Because of the increasingly important role that blogs are playing in so many aspects of our lives it is important that students develop an active deep and critical understanding of how to blog, how blogs function, and what their impact is likely to be. With these goals in mind, the Technology Across the Curriculum (TAC) program convened a cohort of faulty who elected to redesign their courses to include the use of blogs as a central feature of the undergraduate course assignments.

Spotted here.

I forgot today was Friday, in spite of the fact that last night I knew today was Friday.

So I missed a lunch date with another revgal.

Back when I was a young adult, the word we’d use for “flaking out” on someone was “lunching.”

I lunched on lunch.

Sigh.

*wham, clank*
H: Was that the salad?
D (sheepish): No. (meaningful pause.) It was the pie.
K (hyper): what? what? what happened? (trying to find the scene in serenity we left D. off at last time)
H (comes around to look): Oh. Pie foul.
(The apples are piled under the bottom crust, the pie plate is empty on the counter.) It’s the pie that didn’t want to be anyway; the apples had tried to go south, the crust tried to be overcooked…
K: Is this the scene?
H: We’re not going to be able to watch it just yet; we’ve had a pie foul.
K: What??! (comes over, peers over counter, gapes)
H (leans over): this part didn’t touch the floor…(rescues a bit of the bottom crust)
D: Oh! You’re right! (helps himself to half the bottom of the pie, gestures to K) Want some of the pie that didn’t touch the floor?
K: Oh, yeah!! (this is his third piece)
D: Come on, H, you know you want to blow a few more points.
H: That’s ok. I’ve already blown too many.
D: (guffaw)
H: (realizes what she just said, only to look up and see K and D lifting their pieces of broken pie to their mouths in perfect synchronization): That’s just wrong on so many levels.
D, K: (crack up)
H: I’m writing this down.
D (to K): So is this your first pie foul?

Today I had an episode of exploding yogurt. It’s blueberry, and so the resultant spot is purple, which color coordinates well with my striped purple-blue-and-white hoodie. But then I look down and find a smudge of indeterminate origin on one of the white stripes.

Clearly, I have no business being allowed in public without a body-sized bib.

And Dear CNN: Thank you for making me feel less shitty about my profession.

Then went back and reread it.

And burst out laughing:

With spam filters and ad-blockers killing your ability to reach people
through the internet, it may well be time to go postal.

Ma,

I just opened the DAR newsletter and it’s riddled with awful grammar mistakes. Can I volunteer my editing services? I can even produce the whole thing professionally, although I’d need to be reimbursed if you wanted me to take over the print and mailing services. I have no desire to be involved in any official role, but the damned thing reads like a middle-schooler wrote it. Not that I have anything against middle- schoolers.

Hel

I then spent a half hour worrying over whether middle-schooler should have been hyphenated, and by the end of it all, I couldn’t tell the difference between “schooler” and “schooner” and “scholar.”

Score!!

In other news, that somewhat irrational fear I have of falling? I took a spill on black ice yesterday and banged up my hip, my elbow, and my two outermost fingers. If I can ever go a few weeks without injuring myself, I’d like to get back into climbing; but I’m going to have to start from scratch, because yesterdays fall was a freefall from vertical to horizontal and I narrowly missed cracking open my skull.

However, I sort of packed the fingers in snow on the trip home and the result is there’s no discoloration and very little swelling, but a whole lot of pain.

In other news, today is the first day of the rest of your life. That may sound cheesy, but one friend is particularly wound up in past patterns creating fear of a new future. There is the blue collar approach to life, and the white collar approach. The former is all caught up in finding a job; the latter is all caught up in finding a career. There’s nothing inherently wrong with either path, but which yields more returns, at least in beltwayland?

In the first paragraph, “applicants for the MA in literature must send..” should instead read “applicants for the MA in professional writing and editing.”

Unless, of course, spotting that is one of the requirements for admittance into the program.

Best,
Helen Thompson