Monday, October 27, 2014

paradise is real

What started out as a typical Monday became much better than typical.  I always feel like a caged animal at work, especially Mondays, but yesterday (Sunday) was beyond splendid.   Today, I’ve been on a high (happy?) all day.  It’s like living in an entirely different world.    

In sort of an impromptu decision, I took off on vacation this afternoon and left work two hours early.  Someone left work early too because he has a holiday tomorrow for some reason.  His boss always lets everyone leave early the day before a holiday.  It was sunny and 80 degrees today; how could I possibly waste the whole day at work?   Someone and I met up at the golf course which miraculously was practically deserted.  We pretty much played the entire 18 holes with nobody in front and nobody behind.  It was divine!!  I played well for me too which always makes golf more fun.       

Yesterday, I drove to Flemingsburg to visit Sarah.  The trees on the hillsides are becoming peak color now – the hills were blazing with drifts of red, orange, and yellow.  On a clear, sunny day like yesterday when the leaves are so colorful and the sky so brilliantly blue, it just gets no prettier than that in Kentucky.    

Sarah, her friend, and I drove over to Maysville for some lunch and a bit of shopping.  On a whim, we stopped at a house that has been for sale for awhile.  Sarah and her friend had seen it before and told me it was just spectacular up close (it sets far back off the road).  It’s a very old house, built in the 1800s in a very grand style.  Coincidentally, some people pulled into the driveway right behind us; people who Sarah and her friend knew; people who are archeological experts who had also come to tour the house and had access to the inside.  What fantastic luck!!!  They let us walk through the house with them.  



gingerbread trim and lovely attic window
The house became larger and larger as we drove up the winding driveway.  There are two gigantic trees in front of the house, even taller than the house.  The one on the right is the most fantastic, gigantic ginko tree that I’ve ever seen in my life.  It is wider than my arms stretched out from fingertip to fingertip.  Its leaves had only barely started to turn yellow.  We decided it must be a male tree because it didn’t have any of those stinky balls (technically, those things are called fruit) hanging on it or on the ground around it.  If you have no idea about the odor of those ginko fruit ball-things, they reek.  Imagine a women’s restroom where the trash is in dire need of emptying.   Multiply that level of gross by 10,000 and you’ll get an idea of what a small ginko tree smells like when its fruit starts to rot.  This ginko is like 100 times bigger (at least) than any ginko tree I’ve ever seen. 

Magnificent ginko


Larch on the left, ginko on the right
   

To the left of the house is a tree I’d never seen before.  One of the experts told me it is a larch.  Oh splendid!!  I love something new, and this is definitely something new for me.  This tree is an Eastern Larch, Larix Laricina, also known as a Tamarack.  One source said they are small to medium sized trees, but another source said they can become very tall (120 feet).  This one is very tall.  They look like evergreen trees because they have needle-like leaves.  They are, in fact, deciduous.  They have small pink blooms that transform into cones.  The bark is thin and light brown tinged with pink.  The wood is very hard, waterproof, and knot-free according to one source.  It is prized for use in construction.  That fact should appeal to Sarah's friend who is very-skilled in all areas of construction.    

How did it happen that this rare larch tree has come to be and survived so long in Mason County, Kentucky?  They prefer cold climates farther north, but apparently they are found in wetlands in the mountains of West Virginia and western Maryland.  One source said that they are fairly common around Lake Erie.  Perhaps long ago, somebody brought a sapling as a gift down the Erie Canal.  It was a popular transportation route between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River at Portsmouth starting around the time of the 1820s.  Maybe somebody brought it from West Virginia, or perhaps a bird innocently dropped a seed and there it grew. 

One source I read said that in Europe, the larch is a symbol of fertility.  Childless women sleep under it at night in hopes that its magic will help them conceive.  I believe trees have magical powers.  I think it can only be by magic that the ginko and larch in front of that house have survived for 200 years.


The house itself has beautiful hardwood floors and lots of stairs with curved banisters.  Indeed, lots of stairs are needed to connect the floors because the ceilings are 16 feet tall.  The doors and windows are proportionately tall.  It’s funny that I walked around the outside of the house  for 15 minutes, but it wasn’t until one of the men opened the door and stepped out onto the porch that I realized just how big those doors and windows really are.  It truly is a marvelous, beautiful place.    

The man in the doorway is not short!
Look where the doorknob is on this door.  That's a very tall door!
Sarah beside an upstairs bedroom window

The attic is unfinished, but the view is spectacular through arched windows
Beautiful maple trees in the back yard overlooking acres of cornfields.  This is Paradise.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

looking up

Writing a respectable blog post has been impossible lately.  I tried several times, but failed miserably after committing a single thought to a sentence or two.  Life in the deep rut of routine is shitty feedstock for blog post ideas.  Life is easiest in the deep rut of routine, but alas, it’s not very interesting.



Well, I’m writing, so something exciting has happened recently.  In fact, several exciting things have happened.  Until recently, I used to think I was one of most unlucky people who walked the planet.  Truly, I could not even win a coin toss.  This was demonstrated to me time and again throughout my life.  It was not so much a matter of bad luck, just no good luck.

About a month ago, I attended a conference for my teaching job.  At the end of the day, they had a drawing for a boatload of door prizes.  By the time they were ready to give away prizes, most people had left.  There were maybe 80-90 people left.  Anyway, they began drawing names and handing out gift bags.  Name after name was called.  People all around me were winning cool stuff and not so great stuff – tee shirts, books, umbrellas, mugs, software, satchels, etc.  After a while, it looked like everyone was going to walk out with something except me.  In fact, all the gift bags were gone and I was only one of a handful of people who had won nothing.  Then they brought out a small bag and announced they would draw for the grand prize.  I won!!!  It was a Kindle Fire HD.  Awesome!!!



This week has almost generated a whole paradigm shift in my feeble brain.  In fact, I’ve had so much good luck that I’m starting to worry.  Surely all this good luck is going to cause something terrible to happen.  No one person is going to have this many good things happen without paying some kind of penalty!

First, I won a $100 gift card (one of three) for completing a survey months ago.  Then, I was notified by ProQuest that they owe me royalties because my dissertation has sold enough copies.  How much?  I still don’t know, but they don’t cut checks for less than $25. I have a tax form to fill out and return L Next, I learned I was nominated for executive vice-chair for a professional organization I belong to.  Apparently I’m running unopposed, so I’ve pretty much won the election unless “bad luck” kicks in to interfere.   Last night, I learned I was nominated to be included in another honorary (sort of…it seems to be) professional organization.  They are reviewing my credentials and will let me know if I’m inducted. 


All of these things happened in the first three days this week.  I’m just so incredibly lucky lately…maybe I should buy a lottery ticket, or get me to the race track.  Maybe Lady Luck is my new girlfriend.    

            

Sunday, October 12, 2014

intervention

It’s Sunday night; nothing to do now but watch The Walking Dead and write a blog post about how I pissed away the whole weekend.  As soon as I close my eyes tonight, it will be tomorrow and time to return to work for another five days of hell.  Did I mention how much I hate my job?  Sad, but true.  Whine, whine, whine.  The paycheck is wonderful, the people are OK, the work itself is…I can’t even make myself define an adjective for it.  It Sucks with a capital S.    

Friday night, I sat up late (into the wee hours of the morning) working through a project that my students were having trouble with.  I struggled with two of the things they were struggling with.  The problem is that we use a simulator to grade the project files and the simulator expects things to be done a particular way.  The end result might look the same, but if you didn’t get the result using the expected process or method, you don’t get credit for that part of the project.  Anyway, after multiple attempts with different methods and much research, I still can’t get credit from the simulator for those two items.  I’m not giving up!  This stuff isn’t rocket science.   

So Saturday, I slept in until 11 AM.  After a long, hot shower, I settled in to watch an episode of Breaking Bad on NetFlix.  One episode turned into another, then another, then another…until I finished the series around 10 PM.  Somebody should have taken the remote away from me, but nobody did an intervention.  Someone was upstairs feeding his own TV addiction on ESPN channels watching football games and golf.  My unusual Saturday afternoon of hours-on-end TV is Someone’s usual habit.  How does he do that?  

Breaking Bad

It was kind of depressing finishing the last season of Breaking Bad.  The ending of the series was definitely more satisfying than the end of Dexter.  Now what?  All I have is The Walking Dead and South Park.  I was thinking to do more reading, but Sarah gave me a list of TV series she likes.  Actually, I already had a short list of my own, but now with Sarah’s recommendations, I’ll have to decide where to begin.  In no particular order, these are:

Weeds
Game of Thrones
Downton Abbey
Orange is the New Black
American Horror Story
Outlander
House of Cards
Hannibal
Bates Motel
Homeland
Six Feet Under (first two seasons)

I may never read another book.  To watch endless hours of TV with no commercial interruptions is a wonderful mindless thing.      

herd created from too much TV?

Thursday, October 2, 2014

blue skies

October sky in the Ohio River valley, especially these past two weeks, has been nothing short of spectacular.  The humidity has been low lately – it makes the blue sky just vibrant.  When I was 18, I traveled out west for a vacation with my mother and her family.  We drove all the way to California and back.  I don’t remember much about the vacation, but I do remember that the sky over the desert was so blue it was purple in comparison to Ohio River sky.  I do hope to visit the Rocky Mountains and go visit more of the west again someday.  Someday…

oak tree has turned yellow - outside my office window

 
Texas is in the west, but it doesn’t count in my fantasy “out west” vacation.  To be honest, I’d love to visit San Antonio again, but every other place I’ve been to in Texas is no place I want to return to.  Unfortunately, it looks like I will be going to southern Texas again next month on business.  Bummer.

I’m on the schedule to teach two courses for spring semester; hopefully enough students will enroll.  These both will be the same course I’m teaching this semester.  One will be online and the other will be hybrid (meaning face-to-face one day a week).  It should be manageable.  The experience of f2f teaching will be good, but teaching online is where my interest is.  It’s what I really want to do most of all…full time if I could find a job doing it.   

Last night, a person was in my dream who I’ve never met in real life.  This person is a friend on Facebook and I really know very little about him on a personal level.  In the dream, we bumped into each other at an outdoor dinner party.  He asked me to leave the party and go to a dance with him.  He was dressed up in a suit and I was wearing a giant, pale blue Cinderella-style formal dress (just like the one in the Disney movie).  It made perfect sense for us to go to a dance because we were already dressed for it.  I told him to wait for me by the lamp post while I went to find my cell phone.  Of course, I couldn’t find the damn phone after looking everywhere…it was one of those dreams.  When I went back to tell him I needed more time, he was gone.  Probably just as well since I’m married.  Cinderella falls in love and I was wearing her dress.  Who knows what might have happened?

Cinderella dress (but mine was much fluffier)


My African violet has been dormant for several years...meaning it hasn't bloomed or even put out a new leaf.  It was on clearance when I first bought it.  It was large and healthy, and had one withered bloom.  It seemed like a good bet since it was thriving and cheap, so I adopted it.  After all this time of waiting and watching, it has finally bloomed.  It's just very special!  Violets are among my favorite flowers - African or wild, I'm not picky.  

African violet