in the daytime when everything was just so white.)
The fog alone would have made the day remarkable enough in and of itself, but then late last night as I was finishing some stuff up online, the sky lit up. Somehow, in the beginning of February, we managed to have not only a thunderstorm but one of the strongest thunderstorms I can remember having for quite some time. Perhaps I was just hearing the thunder better because there weren't any leaves on the trees to buffet the sound, but for a good two hours there we got hit pretty hard with rain and thunder and lightning. I'm just glad we didn't lose power, because I was doing some pretty important stuff online and a blackout would have really screwed things up for me. As if that weren't odd enough, we went from about 45 degrees late that evening when I came home from teaching, up to 55 or so while the thunderstorm was going on in the dead of night, and then when I woke up today we were back down to 45. We'll drop back below freezing again in a few hours, and there's a "wintry mix" in the forecast for tomorrow morning.
We seem to be out of the dead of winter at this point, which is important for me because it means I'll be able to go out to the garage to work out more regularly. The garage is only half-heated -- it's usually only 55 or 60 out there when I go to work out -- and I don't feel comfortable working out when it gets really cold out there because I worry that it puts me at a greater risk to get sick. The warmer weather also means I'll be more likely to go out to the local parks to walk or take photos, and yes, I will be taking more photos for the Website here soon. I just need to make time for that, and making time for things hasn't been so easy since I started teaching multiple classes this semester. I'm having to switch my schedule around here so I have more time during my "peak" hours, and although I hate doing much of anything before I've had the chance to shower in the morning, those early-morning hours are an ideal time for me to work on my creative pursuits. Maybe I'm just too much of a clean freak, I don't know.
Labels: weather
posted 2008/01/07 at 21:08
I think I can say with certainty that this is the first time I've ever made a post on the .org in January with my window open. At the very least it's the first time I've done so when it's so late at night. We hit about 65 in Toledo today, and even now we're still at around 61. By point of comparison, the average low we reach in the middle of summer is 60. Normally we don't open the house up until it gets closer to 70, but it being the dead of winter and all, our bodies are kind of inured to the cold, and so 60 kind of feels like 70 now. The temperatures will drop here -- we're only supposed to hit the mid 50s tomorrow, and then snow is in the forecast after that -- but for now it's kind of a trip to have my window open late on a January night. It was even freakier earlier in the day, when the sun was out and I could see all the bare trees in our backyard. I'm not complaining in the slightest here, but at the same time things didn't exactly feel quite right today.
This gets me to thinking about going out and taking photographs sometime soon for the .org. It's been nearly a year since I've done so, and I still haven't done a photo shoot at Wildwood in several years now, hard as that is for me to believe. The thing is that I want to get a wider variety of exercise in this year -- not just dance games with the odd day of yoga here and there, and walking in Wildwood is definitely something I'd like to do more. The problem is that whenever I take photos at Wildwood I don't really feel like I'm exercising, because I'm walking slower and making frequent stops just to set up, and take, the best photos I can. This doesn't even touch on how my shoes always get a lot of sand stuck to them when I walk at Wildwood, and how no matter how hard I try, the sand never seems to want to dislodge itself except inside my dance game pads. The obvious solution would be to get a pair of shoes exclusively for those long walks, but I'm not sure I'm ready to make that kind of investment right now.
We're actually going to have thunderstorms, or at least thundershowers, in here in a little while, which is another one of those things that just jars you by how out-of-place it is in January. The chance of thunder extends into tomorrow, when unfortunately I won't have too much time to enjoy the weather because I have to go to a workshop up at campus for the adjunct instructors. My online class starts this Friday, and a week from today my on-campus classes start back up. I'm feeling pretty nervous about trying to teach multiple classes in a semester for the first time, but I'm hoping that I can get adjusted to it in short order. This is work I love, after all, it's only a matter of being able to juggle more of it.
Labels: weather
posted 2008/01/01 at 19:33
Last night was the first time I can ever remember being under a winter storm warning during the changeover from year to year. In the end we only got some snow out of it, which melted before a new front dumped a few more inches on us this evening, but for a while there I was pondering what might happen if we were to lose power as midnight approached. I soon realized that the best way we'd have to monitor the switch to 2008 would be to use the clock and built-in light on my cell phone. Hardly the most elaborate of ceremonies, but then again if we lost power at midnight in the dead of winter, I'm guessing that marking the changing of years would be one of our least pressing problems. What really freaked me out, though, was that a few hours before midnight, as the storm approached, a lot of our neighbours decided to light off their fireworks then and there so as to avoid the snow later. At first I thought we might be having a thundersnow what with the sound and the sky lighting up like it was, but then I finally realized what was going on. There were still a fair number of fireworks going off at midnight, though, even with a fair amount of snow falling from the ground.
What was oddest about last night, though, was that my sister and brother-in-law retreated to their new apartment a few hours before midnight. With all of their heavy stuff moved over there, I guess it only made sense for them to start using the apartment as their home base, but perhaps I assumed they'd stay with us for the ball drop and then head back to their place. It has definitely been odd today adjusting to the two of them not being here, and more importantly their stuff not being here. I'm relishing being able to reclaim some space in this house for my own stuff -- the two of them had pretty much commandeered the loft in addition to their own bedroom -- but even with the two of them having come to visit twice today (and pick up a few leftover things), the house has a weird ghost-town quality to it now. I guess it doesn't help that I'm trying to readjust to other things as well today, such as getting back on my diet after finally vanquishing that blasted virus. Today has had kind of a surreal tone to it, and I still don't think that deep down I realize all that has changed in this house in just the past forty-eight hours.
I've only got ten days left here before I teach again, and only now am I really able to use this time as I would have liked to have used it at the start. Between all the cleaning I've been doing out in the loft and a lack of sleep from last night, though, I haven't exactly been in top form today. I don't want to say that I feel like the bug caused me to waste my vacation, but at the same time I definitely feel a need to make up for lost time here. I may have to make an early night of tonight just so I can catch up on my sleep, and hope that I can really make the most of every minute of tomorrow. I never like doing that, but it's all I can do to keep from falling asleep as I type here right now, and my bed is looking awfully inviting, too. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day.
posted 2007/12/10 at 17:36
If you've been paying attention to the news over the weekend then you've probably heard about the ice storms that have affected the northeast over the past few days. Apart from a few car crashes, Toledo doesn't seem to have been hit that hard. We've still got a fair deal of ice everywhere; it's kind of eerie to look out of my window right now and see the lights from the highway being reflected off of the bare tree limbs and wilting evergreens. However, whenever the possibility of an ice storm arises, I can't help but think of how in recent years some ice storms in places near here -- Montreal and western New York, to name just a couple -- downed power lines for several days, causing many more deaths than have resulted from this weekend's storm. Remembering those stories, and imagining what it must be like to be without heat or food for days on end in the freezing cold of December, kind of makes me feel bad for telling myself how much of a pain it will be to have to scrape the ice off of my car tomorrow before I go up to teach. Compared to what people in Quebec and New York went through, I've got it relatively easy here.
That being said, I'm not going to deny that there is a part of me that hopes that work shuts down before I have to go up tomorrow. (We'd originally had more ice in the forecast for this evening and into tomorrow, but now the forecasts are saying we won't have any precipitation at all until late in the evening tomorrow.) It isn't that I don't want to teach -- I love my work -- but at the same time I'm not going to deny that I still shelter a bit of my childhood mind inside of me, and that the thought of a "snow day" kind of makes me cheer a little to myself, thinking of staying home in elementary school and watching game shows like Press Your Luck and The Price is Right. (Were I to have a snow day now, of course, I'd more than likely sleep in and do some extra reading.) Given how close we are to the end of the semester, taking a snow day tomorrow would be difficult for my class -- I'm handing back the penultimate drafts of their final papers tomorrow, and they'll only have a week after that to revise them and turn them in with their final portfolios -- but I'm not going to deny that a snow day would be totally unwelcome for me.
I guess part of what may be going on here is that whenever there were snow days when I went to UT, they always came at inopportune times, either when I didn't have class or, in one memorable instance, I had an oral exam scheduled for Japanese class and the school shut down five minutes before I was scheduled to take it. I think I actually had more classes canceled on me because of 09.11 than because of the weather the whole time I was at UT. (Of course, the semester after I graduated, the whole city shut down for two days because of a blizzard.) I understand that the bar is kind of set higher for closing colleges due to the weather than for closing other schools, but at the same time when I read stories online about all the traffic accidents that have happened since the ice storm, it makes me wonder if maybe we need to set the bar at least a little lower. As important as a lot of businesses are, and as important as I consider my teaching to be, when you hear about all the serious injuries and fatalities that have happened in the wake of this storm, you really have to rethink the whole risk/reward factor involved in trying to drive on roads that are so icy.
posted 2007/12/05 at 23:09
Our first snowfall of the year wasn't too far off-schedule; we normally get our first accumulation sometime in the last third of November, and this year it came this past Saturday. As is my tradition, I play Björk's Gling-Gló during the first snowfall, partly because I remember buying it on my winter break that year I went to Antioch from a locally-owned music shop, and partly because those of us who grew up watching A Charlie Brown Christmas will, for better or for worse, always associate soft jazz music with the season. The next day we warmed way up above freezing and it all melted away. Temperatures dropped again soon after, though, and last night we had an inch fall on us that will probably be on the ground here for some time to come.
Given how long of a drive I have to and from work, having the roads get snowed on becomes an even bigger hassle for me; I'm used to doubling my estimated driving times to get to and from someplace when it's been snowing, but not when that place is over a half-hour away. Yesterday I asked my students about how well Michigan keeps their roads clean (about as well as they keep the roads repaired, which is to say not at all), and they helped me find an alternate route to take to campus that should be plowed more frequently than my normal route. What particularly concerns me is that I heard that last year, when down here in Ohio the whole county I'm in shut down for two straight days because of a huge snow emergency, MCCC still had classes going on because the snow wasn't so bad up there. Obviously there's no way I'm going to break the law to go up to campus, no matter how much I like my job, but the problem I run into is that I don't get paid for the days I don't teach. I suppose this is another reason for me to work on getting a tenured position as quickly as I can, so I can get salaried and be able to take the odd day off over the winter if I don't feel like fighting the roads. (There were at least two accidents on the highway in our backyard this afternoon alone, and the roads didn't look to be that bad.)
All of this leads up to another interesting dilemma, because I'm scheduled to go to Cleveland for a DDR tournament this Saturday, and sure enough there's the dreaded "wintry mix" in the forecast that day. The last time I went to Cleveland for a tournament back in February the roads were hazardous from snow and ice, and I wound up arriving about ten minutes too late to register for the tournament. (Not that I had any shot of winning, but it's the thought that counts.) I don't like that I'm having to hold off on making a decision about whether or not to go until the last minute (particularly given all of the baking I'll be doing for the tournament over the next couple of days), but I suppose that it's really out of my hands. Even though I've lived up here all of my life, I still can't get used to how, in these coldest months, the weather can mess up my schedule so much.
Labels: driving, stompity, weather
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