Blowing & Drifting

Looking out my office window throughout the day, I often feel a pang of sadness for my bike, which sits out there all day in the cold, halfway up the snowbank that covers most of the bike rack. (I’ve anthropomorphized my belongings like this as long as I can remember: I recall introducing my G.I. [...]

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Is there any manly – or even semi-masculine – way to carry those little wire-handled takeout boxes? Have any students ever been injured after a collision caused by someone reading while walking? Have any students ever been injured after being run down by someone biking at 15mph through a crowd of pedestrians? Just how do [...]

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September was the second “30 Days of Biking” event. As I posted way back on August 31, I gave it a go, having successfully completed the first 30DoB in April. Thanks to good weather, a great bike, a wonderful commuting route, lots of excellent road riding right near the house, and the bit of incentive [...]

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Soon, I’ll finally get around to writing a post about my late Grandpa, but for now here’s a great picture of him with two of his workhorses. The man was a teamster in the original sense of the word, and his love for the animals is obvious. One of the best moments I ever had [...]

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One item on the long list of great things about working at Carleton is that I can attend the weekly presentations offered by the College’s Perlman Center for Teaching and Learning (which is, perversely, called the “LTC”). Today’s presentation , conducted by a geology prof, a psych prof, and a student, was great: Digital Nation: Electronic [...]

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When I headed off to another townhouse-association board meeting on Thursday night (with luck, my next-to-last one), Vivi lost it – crying and grabbing me and begging me not to go. When I came home, I found this on the kitchen counter: Dear Daddy I miss you at the meeting I love you too. Just [...]

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Today, I submitted the final grades for the online course I taught this summer for Metro State University in St. Paul, “World War II – A Global History.” This is the twelfth time I’ve taught for Metro State since fall 2003, and the third time I’ve taught this particular course, always online. I felt like [...]

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This evening Vivi and I were  drawing when she looked over at me with big sad eyes and asked, “Is amorrow a weekend day?” I shook my head. “No, honey, tomorrow is just Tuesday. It’s a few more days until the weekend.” Whereupon she burst into tears – heavy, gasping, wailing tears – and leapt [...]

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The customary quiet of campus during the summer is gone, gone, gone this year. In addition to (seemingly) larger-than-usual contingents of high schoolers and others attending various summer camps on campus, a number of construction projects are underway in virtually every part of campus. Take the visual tour! (For realism’s sake, you should watch this [...]

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Wednesday was, I’ll understate, quite a day. It wasn’t exactly “one of those days,” since I didn’t spill my coffee on myself or ride my bike into a tree or walk across fresh asphalt. But it was a draining, topsy-turvy day at work. I knew the day was going to be intense, since my boss [...]

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I saw lots of great stuff in or near Grinnell today, both during an excellent tour of the Conard Environmental Research Area, Grinnell’s natural preserve, and afterwards, around campus. Oak savannah on the south side of Conard. Ants on the underside of an oak leaf, harvesting sugar-rich fluids secreted by the tiny aphids which the [...]

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Tonight, I ran out west of town, stopping at this road, just west of Grinnell, Iowa. Gorgeous. I wish this photo did justice to the incredible purple-white sky – and that I’d had my bike, because this road was begging to be ridden.

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I love that I played a (small) part in this: Carleton College Announces Completion of $300 Million Fundraising Campaign (July 1, 2010) Northfield, Minn. — Carleton College has announced the successful completion of its largest-ever fundraising campaign. Breaking Barriers, Creating Connections: The Campaign for Carleton has exceeded its goal, raising more than $300 million from [...]

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The lovely view out my office window of a tree and passersby on the sidewalk was been lost for the summer by this view, of the scaffolding necessary to do some loud and smelly repairs on our building. As one of my coworkers said when we were sharing mild complaints about the noise and stench, [...]

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All the construction outside Goodsell Observatory at Carleton means that the College has finally begun the construction of our long-awaited death ray. Once installed, sometime next month, we will conduct preliminary tests on people who’ve let their dogs off leash in the Arb. When the instrument is properly calibrated, we’ll burn a clown nose on [...]

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