[sheepman] TWTYTW

In the great tradition of bloviators bloggers everywhere, it's time for the Year in Review post, and I guess I am no exception to the rule. But I promise there will be no "Best [whatever] of 2008" lists and no "clip show" recycling posts from the prior twelve months.


In fact, it's hard for me to get very worked up about New Year's Eve retrospectives at all. I've long thought that outweighing the holiday's merit as truly international and secular - the Gregorian calendar is, after all, an artifact of state and commerce - is January First's totally irrelevance in most arenas most of us attend to. The astronomical calendar and the seasons do not notice it, most fiscal years ignore it, the US electoral system marks it not, the TV season is not based on it, and so on. It's pretty darn arbitrary, when you come to think of it.

The triviality of January 1 is especially true for me. Working in the higher ed system for the past eleven years, I have grown used to using October 1 as my rough marker for renewal. In addition, my personal budget runs from October 1 through September 30, and my birthday is in the beginning of October, so I underwent my own stock-taking, closing of the books, and turning of the calendar three months ago.

This time around, there's an additional reason for not marking the new year with a look backward. In many ways, 2008 could be counted as an annus horribilis around these parts, certainly from Otis's perspective. Not there there weren't any fine and happy moments at all, but there was so much struggle and pain for so much of the year that revisiting it holds little appeal.

So let's look forward instead, with just this briefest of backward glances:

From HKC, 2005-2006:

When we were having our new year's resolution discussion at breakfast yesterday, I didn't mention the one and only resolution that I make every year.

Many people have talked about it in many ways, and each year - each day, really - I hope that I can make fewer statements and ask more questions.

From HKC, 2006-2007:

So I take this moment to reflect and to give thanks for the world I was lucky enough to be born into and for the people I have been fortunate enough to meet along the way. I generally have the same two resolutions every year; this year I add one more:

I will try to talk less and listen more.
I will try to ask more questions and make fewer statements.
I will look at the situations in which I find myself and ask how a little kindness might help.

From HKC, 2007-2008:

This is my third New Year's Day Blog post, and my themes (I hesitate to call them resolutions) for the year remain the same, with some growth (a description that I hope applies to me as well):

Try to make fewer statements and ask more questions.
In each situation, consider what a little kindness might do.

So, I don't know what I can add, so I will merely reduce:

Listen more, talk less.
Ask, rather than state.
Try some kindness.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

[blockhead] Running with scissors

The first look at the first draft of the new, draconian state budget is here, and at first glance it looks like relatively good news for the community colleges, but overall, the situation is pretty damn dire.



Looking at the governor's own highlights, it looks like there will be no COLAs for CC staff for the next few years, that tuition will be increased by five percent, and that the operating budget will have to be cut by seven percent. Considering how our Cascadia Budget Council has been trying to imagine 20% cuts, this seems like a relatively simple exercise in comparison. Not that seven percent won't mean painful dislocations; I still fully expect people I know and like to have less work - or no work - as a result, and the five percent tuition increase will almost certainly mean the difference between access and barrier for some of our students. It's hard times all around.

But I can't feel too good about all this when I look at the proportionally greater cuts to heath and human services. For just one example: 13,000 low-income patients will no longer receive chemical dependency treatment. Those are actual individual people with actual problems who will now not get help where once they did and who will then stress some other part of our society, whether that is their family, the police, or you, when you're walking down the street. The proposed cuts to direct services necessary to balance the budget include many such scenarios of people's quality of life changing substantially.

The governor spared community colleges from some of the burden of cuts apparently because she feels that any economic recovery needs the worker retraining provided through the CC system. That makes sense; we can't live in crisis mode forever and we need to continue to plan for the future. But thinking about the future doesn't make it any easier to make even bigger cuts that effect direct services today.

So, while I feel a little bit relieved by the news, I am far from a good mood.

[sheepman] Early morning snow notes

I've been up for about an hour, after being awakened by some thunder that accompanied the snowstorm that has finally arrived in central Seattle, after three days of waiting and one proactive snowless snow day. It's been a long time since I've made a lazy pre-dawn post, but I've got a fresh cup of Folger's on the table and NPR in the background, so here we go.

So, I'm sort of in the middle of winter break here, and this was going to be a time for imposing little order - or at least the illusion of order - on aspects of my life. My professional life runs on its own rhythm - the tenure process engine is clanking along, still going pocketa-pocketa-pocketa with a full head of steam in the boiler, and the quarters turn in their inexorable path. There's a dire budget crisis looming, with some severe cuts up ahead, but I think I'll come out of it okay personally. It's not the professional life that needs attending, it's my personal productivity.

I've had a bit of a setback physically. After a summer of getting to know the three-mile path around Green Lake, and a vigorous fall of regular running, I pulled up sorta lame few weeks ago. I have been giving my right leg a bit of a rest, trying to allow a mysteriously weakened knee to recover, but this aging anatomy doesn't seem to be quite as resilient as it did some time ago, and people are still noticing a little wobble in my gait. I'm going to give it the ol' community college try again today, but I may have to overcome my reluctance to go to a doctor and actually get this checked out. The early-morning RCAF calisthenics have not been affected, thank goodness, so that regimen is moving into its second year.

Of more concern than my exercise program are my intellectual endeavors, such as they are. Nu, for an English teacher, I sure don't read much! During the quarter, I am so piled with student papers that I find it hard to squeeze in personal reading, and if I do get time to read, I feel like I should be reading the professional literature instead of pleasure stuff. Of course, I usually wind up reading neither. And my writing is languishing as well - this blog hasn't seen any essay for quite a while, my academic "articles" don't seem to advance past bibliographies and outlines, and my fiction has yet to resurrect itself. It's not a compete wasteland - I have been reading articles and pursuing some smaller writing projects - but I have produced nothing substantive to set upon the mantle.

This break was supposed to be a time to get control of those processes, to make some particular headway and perhaps establish some habits that I could take forward. It hasn't seemed to work that way. Right out of the gate, a week ago, I got wrapped up in Otis's art show project. It was wildly successful - check it out - but also consumed a lot of break time right away for preparation, execution, and recovery. The remaining time between then and now has been filled a bit with decompression from the quarter and a bit with plain old indolence. Maybe there's time in the twenty-four days left to the break to slide some accomplishments in with the lesson-planning and portfolio-writing that have to be done.

Gee, this got more ruminative than I thought it would. The cat just came back in, complaining about the cold. The snow seems to have stopped. Let's make something of the day.

[apparatus] I broke my blog

Nu, I was going to mess about with my template, so I saved the old template and everything, just like you're supposed to, and when I realized that changing my template was probably a stupid idea I went to put it all back, and most of it came back, but the blogrolls were empty, so now I have to do them all again. Pfui. If I lost your link or a link you liked, please let me know.

But just so this is more than a completely self-referential, whiny post, here is a death-metal puppy for y'all (but mostly for Soapy).

[jet city] Blog bast #1

Sometimes, you just have to take your ride down to the flats and blow the carbon out of the pipes. I have been absent from the blog for a long time, and the longer it goes, the weightier I feel the next post has to be, so instead of waiting until I (or forcing myself to) come up with a brilliant essay, I'm just gonna blast the intarweb with a lot of little stuff.

A lot has happened around town since the last post, not the least of which has been Otis (and by extension, me) taking on dog-sitting Bailey while Lon and Jules are vacationing in Mexico. Lots of fun adventures in poop-scooping, resulting in Otis's informed observation: cats are a lot easier than dogs. Another few days and the master and mistress will be back, letting us off the leash.

The new D&D campaign got started in earnest. Johnbai is DMing again, with his usual incredibly high level of detail. Otis and Soapy are reprising their old roles, Dingo has joined us (breathing life into a former NPC), and I have revised my character somewhat. Neds couldn't commit to the whole campaign, so she came along as a completely new character specifically designed to join the party, betray them, and go out in a blaze of glory. And so she did.

Farewell, Moloch, you untrustworthy tiefling SOB.



The Thanksgiving Holiday went just fine. The day began with a Pumcake Brunch with just me and the ladies around the table: Dingo, Stella, Trots, O, and JagGirl. Yum-o! Afterward, I joined Otis and Clan Putnam up in LFP for an East Indian thanksgiving meal: channa masala, dal, tandoori, raita, and Robb's Whipped Monkey King Coconut Yams. And let's not forget the tevenberry pie!

There's one more week or so of fall quarter, and then the long winter break begins. I'm sure more adventures lie in store.

[blockhead rhetoric] Blog blast #2

It's as easy for teachers to complain about job-related stuff as it is for anyone else, I guess. It's a bad habit to get into, so I try to avoid it, and in that spirit, I would like to share something that happened today that made me feel good.


In my lit class, we have a workshop day before papers are due, giving the students a chance for some peer review before they hand the paper in (and not incidentally keeping them from writing the entire paper the night before it's due). On each of these days, before we get into pairs or groups, I have each of the students reduce the claim of their paper, its main point, to one sentence - a thesis statement, if you will - and write that on an index card. Using the document camera we look at all the samples, and talk about how complex (or not) they are, how interesting (or not) they are, what strategies would be useful in exploring them, and so on.

We had out third and last workshop today, and halfway through the stack of cards, it struck me: none of them were complete clunkers. Oh, sure, some were more sophisticated and some less obvious than others, but overall, all of the ideas were analytical, specific, and potentially robust candidates for the focus of a lit paper. We had come a long way from out first workshop, which offered some claims along the lines of "this poem is about love".

It was satisfying to see that the class, as a whole, had moved from one place to another. While some students clearly have more aptitude for verbal-linguistic learning, and some individuals are just more interested in things literary, everyone's grasp of the form and conventions of literary analysis seems to have been ratcheted up a notch or two. Whether they will ever be really good at it or whether they will ever really enjoy it, they all know how to do it: what the objective is and how to get there. And in the final analysis, that's all I want.

So, yeah, we'll put this one in the win column.

[men in skirts] Blog blast #3

When winter comes to Seattle, it's time to break out my Workman's model Utilikilt. This durable garment, made of caramel duck cloth (usually known as Carhartt material) is heavy enough to keep out the coolness and dampness of the northwest rainy season. There's just one problem.


Two of the six snaps that hold the kilt closed have ripped from the fabric. The remaining four snaps are enough to keep modesty (and comfort) intact, but it gives the kilt a slightly shabby looks, with frayed holes where the bright silver buttons ought to be.

I'm thinking I might want to get this repaired, but I'm not sure how to go about it. The same thing happened to the first version of this kilt that I bought, within a week or so of wearing it, and I made a temporary and not-very-effective repair with some duct tape (on the inside), but Utilikilts replaced the kilt promptly, so I really didn't have to worry about it. Now, the kilt is out of warranty (as it were), and I'm certainly not in the mood to spring for another new one, so... what to do? Perhaps over the break I can track down a canvas fixer.

[apparatus] Blog bast #4

Since we borrowed the DVD set of Farscape - what, about three weeks ago now? - we have watched about a season and a half of it. Otis is positively addicted - not only does she want to watch it every frelling night, but when we discovered a missing disk, she downloaded the episodes on iTunes and we projected from the laptop!

Okay, I'll admit it, I like it a lot, too. And the ability to watch a series - any series - basically all at one go is really changing how people interact with Story. I'm telling you, there's a doctoral dissertation in there. maybe I should write it.

But that can't be the only junk culture of note that has surfaced recently, can it? Not bloody likely:

Just for Johnbai: hippo fight!

Okay, this video starts out as one of those sweet inter-species friendship stories, the kind that Otis really likes, and then hangs a hard left into Weirdville. Downtown Weirdville, at the corner of Disturbing Avenue and Crazy Street.

Occasionally I have posted games that I thought were cool or fun. This one is just damn frustrating!

I have to find a way to work these old manuals into the tech writing class I'll be teaching next quarter.

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Okay, that concludes BlogBlast 2008. Maybe now that the tubes are clear, this particular section of the Internet will start flowing again with some quality content. Hope springs eternal...