Not All Who Wander Are Lost

It's A Date

In case you hadn't heard, I'll be in Bangladesh for a few weeks starting next Tuesday. I return on the evening of August 18th after a twenty-four hour journey home via Heathrow, and get back on a plane at 4 the following morning for the Alaskan Cruise with my siblings and parents.

The 18th, of course, is my anniversary. August ninth, Darcie's birthday, I'll be missing altogether. And, of course, I'll miss her -- this is the longest we'll have been away from each other after dating for thirteen years.

So this afternoon at four, beard trimmed and Teaching with Technology Institute module outlines posted to my coleaders for critique, Darcie's parents came by to watch the baby, and we went off to see The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen down at the mall across the road from UMass Amherst. There's not much to say about the film save that it was quite possibly the the worst movie I've ever seen, with an almost incoherent sense of plot, some fake-as-all-heck special effects (check out the first close up body shot of Mr. Hyde, the first strong man with styrofoam arms), and a bunch of just dumb inconsistencies (Like a cruise ship in the canals of venice. Get real, Nemo.). The theater, which had come highly recommended, made up for the difference: comfortable high-backed seats, soft classical lighting along velvet walls, and an especially large screen, anomalous for what is otherwise a sparse and seedy mall, three dollar stores and a collectables shoppe.

Dinner afterwards in another well-recommended place, the Lord Jeffrey Inn in Amherst itself. No disappointments here, though: the room, set around a crackling hearthfire, was otherwise dark and romantic, furnished with old books and a minimum of faded mallard decoys upon old bureaus. And the food was excellent: gorgonzola and pancetta cream sauce over spinach linguine and under steak tips for me, pecan-encrusted chicken and spinach greens for Darcie, and a plate-swap midway eagerly and mutually agreed upon.

It was a good date, with a lover and an old friend, the kind you wish you could have more often no matter how often they come. Good enough, even, to make me wish I wasn't going anywhere, after all. And moreso when we got home to see the baby smile at us, and hold her arms out to us both.

God, I'll miss you, girls.

Totally Hot

Like, I totally think we set fire to the school dump today, dude.

Right, so there were these things, you know, all the accumulated junk of five years -- broken flowerpots, snow shovels with broken handles, the Christmas tree, a cracked glass vase and an old moldy school bench -- still sitting beind the fence of a ten-foot-square "backyard" behind the dorm apartment we just left behind. They had been there a while, and people were gonna want to move in, and the school wanted us to move them really soon, even though when we moved in five years ago the backyard was still filled with some other guy's trash, mostly rusty little-girl pinkbikes in a variety of sizes, and we had to get rid of it.

So we (that's Darcie and I) borrowed a school truck with no rear view mirror and no readout to tell you what gear you were in and asked the couple downstairs and their six year old kid to watch ours for a few minutes while we tossed all the junk in the flatbed and drove it all down to the school dump -- all, that is, except for the saggy wooden garden bench we dropped off under the tree across the way from the new place on the way over.

We'd never been to the school dump -- didn't know they had one, I mean -- but past the lower sports fields, down one paddock and through the second gate sure enough a pile of computer parts and face-down television sets at the corner turned into wide dump-piles: woodscraps, tree limbs, doorless washers. At the threequarters mark of what was obviously becoming a circle through the dump a raised ramp of road dead ended in the sky directly at the upper lips of a pair of mostly-full dumpsters, each construction site size, five times longer than wide, and we drove up it, and heaved our stuff on the top.

We went back to get the baby, now happily eating dirt and rocks by the tennis court entrance while someone else's Retriever snuffled the tennis ball at her feet. While Darcie put her in the car I drove the truck down to the back of the work control shopbuilding where it had to be returned.

Now what you have to understand is this: our school is on a hill by the side of the Connecticut river, and the back of the work control building is pretty much the only place where you can see even the barest tips of the dump-piles over the trees surrounding them. Everywhere else there's a ridge in the way. So it's a sure coincidence that right in front of me as I parked the truck the wrong way in to avoid the security vehicle in the middle of the lot was a huge paired spout-set of flame to the treetops rising from pretty much where the dumpsters should be, and a plume of smoke half a mile high besides. Darcie saw it too. And the fire trucks filling their hoses at the hydrant right next to us there in the lot were pretty hard to miss.

And we had just been there -- weren't we the last ones there? And we don't think we did anything, but there was an awful lot of wood and paint stuff and insulating fiber in those dumsters, and it was under a lot of pressure, what with the dumpsters being so tall and filled with heavy junk, and I guess we threw stuff in them pretty hard, and maybe it rubbed some of that old flammable stuff together the wrong way or something.

What was weird was really the unreality of the fire coming out of nowhere, I think. The dump wasn't on fire then -- you'd remember if the place was on fire, I mean, it's the kind of thing you'd notice pretty much no matter what, right? But then, all of a sudden it was.

Totally.

I hope they got it out -- the boathouse isn't that far away down there, and they just got a new boat.

I also wrote three four-page outlines today, each one a different half-day teaching module for the trip to Bangladesh. Yay me.

Baby You're Never Far Enough Away

Buy this CD or I will kill this hamster.

This song by alt-folk (and out-folk) newcomers Girlyman has been stuck in my head since Falcon Ridge. Also a powerful cover of Harrison's My Sweet Lord and the homoerotic Rose of the same album. Their harmonies are so tight there's no room to sing along, but I've been doing it anyway.

Girlyman's coming through our area tomorrow and friday night, and I might just go, and skip the Great Waters Folk Festival altogether. If you don't live in my area, you'll have to wait to see them. But luckily, you can download Postcards From Mexico (the song in question) here (or here if you prefer Real Audio), and more music here. Get with the Girlyman program!

Pacing The Cage

Spent the day slowly-but-surely gearing up some initial inertia for some by-Friday curriculum-writing, which mostly meant a few hours in the faculty computer resource room on the LAN printing anything I thought might come in handy over the next few intensive days, a bit of email catch-up, and a spot of message board reconstruction.

Perusing and evaluating such materials tends to refocus the mind on the task at hand; by the time I arrived home with a thick handfull of papers and powerpoint printouts to find Darcie and Willow gone off to Brattleboro for a dip in South Pond the mind was brimming with ideas and outlines, each of which begged for paper and pen. The way my mind works -- and I have trained it well to do so exquisitely -- the brain will continue to simmer all night; by morning turning notes into narrative will be as natural as that first cup of coffee, and equally necessary to my mental health.

It's a (subjectively) highly successful formula, one which minimizes waste and maximizes quality in the production of any sort of paper, presentation, or indeed any extended linear communication. Given a month for an assignment, I have learned that my best can be found in toying with ideas for the first three weeks until the thesis, the goal, and the needed steps to get there become clear; from there, merely steeping myself in materials and keeping the ideas fluid until they naturally drop into their proper place like that last from-mess-to-finished rubik's cube twist, is the easy part. It's natural. It's fun. It looks like procrastination, but it isn't -- starting earlier results in a loss of focus over time, and produces only fragments for me. It does not break but merely internalizes the traditionally taught process of brainstorm and draft, and it works only if one can visualize, instantly, both forest and trees in an extended argument or process.

I like to think of this as the lighter, brighter side of ADHD. If one learns to watch one's own mind, the eight-track-simultaneous "curse" of the ADHD brain -- most often seen as problematic in that few ever learn how to manage so much information flow and environmental junk at once -- can be harnessed as what to others looks like "intuition" but is in actuality the ability to carefully fill each track with complimentary sub-ideas of the same process or piece-at-hand. The well-practiced mind, furthermore, can then "see" the relationships between each thread, and use it deliberately.

Or at least that's what it feels like. Hey, ask Shaw -- for a short while, I held the record at Marlboro College for netting the highest score ever on my writing pre-exam at orientation. I'm not bragging -- I have no sense that I'm a superhero -- it's just what I can do, and I'm proud because, for a long time, my brain was incomprehensible to me, my behavior erratic and inexplicable. It wasn't until I had a whole and holistic metaphor for the mind making the metaphor -- a meta concept if ever there was one -- that I managed to make sense to anyone, or to myself. And I didn't get that without much support (thanks, Darcie), and a very, very prolonged period of what can only be called adolescence into my mid twenties.

Okay, now that I've psyched myself up...I'm off to work. Is this how others think, I wonder?

Uh Oh

Via the constantly updated weather.com. Guess they're serious about this monsoon thing, eh?

To Do

Get beard trimmed.

Fill anti-malaria 'scrip.

Get batteries for Palm.

Check mapquest for weather in Dhaka over the next three weeks.

Launder and iron short sleeved button down shirts.

Install needed software on loaner laptop: Photoshop, Premiere, PhotoDeluxe, Inspiration, MS Office 2k Ed., hardware drivers for camera, printer, Palm,

Gather and organize Teaching With Technology materials, presentations, bookmarks, outlines and tests.

Leaning heavily on extant scavenge-able presentations and curricula originally developed for / delivered to other groups long beforehand, develop Teaching with Technology materials, presentations, outlines and tests for the following half-day modules:
- Terms, Models and Metaphors of Technology and Learning
- Writing Digitally
- Assessing Digital Learning
- The Computer As Brainstorming Tool
- Collaborative Knowledge Sharing Online and Off

Contact Margaret re: missing full day module on Searching and Researching Online.

Figure out if I'm doing the wrong modules.

Spend lots of time with family.

Videotape self reading bedtime stories for Willow to watch every night while I'm gone.

Be grateful for the opportunity to go at all.

What I Did On My Summer Blogcation

A week ago in the midst of what we in the technical field like to call a "kablooey" -- see below and then back father still to track the recent almost-demise and eventual ressurection of Not All Who Wander Are Lost -- I stopped blogging. There wasn't much point, really -- the good folks at blogger were understandably slow in helping a barely-paying customer with a violently unusual problem, but in the meantime, I was locked out of my primary blogspace and then rather quickly lost the password for a gifted second: I had nowhere to publish, and plenty to do.

Sorry. Really. I missed you all, and it's good to be back.

There's no real way to do justice to over a week of whirlwind summer in a single backblog (definition: any blog entry which tries to recapture a series of events just on the verge of mental overripeness, often resulting in a long boring entry which no one really ever reads), and not much point besides. But the highlights are pretty bright, so let's recap, shall we?

Saturday, June 19th, the Green River Festival in nearby Greenfield, MA. Discoveries that day include sparse funk band Inner Orchestra, Kris Delmhorst, who I came back to for a workshop set after being wowed by her early slot on the mainstage, and the joy of Patty Griffin in live performance (I've loved her forever but never made a show before); rediscoveries included They Might Be Giants, who always put on a great show, and Amelia, a beloved ex-student who also appeared the following weekend at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. Rekindled my love of kettle corn and Burnt Sugar and Cream ice cream from the traveling Herrell's double decker ice cream bus.

But Green River was just a warmup for the summer's main event. Sunday, June 20th found us packing up the camper, dropping off the dog and picking up Virginia at the in-laws, errand-running. We left early the next morning, stopping at diners and roadside stores to keep the baby happy and our nicotene cravings fulfilled. And from Monday to Monday? The four of us -- yours truly, the now-one Willow, fond wife Darcie, her sister Virginia -- lived neo-nomadically out of blue tarps and screentents, campers and cars, in the damp green air of a horsefield in Hillsdale, New York, where every year the hordes descend for the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, and we are there to greet them, and dwell among them, and listen as they sing.

Condensing Falcon Ridge into anything resembling a readable blogentry is impossible -- I live a year in one week each summer. We set the camper up against a creekbed and a road, next to Dave and then Virginia, right where we had been two years ago, but from there the narrative thread goes awry; it is not enough to say For three days we camped and worked as the festival slowly came to almost-life around us; for four days afterwards the festival raged as we rode the wave partially underground, like woodland elves on other faraway fields., and the blog format is antithetical to you had to be there or anysuch. The best one can say is that, in this time as in all timeless times, a week passed, the community around us grew and waned as a constant.

But I suppose to some extent life fell into three overlapping but identifiable categories: Work, Music, and, above and between it all, Leisure.

Work at a festival like this is lower than everyfest average, about 20 hours total, for which you get free admission and camping, free albeit meager and meat-free rations, undying friendship, and the best camping spots. Darcie painted festival signs in the shade of the central staff tent, including one which said "Baby Zone" and another which said "Today is Wednesday" and then later "Today is NOT Wednesday" and then by Friday "Today is (still) NOT Wednesday / please see the festival information tent for further temporal/spatial reference" which we hung outside our camping area. I checked in volunteers in the bigger tent out by the parking lot as they arrived and then, later, checked in the performers for a few hours each festival day, shaking Richard Shindell's hand, being introduced to Dar Williams' husband Mike (Mark?), watching the night rain with the members of We're About Nine, and putting wristbands on all of them. Dave, our Falcon Ridge Buddy -- we know him only from there, and see him never otherwise, but camp and spend all our time with him there every year -- stood security watch at the vegetarian-only staff meal tent entrance. Virginia watched the baby.

The Music at this year's fest began slow, with not much worth seeing Thursday but a late-night Patty Larkin (I got her some water later in the staff tent) and Richard Thompson, who was dressed exactly like a mime but was so much louder he brought his own stage amps and speakers. But over the next few days the rich diversity of two stages and a dance stage captured me, as it always does. Highlights included the discovery of last year's Emerging Artist Showcase winners Girlyman, a homophillic trio of powerful harmony, song structure, production and energy whose live performance and whose new album I cannot recommend any higher; also Richard Shindell, who I've seen before only peripherally but was much more impressed with. DaVinci's Notebook and Eddie From Ohio were as always rocking and hilarious; Railroad Earth and Vassar Clements bluegrassed the heck out of some jam band music (or vice versa), Dar, Kaplansky, and fest-fave John Gorka were predictably pleasant. Tuesday when the line was drawn between camp and stage seating we had pitched the fifth tent up along the line from stage, a freak miracle of timing which allowed us to closely watch the music that followed from the comfort of our own sun-and-rain-blocker without having to wait for three hours behind a rope for the 9:30 daily mainstage rush; it was the closest I'd been to Greg Brown since I shook his hand at the last festival we attended together, and nice to be able to drink beer at the otherwise dry festival under the shady screen. Virginia even got me to the dance tent late late late one night, where I managed to spin through a fifteen minute contra without bashing her into more than a dozen people.

And Leisure? Dave and Ginny and I spend hours together a day, sometimes wandering the grounds making friends with the food vendors, mostly just sitting around at the main path-side tentsite and watching the world eventually walk by. It was a bit like holding court; people would walk into our domain, and would instigate speech or not, and some of them sat, and some just said "hi," but all smiled, and were appreciative, and approvingly and jealously watched the baby walk among us always smiling, not like those other sometimes-grumpy otherkids we sometimes heard late at night from a few tents over, loud in the songcircle nights. Willow was a joy and a marvel, and we bought her a kazoo which she buzzed on while she danced and waved at the music. My parents, active and eager cajun and contra dancers for whom Falcon Ridge is large-scale but otherwise a bit minor-league, I suspect, took us all out to really-nice dinners twice and watched the baby when we needed naps and sat and watched the music with us sometimes when they weren't dancing. I found some beloved ex-student working in the Burrito Booth, wore a new denim hat, slept little, was happy.

We stayed overnight on Monday the 27th and packed up in the morning with a teary goodbye to Dave for another 51 weeks, and went to get Willow a passport in Keene today, and that doesn't even get to the heart of things, but it's late here and probably there; I think now we've caught up and can go forward, that it's time to get back on the pony and ride like the wind. Much of the next two weeks are inherently, powerfully blogworthy -- a trip to Bangladesh, another to Alaska via Vancouver; the start of a new job and a new school year; a new autumn. Any or each of these might cause another blogout/blackout, to be sure -- I know of no network access outside of the school where we'll work in Dhaka, and suspect not much will be available on the waters of Alaska as we cruise. But each is surely worth waiting for in it's own right, and, well, thanks for coming, y'all, and for waiting longer.