Entries from August 2009 ↓

No, not one of my undergrads; me. I am cleaning the filing system, especially old school and personal documents, and going through an emotional rollercoaster (consisting mostly of the “down” parts as everything I find seems to scream terrible choices and squandered potential). Among my old college materials, I found some blue books from tests I took during my senior year at BYU, 1993 (eek!). Some of them are hugely reassuring. Not all the answers were great, and I didn’t get A’s on all the tests, but it’s nice to be reminded that (1) I’m not an idiot, and (2) it’s OK to expect my own students to learn how to think. I was almost 20 years dumber back then, and my answers reflect that, but I’m proud of my historical self anyway, given his limitations.

The essay transcribed below came from an exam in a capstone class that we non-honors students took (oh, how I wish I’d just sucked it up and done honors…) instead of writing a thesis. The prof (Harold Miller) was not exactly warm and fuzzy, but he was brilliant, and committed to teaching effectively. He had a strong sense that students must be taught critical thinking and encouraged to question assumptions. He might have fit in at Berkeley or Harvard, which explains the rumor that he had resigned from BYU in protest before I met him. My essay answer is after the cut. Laugh all you want, but it’s about as good as my essay tests ever got. Continue reading →

The pic is the lovely pyromaniac I have left behind. :’(

Travel was uneventful, which is usually best. After a 3-month absence, my apartment is still here and unflooded (no hurricanes or even rain here, apparently), the phone and internet work, nothing smells weird, and I am really hoping there are no dead animals in either of my kayaks, this year. I made all my flights, they were all on time, and I wasn’t in any middle seats.

My car still works. I reconnected the battery, put the license plates back on, and drove it a little, feeling the whumpy whumpy of the flat spots on the tires. I got $90 worth of groceries, which feels like nothing; it always does when you start from nearly zero.

My job is still here, and all the people I love, whom I work with. Now I have a new next-office neighbor, Edna, who is an awesome developmental researcher, a set of skills I wish to exploit. Heh heh. I have put my Algonquin 8x10s on my office wall. They may not be the most artfully-placed things ever (wall space = limited), but they remind me, and make others jealous. Their purpose is fulfilled. I renewed my campus gym membership and parking tag (total price for the year: about $300; kind of a bargain, in the case of the parking permit). I got my accumulated mail (nothing from U.S. Immigration). I have migrated my Outlook settings from the summer back into my desktop machine, and am working on synchronizing the files, now. I watched the Fall Convocation on le internets, and then sneaked into the after-convocation brunch to chat with people I haven’t seen all summer. Nice :)

Ah, to be back home. Perfect? No. But it’s home, and there’s something to be said for not worrying every day whether it’s still there ;)

Bullfrog on Biggar Lake, Algonquin Park

…aaaaand to spoil the effect, a little rant from one character in the book I’m listening to in my current workouts:

“Let’s see… you work every day of the year except for three lousy weeks. You make about a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two-thirds and gives you one-third, and you give a third of that to the government. The government uses what it gets to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So, naturally, you complain about your bloated, inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party.” From Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Forty Signs of Rain”

Of course the character who says this is ignoring some things (like the fact that the government can, indeed, be bloated and inefficient, and not all executives can afford mansions); but the point it makes is acute: we complain more about the small percentage of our paychecks we give to the government — for which we receive some benefit — than we do of the much larger percentage that goes into corporate profit, for which we arguably receive little (or certainly much less) benefit. We feel the visible loss in our monthly paycheck more than the much larger one that happens before the check is even cut.

Just got back from 4 days in Algonquin Provincial Park. We stayed on North Tea and Manitou lakes, in really very lovely campsites. 1 day was kind of miserably cold for a few hours, but otherwise it was awesome. Alex, her brother Geof, his wife Veronica, our friend Brad, and I all went. 2 canoes and 1 kayak (I got the latter; insert squeal of excitement). It was way rad. :) I don’t have most of the pics, since my camera had some bad batteries… and bad backup batteries. But I have a few, and here are three: