Faculty WebPage For John Goldfine

Aug. 26.  "What's growing over there?"

The bus is zooming through a lot of lava and sand and a few hard-won hayfields and pastures, when I spot a field crop.  My guide is patient, but the expression behind her expression tells me that she wishes tourists weren't so much like five year-olds: they know nothing, ask about everything, and can't make sense of the answers she gives them unless she dumbs them down considerably.  Why, she must wonder to herself in Icelandic, does this old geezer think I would have any clue in the universe as to what that crop is?  Does he think all Icelanders are given quizzes on imports, exports, heights of mountains, square miles of land under glaciers, length of coastline, number of people who speak more than one language?

She smiles at me and says, "I don't really know, but I'll ask and see if I can find out for you."

I smile back.  "Well, what's the dumbest question a tourist has ever asked?"

That gets a grin.  "One wanted to know when they would get to see our ice houses."

"Igloos?"

"Yes, igloos!"

Monday, I'm going to be a teacher again. Unlike my guide, I will have All The Answers, never fear.  Just don't ask about igloos.

Aug 26.  Just back from a week without news, I see the UMS is imploding.  First, it withdraws the most obnoxious (and ambitious) parts of its reorganization plan, bowing to political pressure.  Then, although it had said the trustees couldn't vote on the faculty empowerment plan until they had considered the reorganization in September, the trustees proceeded to vote on the faculty empowerment plan before considering the reorganization plan in September. Oh, and voted to shoot the faculty down, if you hadn't guessed.

So, let's get this straight: the faculty unleashes havoc to prevent the Northern Maine University from happening.  UMS must agree in the end that faculty was right, otherwise UMS would have stuck to its guns (unless, of course, they're merely gutless bureaucrats shuffling papers and looking ahead to their golden parachutes and don't really care what happens to the system.)  But, having admitted that faculty was right, they then turn around and say, "Now go away, children, faculty are not allowed at the big people's table." 

In other words, the system and the trustees want free rein into the future to make plans and dream the impossible dream without any reality check from the people who have to do the grunt work on the ground.  If UMS and MCCS ever merge, there won't be much of a culture shock, because what I've just described sounds so much like the philosophy of the admins I deal with that it's making the hairs on the back of my neck raise up, the preliminary to my fists pounding the desk in frustration....

Aug. 26.  I often have old Chuck Berry tunes in my mental jukebox.  'Sweet Little Sixteen' runs a lot until August 30: "Come Monday morning, gotta change your trend--sweet little sixteen and back in class again."  Truer words were never spoken!  (However far from age 16 some of us may roam....)

Then there's 'Tulane,' an obscure Berry song from 1969 (I was paying attention, Chuck!) where he used a word I'd never heard before on a mass medium.  The song goes "bail me out this rotten, funky jail."  (I just copied that off the internet, but, trust the old English teacher on this one, when you hear it, there is no "funky" anywhere in sight.)  My colleagues will tell you that, late on a Friday, as I prepare for departure to home and my dear dogs and wife, I often quote Mr. Berry.

But we're not there yet.  Many a river to cross.

August 26.  School anxiety dreams will come soon enough but not last night.  After spending a week on horseback 6 or 7 hours a day, I had horse anxiety dreams.  I woke up at four jerking my right leg and groaning--the darned horse I was dreaming about had just stepped on my foot.  Back to bagging zees until 5:30 when I woke up making kissy noises, clucking to the new horse I was dreaming about to pick 'em up and put 'em down.  Chloe's eyes were wide open and about six inches from mine, trying to figure out if there might be a treat for her in this--it's very refreshing to wake up laughing.  (New readers: Chloe isn't my wife or girlfriend.  Just a little Maltese-Shih-Tzu cross.)

August 15. How do I know summer is nearly over?  When I find myself walking the dogs and having imaginary conversations with my first-day classes, which start...two weeks from tomorrow.

As always I ask myself, "Are you going to start by just coming into class, not saying a thing, and reading Double Standard Dad? 

Sorry no link--maybe I'll have to type it in--but this is what I wrote about Double Standard Dad in my professional self-evaluation in May of '02:

I had a student who wrote about her dad’s double standard way of treating sons and daughters—I’ve read it to every class since 1990.  I read it at a conference in Baltimore and it received a standing ovation—at a teachers’ conference, not a ball game!  I love that essay more than any other I’ve ever received.  Will the rough language in ‘Double Standard Dad’ get me in trouble today, I wonder as I start to read.

As always, I add up the pros and cons and say, "Oh yeah!  Gotta, gotta."  That's what I was thinking about as I walked the dogs.

August 10.  Still have watches on my mind, but, first: will I have everything all planned out for my whole semester on August 30 or will I be improvising?

Teachers aren't supposed to admit they improvise--the words 'lesson plans' strike fear into our hearts and then as we get used to the harness, creating them becomes totally automatic.  The ones I've seen tend to read like they were written ten twenty thirty  years ago and haven't changed much since.  What teacher wants to mess up neat lesson-plans with changes, which will always look sloppy in the Lesson Plan Book.

But, since most of the content of the two courses I'm teaching is all-new, I better be improvising. 

If I plan everything out now, my loyalty is to my careful plan, not my students and not the moment they and I are in.  So, I have a rough sketch, which I'll be filling in as I go along, using my brain and my, ahem, 32 years of experience.

Clearly improvisation is on my mind today--and on my wrist too.

I bought a $19.95 Timex Indiglo Expedition watch about 15 years ago, and it did what it had to, as well as sometimes providing me with the correct date (as long as I made allowance for months with fewer than 31 days.)  There was also a compass ring on the bezel which was supposed to do magic stuff when aligned with the sun at the right time of day, as if I could remember the trick, and which eventually was so worn-down with time passing that the N-E-W-S and all the points in-between were no longer legible.

Anyway, a few years ago, the original leather-and-webbing strap rotted off, and, fortunately, Ameses was still in business and had a replacement strap.  Unfortunately, the buckle-bail popped off about a week after the strap went on, casualty of me reaching my hand in a tight spot in a car engine.  That side of the buckle was a total loss, but I had the previous Timex up in the house in a junkbox.  That old watch didn't work--what about the buckle?  With a little pinching with needle-nose pliers, I cobbled the old bail onto the new strap, and it didn't quite fit, but close enough was good enough.

My jury-rig lasted a couple of years until one morning coming back from a ride on the road on horseback, the watch was not on my wrist.  Nor was it on the road's shoulder.  So!

This time I found a Timex Indiglo Expedition for only $13.95--with a velcro strap and kind of smallish, maybe a unisex look.  Every time I ripped that velcro apart, I thought of someone I knew once who would get my attention by removing her velcro-strapped Timex Indiglo Explorer from her wrist and strapping it around her otherwise naked right ankle--she had an anklet on the left.

There are so many 'unfortunatelys' in this tale already, but here comes another: unfortunately, the velcro and the strap separated after I'd worn the watch less than a month and after I'd already done one needle-and-thread repair.  (You don't send a $13.95 watch back to the Timex people.) 

Instead, I found an old webbing dog collar once worn by The Horrible Black Dog The Missus Rescued From Death Who Lived With Us More Years Than I Want To Remember.  That's right: 'Curly,' as the Missus called him, or 'Devil Dog' those of us with eyes to see tagged him as.

I removed the velcro strap, cut Curly's collar down, burned the end to seal the nylon, and ran it under the springloaded thingies and voila.  Perfect fit.  I even took a little of the leftover webbing and, with a flame, made a keeper so the loose end of the strap wouldn't flap in the breeze.  Slick, if I do say so myself!

I hope I can do as well improvising with my students.

August 10.  I think it's August 10 anyway--my watch switches over at noon instead of midnight, the kind of problem we can mostly ignore in the summer.  I'm contemplating a post about what I'm going to miss about summer, but, after nearly three months of vacation, I'm afraid to--afraid angry real people who have to work work work (unlike teachers) will storm down the Upper Oak Hill Road and lynch me.

Meanwhile, I came on this which I like: "The writer Murray Sayle once joked that there are only three real stories in journalism: 1) "Arrow points to defective part;" 2) "We name the guilty man;" and 3) "Everything you thought you knew about this subject is wrong.""

Although I'm not a True Believer in anything much at all, I have a sneaking addiction to formulas which claim to explain Everything.

Here are two others about writing I like very much.  Jim Thompson said that the premise of every thriller is 'nothing is what it seems.'  Pretty much the same as Sayle's number three!

And John Gardner said that the first fictions were always built around these two linked, inside-out ideas: You go on a journey, a stranger comes to town.

July 31.  Front page article in today's BDN about UM profs, unhappy with the UM chancellor's reorganization plans, asking for 'shared governance.'  The article has some amusing quotations.

One I like from the ever-egregious Vice-chancellor, Elsa Nunez, praises the governance proposal for "empower[ing] faculty"--you have to love the educationese buzzwords--but she then turns around and says the administrators actually have to read it, read it carefully, before considering giving the faculty any say in things.  I get it: without reading it, you like it, but don't hold me to that.  Quotations that swallow their tails and disappear.

Then Nunez launches into a song-and-dance about how the faculty proposal couldn't be implemented before the trustees meet and vote on the reorganization plan itself in September.  The budget is due at the end of September and the trustees have to decide about the reorganization plan at that September meeting, thus denying the not-quite-empowered faculty a voice.

Makes sense until you read the last graf in the article: the system's CFO says that reorganization savings can't actually be identified until the reorganization is under way.

I savor that: the reorganization plan is fiction.  Who knows what will be saved where?--certainly not the system's chief financial officer!  We don't actually plan that out, the CFO is saying: we just kinda start the ball rolling with sort of a goal and hope it rolls somewhere in the right neighborhood!  Hey, I could offer that sort of financial planning, and I haven't balanced my checkbook since 1969.

And it certainly makes hash of Nunez's assertion that the faculty proposal can't be considered because of the tight timelines for the budget.  The budget, you know, the one in which they can't accurately identify where the money actually will and won't go.

July 31.  I have the first three weeks of online ENG 162 up and ready to go: three weeks worth of prompts and lecture material.  I could keep going and fill in the rest of the semester.  A big part of me would like to have all that work done, so I don't have to think about it.  It's sort of fun to see it roll out of my mind onto the page.

Another part--part lazy, part professional--says, 'Why not see how it goes the first three weeks, see whether the stuff you're creating works for the students you have?  If it does, continue.  If it doesn't, you won't have wasted a lot of time and you won't need to let them know you're switching course.'  (Switching course, either up to harder stuff or down to easier, never pleases students....)

July 27.  My first piece of online stuff for my online 162.  If only I were as assiduous a journal-writer as I misleadingly hint I might be!

July 27.  I helped found an alternative school back in the late 70s.  Why?  In a nutshell: follow this permanent link.

July 24.  Too long between posts to be respectable, and I can hardly claim press of business as an excuse as I swing into the last month (sigh) of the mere three months of summer vacation.  When school starts, school stuff will crowd in on me and make me a faithful poster again.  'Post or explode' is the choice come late August.

I've been doing a lot of unsatisfying chores lately, the kind that when they're done, well, you're right back where you were before.  A rotten tree falls across the electric fence in a summer thunderstorm.  I saw it up, toss the rotten wood over the fence line.  An hour has gone, I'm all sweaty, I have no more firewood than before, but the fence can be electrified again.  No sense of accomplishment there at all.  I'd make a rotten farmer, because I'm always asking of myself, 'What have I done for me lately?'  If the answer is, 'Everything is about as good as it was yesterday,' I'm bummed.  Enjoying the cyclical quality of life is not for me.  Or, rather, when I do get into something cyclical like gardening, it's always with deep self-consciousness: 'Ah, now you're at one with the universe for two seconds, so savor it, buddy.'  Talk about killing the mood.

Then there was the tractor tire.  A flat on a tire on a wheel that hasn't come off the axle since 1980, no power tools, a collection of nearly useless jacks--misery ahead.  Finally got it off, schlepped it to Tire Warehouse, found where the bead had opened up, and home we went, all set.  Next morning, it was flat again.  Took tire off, etc etc. Occam's Razor argues against the likelihood of, after 15 trouble-free years, simultaneously having a disturbed rim-bead and a big fat puncture in the tread, but so it was.

And when everything is put back together, I can accomplish exactly what I could have accomplished before all my trouble, if only the gods hadn't decided to have sport with me....

Putting in a new septic system a few years ago was the worst example of this phenomenon.  After the designer turned in his plans, and Guy Hanson took his backhoe to my lawn, and the plumber had hooked up the lines, after many gold doubloons had flown out of the treasure chest buried under the chestnut tree, what then?  Then I could repair to the bathroom and flush the toilet, which is exactly what I used to do before all the excitement.

Teaching is a little this way because of the way learning curves work.  Most students learn everything they're going to learn pretty quickly (though there are surprises and untypical students)--then they spend months practicing it.  Morale becomes a problem by the end of the semester in this scenario.

Then why not create a different scenario, Teacher Man--you're the boss!  Yeah, why don't I introduce a whole new thing right after Thanksgiving so that students aren't bored by the same old same old?  No, students tongues are lapping the linoleum by Thanksgiving.  This is a case where institutional life and the realities of human learning and attention span are in conflict, and when the conflict is between learning better or fulfilling the rational plan the heavens ordain of fifteen weeks on, four weeks off, which will come out of the ring as still-undefeated heavyweight champeen of the world?

The English Department lobbied for a modular or octal system where teachers and students did their thing much faster, much shorter, and much more focused.  We all loved the idea.  But.

But it was too hard to schedule, the paperwork problems were insurmountable, students would be confused, the technologies would complain.  And so on.  Sometimes admins act like fond parents reminding their children that running off to join the circus isn't really a good career option.  They are the voice of reason and responsibility in the face of these childish enthusiasms, which will blow over, no doubt, once the children have seen the rational view.

Okay, maybe we can't be circus acrobats, but a good parent would at least buy the kids a darned trampoline for the back yard so they could dream a little.  A good parent wouldn't just say 'go do your homework so you can grow up to have a real job someday.'   A good parent would wonder what about the child's life was so stultifying that the child dreamed of the circus.  A good parent would do more than squelch.

And a good parent wouldn't be wondering why the squelch leads to the passing-in-the-hall scowl or the passing-in-the-hallway insincere greeting. 

But I don't need parents, good or bad.  I just want the chance to do a chore that doesn't leave me where I was before, which is what we'd hoped octals would do for us.

July 17.  My first first-day-of-school anxiety dream last night.  Quite a bit earlier in the summer than usual, perhaps because I'll be teaching new syllabuses in the fall and perhaps because in several areas I expect a lot of conflict with administration.

Of course, teachers have anxiety dreams about school, children!  Didn't you know?  They're the mirror image of the student anxiety dreams.  Students worry about being overwhelmed; I worry about having a class full of sheep who just sit there looking helpless.  Students worry about having mean teachers: I worry about students who have been acting out and acting up in class for twelve years and know no other way.  Students worry that they won't make friends and will be isolated and laughed at; I worry I won't connect to any students and will be isolated and laughed at.

The usual theme of these dreams is that I arrive in class totally unprepared and unready.  Last night's was a variation, which I blame on the wonders of technology. What evil imp made me go on StudentOne yesterday to see how my classes were filling up?  The answer is--like my weight: just about at their max, which is twenty.

In real life, it's extremely stressful coming in to a new class of twenty writing students--the stress is rolling off them in waves one can't ignore, but I have to present myself a little and then get them going doing something--and half of them will have just registered and will need special instructions to get on the computer; and half will still need help because the computer won't take their name even though they registered in the spring; and there will be oldtimers who have never used a computer or who don't type and they have to be coddled along; and two of the computers won't start and there are only 19 chairs; and one of the hotshot students will already be online downloading a game and printing out my 80 page batch of assignments, just daring me to show him anything he hasn't done a thousand times before; and when I lay out the first assignment they will all look terrified or sigh and roll their eyes to make it clear the assignment is stupid.

Mind you, this isn't the nightmare part yet--this is what will happen August 30.

In the nightmare, I was in a classroom I didn't recognize in a building I didn't recognize.  Already bad--teachers like predictability.  You didn't think we had the souls of round-the-world solo sailors, did you?

The room was jammed with people.  Maybe 30 students and a dozen kids--well, contractually I can only have 20 students max, so we were in trouble.  As for the kids, I'm not really crazy about having them come to class, but parents only do it when the kid is too sick to go to daycare (thanks! clean the keyboards after them, will you?) or is afraid the ex is about to kidnap the child.  In other words, if the kid doesn't come, neither does the parent, my student, so rather than tear off that nasty little lecture on priorities I hear colleagues rehearse in faculty conclaves (What would those colleagues say: 'You shouldn't have had kids until you're done with school!  Why didn't you use a condom?'!!!), it behooves me to smile, be gracious, and ask the child's name.

But in the dream, the room had about twice its carrying-capacity in bodies, and I was desperate to offload people.  This desperation is identical in real life, which ought to indicate how nightmarish it is to be presented with more students than one has computers for.

When given 23 or 24 students, I do complain right after class, believe it.  The admin says, "Well, you know a few will drop in the next week so that will bring you down to twenty or even fewer."

I say, "Not enough computers."

The admin says, "You're not actually going to use the computers for a few classes, though, right?"

I don't know which is more insulting: that the admin thinks I will roll over and accept a contract violation to make the admin's life easier, or that the admin thinks I will yak at my students for two or three classes before letting them on computers.  I make them go on computer and write.  The first day.

So, backed by the contract, I just say, "Get the numbers down to twenty by next class."  I don't say, "And don't try pulling that stunt again, you person of low quality and parentage."

In the dream I sent away the people, and their attendant children, who weren't on my little list.  I still was way over max.  I promised the students I would sort it out with the admins, but that now, today, without further ado, we were going on computer, even though we didn't have enough computers.

That's the thing about teachers: we don't  have a lot of tricks in our repertoire.  What else could I do but turn to the computers?  It's all I know.  If the computers are knocked out, as happened several times last semester at Eastern Maine Community College, I shoot the breeze with students and then we all go about our business.  It's not credible to say, "Pull out some paper and a pencil and let's scribble up a storm."  Many students no longer carry paper and pencil!

In the dream there was a lot of hurly-burly, and no one actually got on the computer.  In truth, that sometime happens first day....

It's 5:56 as I write.  I woke up an hour ago with the dream clear and vivid in my mind and very eager to write it down.  But now that I'm writing and laying down the real background to the dreamworld, the dream has faded right away--thank god they do--and the details have all floated off, but obviously, there isn't much difference between dream-doings and real ones in those first classes.

July 15.  I try to be a writing warrior: to let nothing interfere with my writing--not anger, not sadness, not distress, not depression, not loud mental conversations with myself that have neither end nor point.  Even when one wants to crawl into a hole and be silent, one writes.  Even when writing has failed, all that one can do for succor is write. 

You will understand that my sympathy for students who are anxious about putting words down is purely professional: I will buck them up and be as encouraging as I know how to be, but, in my heart, the writing warrior thinks about General Patton slapping the shell-shocked soldier in Sicily.  Even generals can no longer get away with such stuff, but I'd be lying if I said that the General's impatience is a complete stranger to this breast.

That's by way of completely superfluous introduction to today's screed.  The BDN runs an AP article on SMCC's plans to expand its physical plant.  The article is bland to the point of nonexistence for most readers--SMCC has a decade-long expansion plan.  O-kayyy.  Does any ordinary reader do more than glance at the lede graf?  Doubtful.

But those in the system who are trying to divine their fates and futures by staring at the entrails of eviscerated colleagues read such pieces the way apparatchiks read Pravda in the bad old days.  One has to already know something to figure out what the new party line might be and figuring it out is a matter of life-and-death.

What the article really says is that SMCC is bursting open at the seams and that any plans with a ten-year timeline will be obsolete and overtaken by events long before 2014, especially if enrollment expands at even a fraction of its current rate.  What the article really says is that SMCC is working on a wing and a prayer.  They have a 50 million dollar plan and are setting out with less that ten percent of that in the bank.  The rest they plan to beg, borrow, or leverage: they will finance the building of the new dorms by offering revenue bonds, interest on which is paid out of the housing fees charged students who move into the new dorms.  It's legal!   By the time the revenue bond is paid off, SMCC will have an old dorm ready for renovation, perhaps paid for by yet another bond.  For MCCS admins that constitutes thinking out of the box.

What the article most interestingly says is that tuition increases (what is a tuition increase--hasn't it been more than five years since we've heard of such things?) would not be tied directly to building projects.  Okay, what would they be connected to?  'Cause we need them!  Or something.

They would be connected to "overall financial demands" of the schools.  Makes sense, but it made sense years ago, and no connection was ever made.  For years we've been told that we had to keep tuition down to keep the schools affordable.  Suddenly, an about-face.  (We won't even get into the issue of who decides these things: John F. or the Board.  Very hard to nail down responsibility for unpopular decisions!  Failure is an orphan--success has a thousand daddies.)

It does seem clear, looking through these mists, that the Powers might be willing to spring for bricks and mortar, monuments to their tenure in office, though probably not for items like faculty salaries, which, you know, faculty just go out and spend, without even a thank you or a wall plaque or anything.

July 12.  Despite more than thirty years evidence to the contrary, I've never quite gotten over that childish belief that teachers don't have human lives when they step out of class.  Or, if I can just barely accept that teachers have a sort of shadow-life, I can't and don't really believe bureaucrats and administrators are fully human.

Here are Hoff and Westphal, UM prez and System chancellor, clearly having a royal tifferoo.  Hoff is kicked to the curb, but butter melts in no one's mouth.  No one indicates that personalities might be in conflict, that there might be emotions boiling, that these fellows just had a major cockfight after which only one man was standing.

I understand that Hoff got a golden parachute, and that self-interest indicates he button his lip.  Probably there are legal constraints on him, if he wants to cash the sweetheart deal they dealt him.

Nevertheless, it's creepy dealing with administrators who don't get angry when it is right to be angry, who act like everything is simply a problem to be put into a process or a matrix in order to develop goals, objectives, and measurable outcomes.

If an admin is not going to get emotional about being beat up in public, kicked around, and left for dead by the roadside, if his cupidity is too great to say anything about all that--then he's a menace and always was a menace and should have been let go on that ground alone.

They don't have to be Slaves to their Limbic Systems, but I do want my leaders to talk normally, to not always dig into the bag of b.s.  just when the conversation gets interesting, to make jokes that make me laugh, to not act like po-face storefront preachers, to have some bite and snap to them.  Hoff doesn't sound like he qualifies.

Of course, not many of the others do either--or is that the first grader in me speaking, still not believing in the humanity of Miss Martin?

Next morning, further thoughts.  I don't expect that the essence and reality of another human being is or should be transparent.  But I'd like it if these people didn't go out of their way to reach into that aforementioned bag o' b.s.  Today's BDN has a few remarks from Hoff, who, it turns out, simply was "exploring options" and looking for new "challenges" when he suddenly resigned.  He "looked at the situation and made a determination...on the basis of a complex set of factors."  At least, unlike George Tenet, he didn't resign to spend more time with his family.

Exactly the sort of mealy-mouth blather that makes me suspicious about the constituents of another person's essence.  It's certainly possible to have plain-speaking villains, but there's something already villainous about even a hero who quit a job he clearly loved in order to explore options.

July 11.  I've had classes whose whole tone and mood was twisted by one powerful negative voice (that voice could be mine, but actually I'm talking about a student's.)  Similarly, I've had classes lifted out of the mire by one happy student with some leadership qualities who was pleased indeed to be writing.

Last night, the missus had Maddie down at camp--boy, I'd forgotten what it was like to walk dogs who are not hunters.  Scoot and Chloe ramble around, sticking pretty close unless something engages them.  If they disappear, it's guaranteed to be for a minute or two, no more.  I don't notice or think about them, unless they're doing something interesting like fighting over a stick or chasing each other in tiny circles or jumping up on high places to see if that earns a click and treat.

With Maddie, even when she's sticking close, the sword dangles just overhead.  If a scent is fresh, she gets a crazed, wild, heedless look, runs with her nose down, and pays no attention to anything I might say or do.  When she's gone, she's gone.  She might show up in a minute, five, ten, or get lost completely.

Her message to me: I'm in charge of hunting since you obviously can't handle it.  When she comes back, Scoot often snarls and snaps at her to indicate that she is not the one in charge--that's his job, thank you.  (It's okay with me if he wants to believe that fiction, because it doesn't cause any trouble.  With Maddie, it's a different story.)

She showed up yesterday after a five or eight minute turkey hunt--who can resist those stupid gobblers, flapping in your face?  She looked a little sheepish but overall bouncy and pleased with herself.  I went over to her without a word, did my best imitation of Scoot snarling, and bit her on the bony part of her nose, about as hard as I'd bite my knuckle if vexed--not very.

I doubt that will have a lot of carryover value, but she did spend the rest of the walk either behind or beside me, very close, keeping her eye on me and apparently chagrinned at her come-uppance.  If she got ahead because I slowed down, she would immediately zip back to subordinate position.  I think that's the way it's supposed to be!

I don't have any plans to nip rowdy students, however.

July 10. Use it or lose it: the half-life of learning.  Two months ago it wouldn't have been any kind of problem at all.  Today it took an hour and a half of messing around, and I still couldn't figure out how to hyperlink my new material in ENG 101 Fall 04 to this default page.  I looked at 'FP for Dummies.'  I used the help menu.  No luck.  Very frustrating.

Finally, I was running out of time: I needed to walk the dogs, run, pick peas, cook supper, walk the dogs again before we ran out of usable daylight (about 9pm).  So the dogs and I set out on a walk with me fuming, sure preliminary to a downer. 

But as we walked, a tiny bell kept jingling: why was I trying to hyperlink the title on this page to the folder with the files in it?  What use was that?  I was missing some step I knew in the spring but had forgotten....

By the time I was across the pasture, through the big hayfield, and into the woods, I had realized I needed a menu page.  It took two minutes to do it when I got back.  Check it out on your left.

Now what am I supposed to say to students who believe deeply that there is no point cluttering their mind with things they don't and won't  use--like writing?  The writing they do for me will NOT be ready and waiting for them a year or even a semester down the road.  Heck, I can't retain a skill for a lousy two months.

I can't even say they'll use it a lot in college, because they won't, and if they do, they'll use it for some martinet who treats this profoundly humane act, writing, as a way to gig them for comma splices or incorrect footnoting, i.e., exactly the way it was used in high school --another painful way of getting the student to give it up.

July 8.  A quotation from Robert Brustein in the July 5 & 12 New Republic:

"Avenue Q... purports to be about the human encounters in a multicultural neighborhood...[T]his means lessons in in the fact that American society includes people of every sexual inclination, ethnic identity, and political persuasion, and isn't that wonderful and inspiring and irritating all at the same time? It's not diversity that I find annoying. It's the way the theater continually celebrates its celebration of it. The liberal self-infatuation...is suffocating. The same problem afflicted the Tony ceremonies....people trotted out on stage less on the basis of talent than according to some preconceived patterns of ethnic, racial, and gay representation."

That's how I see any diversity program the admins at this school are likely to come up with: one long self-satisfied lecture about how we can't afford to be self-satisfied.  Hey, when it comes to diversity?  Let's not notice and let's not care.

July 4.  Fourth of July Brooks Field Day Five-Mile Race--my best time ever: toured the course in 36:45!  (Too bad the year that happened was 1989.  Today I did it in 48:44....)  Nice if the plantar fasciitis, the twinge in my right knee, the arthritis here and there, the extra ten pounds I'm carrying, the general wear-and-tear of the past fifteen years all dropped off like magic and allowed me the bod of a 43 year-old again.  Heck, if I'm fantasizing, why not wish for a 23 year old body? 

Fortunately, renewal, revival, and rebirth are easier at work than at Brooks.

I've been thinking a lot about ENG 101 and my plans to offer it a special topics course ('Cyber Communications') this fall.  I plan to toss most of what I've refined over the past few years in ENG 101--dynamite stuff!  Or at least stuff I know works pretty well. 

I'm launching into something new for me, something untried, untested, uncertain, a course focused on much less structured essays than I've done in the past--blogged essays and journal entries.

June 29.  Tory Haiss was a writing warrior and would not have been daunted by any assignment: Not cancer, not mutilation, not death, not sadness, not leaving forever the places, things, and people she loved--and she'd have woven through a thread of poetry, a metaphor, a hint of something even larger.  Actually, she wrote about all those things in the years before she died in just the way I describe.

Today I wish I could write something worthy of her and of this first anniversary of her death, but I can't.

June 25.  I just read a very interesting review of a book by James Surowiecki, "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations."

He argues against the value of expertise in many areas--claiming that the aggregated collective wisdom of ordinary people is often better. For aggregated wisdom to work, the crowd must be "made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other." Diversity, independence, and decentralization are needed for the crowd to be wiser than the experts.

It struck me how none of these conditions are met at, for example, our AAPD meetings. There, consensus is looked for, rather than diversity of opinion. People in this institutional setting have all sorts of hidden pressures on them which make independent expression of opinion difficult--they are picking up signals all the time from the surrounding group.

The best performing groups, the reviewer says, "consist of people who do not see each other much and welcome dissent." Not your basic set-up at EMCC or the MCCS: at both of which dissent is met with the call to reason together to find solutions--which I think Surowiecki would argue ultimately creates poorer decisions.

Or consider the wisdom of the decision to become a community college system. Was it a decision the many, each individual with a bit of knowledge and altogether exercising communal and collective wisdom?  Or of the few, the experts who know best what the many need?

June 23.  I saw my FrontPage mentor up at school Monday, raking trash out of a ditch.  I told him that seemed like a poor use of his talents.  He ruefully agreed.

Speaking of round pegs and square holes, I spent my morning under a toilet, trying to persuade an inlet valve to let in the right amount of water and then trying to get all the connections tight and dry.  There is no way to put a tool on any of the components because of various non-clearances, so it's nice that in the plastic era of plumbing, finger-tight is mostly what's wanted.  But what if you've tried for nearly an hour to line up two pesky parts, male and female, and can't screw one into the other (and why is it that discussions of plumbing immediately land everyone's mind in the gutter?)?  And your hands have become soft with the water and then sore from hand-tightening the darned pieces?  And your chest aches from lying across the toilet seat?  And your neck aches from twisting to see the parts?  And your pants are soaked with water?

Well, you'll probably feel that plumbing is a poor use of your talents, however limited they may be.

Although I'm no mechanic, plumber, electrician, carpenter, or handyman of any sort, still in my own dinky way, I know a few things about jury-rigging: I know that when the jack I'm using on the bushhog has parts missing and no way to crank it, I can lock on a Vise-grip and use that for leverage.  I know I can use a curved hemostat to dig the starter cord of the chainsaw out of the housing when the knot has given way. 

And today, I knew that if I called the missus, griped about what was happening, and then went back to the job a little refreshed physically and relieved emotionally, I would have one fresh shot, one more chance to do it with the innocent ease that precedes failure and frustration.  It worked too--after I hung up, the pesky parts I'd been fighting for nearly an hour went together like magic.  Sadly, the washer was the wrong one and I had to unscrew everything and start again, worse in the hole than ever.

Finally all done, I went down in the cellar to turn off the water pump and noticed a grill with a big mouse nest of birch bark, hair, bits of cloth, smack in the middle of last summer's unburnt charcoal.  When I wiggled the grill, a baby foot and pink tail appeared.  I wanted to  take the thing upstairs and dump the damn mice out in the grass.  But I suspected that the way my day was going, the mice would run up my arm, into my shirt, and down my pants.  I also wanted to leave them be and be merciful.

Today my response to neoteny trumped my householder's good sense.  In the fall, I'll lay out the warfarin.

June 20.  In this post I intend to draw a comparison between learning to ride a horse and writing. 

[That sentence is an example of 'the announcement.'  English teachers--and I am certainly one--hate announcements in student writing, but just as student writing has its  certain fads--one semester everyone will be using quotation marks to emphasize words and the next the big new solecism will be ending sarcastic remarks with NOT!!!, so too do English teachers have fads in things to anathematize. 

I noticed last semester when we were grading finals that announcements seemed to be annoying my colleagues more than usual.  Because of the cognitive dissonance between the community college banner and the reality of the sub-college level writing we often receive, we always desire to fasten on something as beyond whatever pale we believe still is demarcated and then slag the essays exhibiting it.  One semester it was swear words, another a failure to include a plan of development, this it was the announcement.

I don't like announcements; my rubric has this check-off item:

___”I am going to write about the topic of X; let me explain to you about Y”—this way of writing is a major turnoff; don’t tell us, just do it.

And I check it off whenever I see an announcement, which is often.  But given the choice between busting a student's chops over an announcement, which amounts to no more than a students' wasted-effort and wheel-spinning--and dealing with some more major issue, I'll go with the major issue.  Sometimes I think my colleagues think their job is to deal with Everything.  It isn't, and imagining it is would cast anyone into a pit of gloom, a place to which resentment might well be the only reasonable reaction.  But dealing with every error or mistake in judgment is not our job.  Our job is to improve people's writing.  Each of us has to decide which problems we want to deal with.  Announcements aren't high on my list of problems.]

Y'know, this post has turned into a totally different post than the one I intended to write.  So, I'm going to end it and start all over!  What's a worse crime--an announcement or a false announcement, which is what my first sentence turned out to be!

June 20.  In this post I intend to draw a comparison between learning to ride a horse and writing. 

When I first learned to ride in 1969, I was taught a way to sit the horse, a way of managing the horse, a way of making the horse move.  If it doesn't sound too sexy to say so: A deep seat back in the saddle, half-halts, lots and lots of leg, a driving pelvis, braced reins were hallmarks.  The idea was to force the horse to bend by leveraging your weight and muscle against him.   Good dressage riders rode this way, and it got results.  But perhaps a lot of horses--and riders--failed under the regimen.

A rider today learns differently.  We're told to 'ask a little, give a lot' and to allow the horse to carry itself, to find its own balance and best movement, to  lighten up in every sense.  We have become facilitators, not overseers.  Today's rider plays gently with the reins, tries to use leg as little as possible, to have a center of gravity more with the horse than behind.  The force, pressure, leverage are all in a much more minor way. This is the way good dressage riders ride today.  Or at least try to.  Or at least try to think about their riding.

Riding is a physical activity with a huge mental component.  If the rider is not intensely thinking about the horse's movement and his own body and how they're interacting, what's going on is more like an amusement park ride than a horseback ride. 

Many of us learned to write by treating it as an adversarial activity, the way I learned to ride.  There was a certain way the writing had to be, certain outcomes expected, certain approaches to yield those outcomes.  You rode the darn paragraph or the paragraph rode you!  What I want to explore in my blogging courses is what I'm finding myself in my own blogs: writing fluency is increased by 'asking a little, giving a lot.'  I'm finding my own best balance and movement with blog posts, whose demands are no kind of a big deal, but which cumulatively are making me a better writer.  I give up a lot of self-expectations of development, of depth, of seriousness--and in return?

My colleagues might consider this heresy: all teachers know that students only achieve if we set high goals for them.  If we only ask a little, they will only give a little.  Right?  Right?  I'm not so sure.  It doesn't work that way with horses....

June 19.  Going to a lot of blogging websites and teaching-blogging websites to prep for my blog course this fall and my other blog course this fall.  Yes, I'll be talking to the boss's boss next week about getting admin support to find students who might like to take an ENG 101 special topics: Web Communications.  I suppose that after talking with the boss's boss, it will all become incredibly difficult, darn near impossible for a dozen good reasons I just wasn't privy to, and I'll leave the office feeling like a fool for coming up with such nonsense and bike home cursing myself for wasting my time yet again.  But it's hardly fair to tax admins with being woefully out of touch and then refuse to talk to them when they ask me three times....

Anyway, I get tired of figuring out the blog bells and whistles very fast.  I have to get just enough of it so that I can at least tell my students what it is I'm NOT going to help them with--stuff like blogrolls, counters, and template tweaking.  The basics are what I'm trying to teach myself and what I'll pass along. 

The actual writing I feel less diffident about.

June 19.  Resistance to blogs. I mentioned something I'd blogged to a colleague the other day, and she wrinkled her nose as if I'd committed an obvious solecism.  She doesn't want to face reading it--but she doesn't want to face not reading it either!  Blog fatigue, blog resistance!

I have shortcuts to 20 blogs on my desktop.  I check four or five of them every day, religiously.  Some of the others, though, while I liked them once--and for all I know, still would, if I read them--I have a huge resistance to opening.  I don't really know why.  Some are political or educational, some are personal.  Some are loquacious, others laconic.  Some have nifty graphics, some don't.  I don't know why.  Just fickle, I guess.

Eventually, I come on a new blog I like, make a shortcut, and delete one of the old shortcuts, feeling like a heel as I do.  What kind of friend am I to Sgt Stryker or Tony Woodlief or James Lileks to be dumping their blogs from my blogroll?

June 19.  The missus has to warn me when our son or daughter come to visit: 'Don't weird the kids [she means their S.O.'s] out with dog stuff.'  It takes me a few beats to figure out what she's talking about.  Is it weird to get down on the floor and eat a cracker over the dog's supper before he's allowed to eat himself?

It is?  Hmm, oh yeah, that's right--it is!  But no one would think it was weird to have a dog sitting on the table doing tricks while we're eating our supper--would they?  I mean, she's soooo cute!

'Seriously,' I say to the missus, 'most people would have at least one small dog on the table during supper.  Just a small one.'

'No, they wouldn't,' she says---'remember Precious?'  I picture Presh, sitting in her chair at the table during supper.  We never allowed her on the table. 

'Okay,' I say, 'so we can put Chloe in a chair.'  No, that isn't it either.  The missus is tough.  (And it never stopped surprising me that people thought Precious was a ridiculous name for a dog, a name connoting pink rhinestone collars and yappy anklebiters.  Presh did have a pink rhinestone collar, of course, but otherwise, having been born in Prospect and raised in Swanville, she was all Waldo County.  And, for that matter, what could be more Waldo County than a pink rhinestone dog collar?  You think we got it at Saks Fifth Avenue?  Try Ameses!)

Anyway, last night I was having a bachelor supper, the kind with meat and bones that really focuses the dogs' attention the way garbanzo beans and yogurt fail to do.  I look up to see Chloe sitting pretty (balanced on her haunches, front paws in the air.)  Nothing odd about that; she hits that pose a hundred times a day.  But this time, she held Maddie's leash in her mouth.  I clicked and treated immediately, to capture the behavior.  She immediately sat pretty again, but without the leash, peering at me very hard.  This is the way tricks are learned: she tries it the wrong way to proof the right way.

I cooperated by ignoring her, but did flick the leash with my finger.  She broke the pose, snapped the leash up, and re-posed.  Click.  Treat.  She did it four or five more times, convincing herself that the new wrinkle got fast action and attention from me--and then I wrinkled the wrinkle.  I stopped clicking for the leash and threw a baseball hat in front of her.  In a second she was doing her thing with a hat saying 'Swanville Maine'.  Then with a motorcycle helmet bag.  Then with a different baseball hat.  Okay, no big deal, she's got a new trick.

Here's the mystery: why did she pick that leash up in the first place?  Because real clicker dogs have been encouraged to experiment and aren't worried about making mistakes--unlike conventionally-trained dogs who are punished for mistakes, or, for that matter, conventionally-trained students who get that same exact psychological technique applied to their education.  

Chloe working the system; Scoot opting out.

June 15.  Today is just two weeks short of the first anniversary of the death of Maine writer, teacher, journalist Tory Haiss.  I met Tory in August of 1984 when we were both starting our time at Penobscot Job Corps.  Job Corps is the world's fastest and toughest test-site for teachers.  One finds one's right stuff--or not--almost immediately.  Although I'd taught for 12 years before Job Corps, I didn't know, really know, what I was capable of in the classroom.  Sadly, I found my twelve years of teaching amounted to only a year or two of actual learning and experience, a year or two I'd simply repeated five or six times to add up to twelve.  But my three years at Job Corps were worth ten anywhere else....

Tory had never taught in a classroom setting at all. 

The world has two kinds of teachers: when presented with eggs, there are those who want to make omelets and those who want to raise chicks.  Omelet-makers have no interest in the eggs, only the result, the product, the presentation on the plate, the plaudits, the gratitude, the excellence, the exquisite understanding  between student and teacher the omelet is proof of.

Chick raisers expect nothing very grand at the end of the day, just some baby chickens hatching from the eggs, some chicken poop, and a lot of scratching and peeping.  They know the baby chicks will, at best, grow up to be mere chickens, but that's okay with them.  They don't expect themselves to do more than scatter some feed on the floor.  No one will ever say to them: you changed my life; you made me the proud omelet I am today!

Tory was an omelet maker.  I admired her perfectionist tirelessness; her standards; her sharp intelligence; her powers of organization; her demands on herself, which were never less than those on her students; her courage and refusal to ever back down from a challenge; the way she could lift a favored student with her into the higher realms.  These are the admirable qualities of an omelet-maker.

But she was not patient with fools, knaves, or rowdies, all heavy on the ground at PJC; she saw things as black or white always and never took a long view; and all her virtues had their dark side.  I will never forget comforting the hapless Leroy who had run into my classroom weeping because of some insupportable demand Tory had made.  As upset with her as Leroy was, Tory was proportionately angry with him.  I don't know how she could stay adamantine in the face of this retarded boy's tears, but she didn't dare give an inch.

Not the nicest story to tell about the dead, perhaps.  (Later, I observed her teach at Husson and at Unity, and in those settings she was a star, all her virtues shining forth and making omelet after omelet of her pleased students.) 

Nice or not, it doesn't matter what stories I tell or what I remember.  The good and the bad have equal power to work in my mind, and Tory is not here to react one way or the other.

(That previous graf doesn't quite make sense--I'm reaching for something I can't find words for yet.  I have two weeks until the actual anniversary.)

June 13.  Out back I'm cutting alder growth off old pastures and fields, and when I find a bumptious young ash or maple, I'm leaving it behind, so that in twenty or thirty years there will be a nice grove with grass underneath.  In one place parallel lines of trees lead the eye to a spot where the obvious classical way to pull the vista together and provide visual closure is to erect a thing.

I'm not quite ready to set up a garden gnome or a birdbath.  My natural proclivity would probably be some sort of folly--a ruin of granite foundation stones, poking up out of the ground: forlorn, New England gothic.  Unfortunately, every granite foundation stone on my property is either being properly used to support my house, or is already upended and poking up out of the ground here and there in a way calculated to excite the neighbors' horrified derision, or is too heavy to drag around with my little tractor.  I did find a dandy piece of stone the other day in the woods.  It's about as broad and long as the stovetop on the old Star Kineo, and nearly as flat, and I thought: a bench, so I hoicked it out.

In England I've occasionally come on a bench on a wild headland high  above the crashing surf or all alone on a dramatic scarp with a thirty mile spread of farmland below.  It's fine to take off the pack for a minute, eat a bite of pastry (one of my many abiding weaknesses), and catch my breath.

Alas, there are no wild headlands or dramatic scarps on these forty acres of Swanville, but I dragged the stone up to the highest spot , found some support stones in the horses' paddock, and built a handsome rustic bench.  At first, sitting on it seemed to be in quotes--I mean, why was I stopping my walk to sit on this bench to look down the field I just walked up?  But the dogs thought it was a grand idea to take a break to jump on my lap and jockey for position near me.  Even Maddie is allowed up on this piece of outdoor furniture.  So, pretty quickly, it's become part of the walk, part of the routine, part of life.  Even the horses don't shy at it. It's always been here, they say--right?  Sitting there last night as the sun set, I had a post-supper pastry, my favorite Labadie's vanilla whoopie pie.

June 11.  My first assignment most semesters is this one:

I know that on this assignment everyone feels pressure to make a good impression--in other words, to knock my socks off. But don't worry about perfection, okay? The perfect is the enemy of the good. Give each paragraph no more than 20 minutes or so max, then call it good, and move right on.

This is a preliminary writing sample--I haven't taught you anything yet, so you can't screw up, so relax, don't worry, and let fly.  Here is your topic:

 Your hands. Examine your hands and tell the reader what your scars, scabs, calluses, fingernails, knuckles say about your interests or your life or your hobbies or your work or your skill (or lack of skill) with tools.

I like the assignment because students can write about nearly anything they want, and even if they stay close to 'hands,' they can write about themselves without feeling self-conscious about writing about themselves.  Sneaky!

My own individual and personal hands are a mess today.  Yesterday I jammed the middle finger of my left hand between a dock I was putting in and a rock.  It's black and blue, except near the nail where it bled all over the nice bleached wood of the dock--now it's scabbed up.  Apparently, dumping gasoline in the cut at over two bucks per puts nature's scabbing mechanism into overdrive--the gas was not country medicine, just parts cleaning at its gawmiest.  I'd give you the words I uttered when the gas hit the cut, but we try to keep this website family-friendly.

The left thumbnail is mostly gone, due to a seasonal fungus infection, but what nail is there has a big blood blister, dead center, due to some forgotten intersection of me and a clumsily-handled tool, not that I need to modify 'tool' that way as I have no other method of handling them.

There's a well of blood and pus oozing out of a puncture wound in my right index finger--a nice long splinter waiting for me in that very same dock since last September.  Freeing up a bushhog blade the lazy man way--by hand instead of traipsing off in search of a rock, a crowbar, or a sledge hammer-- has left my right middle finger all scraped--pretty much a match for the left.

But what's got me writing about hands tonight, what's making me philosophical is the Comfortcool wrist and thumb brace my right hand sports.  The arthritis in the right thumb joint has combined with an enthusiastic but unwise use of a sledge hammer with which I wasd driving spikes through a 2x8 (a real 2x8, one of the old ones, two and a half inches thick), necessary because Kaldi had been up to mischief in his stall.  The result is constant low-level pain.  I can hear the bones grinding when I twiddle my thumb a certain way, and the last thing in the world I could do would be to turn a screw with my fingertips or use my thumb to flip out a one-handed knife blade.

So, what does it all add up to?  Self-pity?  Yeah, sure.  And that thumb...makes me want to seize the day--today, tomorrow--just as hard as I can.  Seize the day--with hands clearly incapable of cleanly grasping much of anything.

June 10.  A week since I've posted, but I have been writing, writing a lot of emails.  I've written about books, movies, teaching, music, ACOA, family horror stories, silly clever stuff on albinoblacksheep.com, institutional gossip, dogs, cats, gardens, children, husbands, wives, blogging, teaching, cooking, coping, and a bunch of other stuff that's already been deleted from my Outlook Express and is heading for some distant ethereal black hole.

One truth about me as a writer and about me generally is that I'm a counterpuncher.  I like riffing off what someone else says and putting whatever JAG spin on it I can--I prefer that to tossing the first punch.  A few times in my recent correspondence when I feel like I'm taking much more than I'm giving, being offered things I can't imagine repaying they are so rich, I will try to consciously lead with something new, something maybe unexpected, so that the flurry of emails is not always my reaction to someone else's move. 

I'm not much different in class.  I really don't have much to say until I see the writing.  I hate it when there's no conversation in class at 8 am, because then, instead of me spinning someone else's conversation into the topic of the day, I have to clear my throat and introduce the topic cold.  And writing a school blog--without a school in the background--is tough for a counterpuncher.

June 3.  The library service EMCC recently subscribed to just found an article from a September 2001 Boston Globe magazine, which I've been trying to run down for over two years.  Maine author Tory Haiss wrote about visiting Mt Washington in winter, wrote about her despair at her own physical condition and at the recent death of a friend, used the mountain as a poetic wedge to open and explore her life.

Tory was a very canny writer when she was on her game--when she was off her game, she was still canny in the small things but unable to see that the whole effect of a piece was forced, mannered, contrived.  It's not hard for me to be objective about her writing, if nothing else--I can see characteristic flaws in this article, trademark Tory.  But the intensity of the writing here transcends any problems, repels any criticism.  She wrote other things after and lived nearly two more years, but in this meditation on a friend, a disease, a mountain, she wrote herself a fine obituary.

June 3.  The couple who lived in the farmhouse up the road to the north are both dead now--Walter died just a few weeks ago.  Alberta was a tremendous gardener--a large garden just for cut flowers; several vegetable gardens;  daffodils, day lilies, tulips, phlox on the lawn.  She would walk on the road to stretch her legs,  and in June and July gather lupine seed and then scatter it on the road's shoulder a little further along.  Eventually in June there was an unbroken strip of pink, white, and purple lupine, both sides of the road, extending nearly a mile, as wide as the woman's throwing arm could reach.  As Walter and Alberta got old and fell sick, they would sell off lots, and the new houses going in disturbed the lupine--people mowed them down or ditched deeper and gouged them up.  The strip is still a sight, but not quite the sight it was.

For twenty years I've run on the road and done my own lupine harvesting, but I never had Alberta's green thumb, and the shoulder in front of our house had nothing until a few years ago, a solitary lupine finally showed.  The next year three or four.  Then a grader did in two of those.  The following year three or four.  I've  kept on tossing out lupine tops.  And...suddenly this year I have a strip of lupines perhaps fifty feet long, due to flower in the next few weeks.

I feel like if I'm posting, it's not a legitimate use of the school's server unless I offer up a moral, preferably an educational one--but, whatever the poets say, if there's anything in the phenomenal world offering no moral, it's flowers.

June 2.  I've been in a funk, partially because of the weather.  Today will be the third day in a row waking up to dark clouds, sprinkles, and cold--and yet not enough rain to help out with what needs to be watered.  It's the third day--but the sunny days before it were cold gale days--what they call suicide days when they arrive in late August, because they remind us of the winter to come and press on the spirits so heavily.  Anyway, the sunny days were a minor exception to the general weather since March. 

More faith than I can summon to even water my seedlings, which can't possibly survive if we don't have some sun.  Or if they survive, not flourish enough to grow to harvest.  This is it, the only summer we're going to get this year, the storehouse we deplete from October to April, and it's still empty of pleasure and memories.  It's grand weather for spinach, peas, onions, and potatoes, all things you could grow in northern Canada, but at least there you'd have more hours of  daylight to contemplate your misery in.  My spinach, peas, onions, and potatoes are all happy, but I'm not.

If I have to and I guess I will, I can buy some sort of pepper and eggplant varieties to replace the pathetic stunted things I've been nursing for nearly two months.  But greenhouses don't have flats of okra or artichokes, and my home-started specimens now in the ground are pretty sad and puny.  Growing these things, working in the garden, harvesting and eating the vegetables has become a bigger and bigger part of my life as I've aged.  For bathos, what could be sillier than an alte-kocker with a hyperactive limbic system railing at nature for failing to provide adequate sun for his baby plants...?  Maybe it's time for a little meteorological reality check: head into town and see whether my etherworld  pen-pal is on the money with 'Day After Tomorrow.'