Bramblings

 Today is the last day of February 2021.  Tomorrow, we start on our journey in Slice of Life.  Today, I'm feeling very burnt.  It's overcast and I haven't even gone for a walk today.  I did get a lot of work done.  "Work" consisted of grading a lot of work. I'm reading a book called Journal To The Self.  In it, there are all kinds of journal prompts.  One of the prompts just stood out to me.  The prompt declares Discover the Writer Within You.  I am thinking about how writing has always been a chore to me.  I do not want writing to be a chore for me anymore!  I want it to just as natural as the way in which I have experienced some of the best conversations of my life.  There are times when I think I just do not have the skills necessary to write.  I wrote a frickin' dissertation for pity's sake!  I can do this. What is really bothering me about this process?  It's about the discipline.  I feel very undi...

 It was the summer of 1986.  An oppressively hot and dry air mass had settled over the southern part Humboldt County, California.  I recall the midday heat of that summer the way I recall the last time I opened the door to my convection oven at a time when whatever I might have been baking was ready to come out. You know that feeling, that experience of opening the convection oven at the end of a baking cycle.  You walk up to the oven, often beckoned there by the sound of whatever alarm you'd set for the baking cycle, and you open that door.  The roiling convection waves of heat hit you immediately.  I've almost always equated that experience of convection oven heat as a form of comfort, much the way one might experience the feel of a hot washcloth on the face.  While I almost always recall the memory of what I call ovenly heat, fondly, I never recall the summer of 1986, that summer of relentless convection, the same way. With the convection oven, the ...

I decided to transplant my amaryllis plants today.  They were beginning to look a little droopy.  I had suspected for a while that something was going on underneath the soil in the planters.  So, I purchased a large bag of Miracle Grow potting soil and spread out a couple of plastic kitchen garbage bags onto the carpet in front of my greenhouse window.  I would have preferred to take this planting refresh outdoors.  Unfortunately, my house is still surrounded by at least four feet of snow, so, this task had to be done inside. One by one, I took each plant down and gently nudged each of them out of their planter.  As I suspected, each one of them had a mass of rotting flattened roots.  Comingled amongst the rotting mass were fresh greenish-yellow roots.  It was easy to pull off the rot.  The brown flattened masses fell off with a gentle nudge.  After clearing each of their crowd, I inspected each bulb.  The yellow-green roots shootin...

I love the snow. I hate the snow. I grabbed the wrong snow shovel as I exited the front door of my house for the driveway.  Off the front porch, my left and then right foot sank into the snow, so powdery and sand-like that if I were to close my eyes I could have imagined I was at the beach.  No time for that.  I walked quickly, my shoes making a determined scrunch scrunch scrunch sound in the snow.  Walking around the car, I swing the orange plastic headed shovel into the air and start scraping away at the snow around the driver-side window of my Subaru Crosstrek.  The metal edge of the shovel head scrapes across the window shade, leaving angry scratch marks on the tinted plastic. Dammit!  I grabbed the wrong shovel. I scream into the woods,"Mother f@#$#@!" I throw the orange shovel at the nearest tree. Back to the house. scrunch scrunch scrunch I am supposed to use the blue plastic shovel, not the orange plastic shovel.  The blue plastic shovel is al...

Today is my third day blogging. I'm going to write about one of my morning lectures.  In my first morning lecture, I reviewed ethical decision-making in the work place with students.  The conversation was borne of a set of ethical considerations that a student posted as part of her chapter presentation.  I was so impressed with her presentation that I asked her to go back to the ethics slide so we could review it as a class.  Here are some of the ethical dilemmas we reviewed today: What should I do if my agency physically restrains clients and I hold a personal belief against this? How do I decide whether to carry out activities in my practicum that my family or friends have asked me not to do? What should I do if I'm asked to conduct a home visit even after I discussed my uneasiness about the arrangements with my field instructor? I found the class' responses to these questions to be fascinating.  They ranged in responses from "You knew what you were getting in...

 Yesterday I attended a workshop sponsored by the Long Island Writing Project (LIWP).  The subject of the workshop was blogging.  A number of my colleagues are devoted members of the LIWP, and so I felt encouraged to show up to the Zoom meeting.  Everything is on Zoom these days.   Today, as I try to control myself from staring out my greenhouse window at all the snow coming down, I will write about my proposed blogging audience.  For starters, I think it's incredibly vain to think that my students will actually read my bogging blog, but, on the off chance that they do, some of what I write about will likely be about those topics I review with them in class from week to week.  Next, I think the other theme to my blog will be simply to write as descriptively as possible about other things that I encounter during my time in Pennsylvania. Being quarantined in the Pennsylvania countryside, miles away from the nearest town, has both its upsides and dow...

I started my blogging journey today.  Well, actually, I started it last week when I decided to join my colleagues at the Long Island Writing Project and hosts of Two Writing Teachers (twowritingteachers.org) in a Zoom seminar about blogging.  This feels intimidating. I'm not used to doing this kind of writing. Okay, so, Slice of Life is the theme of the Tuesday challenge that will begin in the month of March.  It is hosted by twowritingteachers.org.  Yes, this is the impetus to get me to write each day.  I have no idea how long my posts should be or what I'm even going to write about, but, I'm going to do it! Slice of life...  today is a beautiful day in the Poconos.  That's where I'm at, sheltering in place since heading out to the beautiful Pennsylvania countryside in March of 2020.  In the past, whenever I would come up here to my house, it was usually just to crash and regenerate from my life in New York and Long Island where I work at Nassau ...