(no subject)

Hot on the heels of my return to Kenosha is all the usual business. Yet somehow, I'm managing to convince myself that things will be ok, and I'll have time to finish everything I need to accomplish. I hope that keeps up!

Today was my first training session for Supplementary Instruction (SI). As homework, I created a lesson plan for the first week of class, and wrote an introduction speech for explaining who I am to the class. Basically, I'll attend class, take notes, and attempt to be a model student. Outside of class, I will facilitate two hour-long discussion sessions per week where I try to help students develop good study habits, and get them to talk over and reinforce concepts from class. I'm a bit nervous as this is my first time doing anything like that, but I also think it will be a very positive and growth-producing experience.

There may be some complication in that I'm doing this for two sections of the same class which are taught by two different professors who have different focuses and styles. I'm going to talk to them soon and get a sense of how they're going to respectively approach things, and how similar the classes and readings and lectures will be.

---

Juan didn't manage to find time to work on Columbia the Lumina while I was gone. I talked to him today about the status. His life has been crazy-busy, and I really feel for him. I certainly don't have any ill-will toward him; he's been a real godsend in keeping my old beaters running on a budget. But I was thinking that if he's still too busy this week, I'd take it in to a shop. Juan doesn't want to let me do that though, and is planning to do the work this weekend because he is awesome like that. It does, though, mean that I should stay in Kenosha this weekend to drive my car over to his place and help out where I can.

---

This afternoon, I went outside and laid down across Columbia's back end (I have to admit, it'd kind of nice to have a car big enough to do that comfortably) and talked to lisagems for an hour or so. It was really nice catching up with her. I felt pretty bad, though, that I had to tell her I won't be able to come down to Chicago this weekend. She's a strong person and can take care of herself through whatever life throws at her, but I really wish that I'd been able to be there more for her recently. She definitely deserves some time set aside for her once I can manage it.

While I was lying down and talking, I watched swallows and dragonflys flit about overhead, some alighting on the pine trees, some far, far above them. The sky slowly faded from blue through a series of sunset colors, dimming and darkening. Winds rustled nearby leaves, making a soothing sound. I realized how little time I've spent just being outdoors and quiet lately. I told Lisa about how beautiful the evening was and how I wished she was there to see it with me.

---

I biked to school this morning. When I walked outside to bike home, I had a flat tire. My mother was kind enough to come pick me up. I really need to buy one of those CO2 cartridge inflators; I had a spare innertube, but I'd never bought an inflator like I'd been planning. When I changed the tube at home, I found that the rim seemed to have sliced into the valve stem where it protrudes into the wheel. I don't know what happened. Maybe it wasn't on perfectly straight.

---

This evening, along with my SI work, I looked at my brother Tim's schedule. He'll be attending school with me this year, and I'm very excited about it! I also want to use my experience at college to be a supportive big brother. He made a change I suggested on his schedule, we talked about the classes he's taking, we looked at loan disbursement info, and how we'll travel to and from school. I think this has the potential to be really good for him!

---

I'm thinking of danaeris tonight too, and of the wonderful adventures and memorable experiences we had in Toronto. I am so in love with her.

It's late, and I need to get to bed. It felt important to me to do a little write-up here, even though I should have gotten to sleep by about the time I started. Hopefully, I'll still feel calm about the mounting responsibilities tomorrow. It's a much better option that being anxious all the time, and probably even more productive.

(no subject)

I finished up with the SI instructional sessions today. Tomorrow I'll be meeting with the two anthro professors to talk in more detail about their courses and plans. I have syllabi from both of them and will use that to plan out what I'm doing too. Part of the SI position involves creating a weekly lesson plan and mailing it to the program coordinator. This is all pretty new to me and I'm a bit intimidated. Adding a little complexity is the fact that though the two professors are teaching the same course, they are using different textbooks. I talked with talked with one of them (who is also my advisor) a bit about that at lunch. (There was complementary pizza while a number of professors involved in the program visited.) She feels that concepts are more important than the text, and that the two sections are going to stress the same concepts, so it should be manageable. For my part, I'm certainly going to be working closely with both professors to try to ensure my sessions are beneficial for both sets of students.

I also talked to a professor who coordinates a mostly-yearly trip over Spring break to Chiapas, Mexico to work with the Zapatistas. The Zapatistas are a once-militant native separatist group in southern Mexico. She and a group of students fly down to the area and stay with them for a week or so. The goal is both to assist in some projects for the people there, and to simply be exposed to a way of living very foreign to our experience. I was trying to arrange financial aid and a study abroad grant for this trip last year, but there were problems with the financial aid office due to it being near the end of the calendar year. This time I'm going to start getting stuff together early. I really want to do this trip! I need to start working harder at Rosetta Stone Spanish. It's really too bad (For me anyway!) that my brother didn't take the introductory Spanish course this semester.

And beyond that, I chatted a bit with a history professor who I took a course from in the Spring and who I have a course with in the Fall. It was neat to see a few people I knew. Though I wasn't sure about who they were from sight, it was a small enough group that it was pretty easy to figure out from context and having listened to other people talk about which professors they'd be working with.

I drove to school this morning so that I could take my brother with. He spend the day getting some bureaucratic details straightened out while I was in the SI session. Afterward, I met up with him and we walked back toward my car. Along the entire way, I kept meeting people I knew and introducing him to them. After bumping into the archivist, the library director, one of the IT staff, and a local researcher who's a co-author of an in-progress book on theatres in Kenosha, I commented on how neat it is to keep seeing people I know and want to talk to. It's a whole different world from ten years ago at Parkside. My brother commented that it was kind of like walking around somewhere with our dad, who seems to know tons of people too. It made me think of a talk with my dad years ago wherein he said that, while he understood my brothers, he felt bad, as though he was failing me in some way, because he felt like I was different and he couldn't understand me. Tim saying that he watched me talk with people and was reminded of my dad made me feel really good, and I passed that observation to him when I got home and saw him.


Dog-blur - Pic-a-day 28 August 2013

Copyright Stormdog 2013


That's me with Wonka, the household dog. Since I wanted a photo with him, he decided that it was time to dash wildly around the yard as though chased by angry hornets.

(no subject)

I just added my hours at the archives and the course I'm the SI leader for to my schedule. I will also need to run a couple of one-hour review sessions during the course of each week which are not on the calendar. And of course, I'll also have to do homework and research.

It's going to be a busy semester.

I'm going to do my best not to let it make me crazy.

(no subject)

York University is one of the campuses I visited on my recent trip to Toronto. Because I'm an infrastructure geek, I photographed this facilities plant.


Facilities Plant - York University

Copyright Stormdog 2013


From afar, I thought there was someone climbing one of the cylindrical sections on the top of the stack, but I could see up close that it was a safety light. ( Close up view behind the cut. )

It reminds me a lot of the one at Parkside. At least, the large fins do, that expose as much surface area of the hot water used as coolant as possible to outside air as part of the cooling process. These buildings make a soothing noise, like a little stream running through rapids.