Where do I live?

I put in that cute little widget on the left to see if anyone else is reading the blog. Now I discover that I live in Warsaw, Indiana—at least that is the city that registers every time I log in. Makes me wonder just how accurate the thing is.

Warsaw doesn't look like such a bad place to be from. After all, Wikipedia calls it "Orthopedic Capital of the World." They are also home to CoCo Wheats and a company that makes projection screens. By contrast, what does Mansfield have? Well, there is the Carrousel, Kingwood Center, and (always) the state prison. Now that I think of it, we do have quite an assortment of odd little local benefits. I think I'll stay here instead of moving to Warsaw.

Laundry Ethics

Saturday is laundry day for me.

Though I live alone, I begin with gathering and sorting, just like everyone else. This brings up the first problem: has that garment "aged" enough? Yes, I wore that turtleneck all day yesterday, but I didn't get too sweaty, and it doesn't smell that bad. Is it OK to wash it? Then there are the sheets and towels. When I was a boy, my mom had a very strict sheet routine: every week she changed the top sheet and moved the top sheet to the bottom. I've got fitted sheets now, so I guess two weeks on the whole set is OK. Or is it? When did I change them last? Sniff test?

We move forward: pollution. A year ago, I went to the Great Falls of the Potomac with my sister. It's a wonderful place, more impressive, actually, than Niagara (though not such a tourist venue). It was a wonderful early summer day, and as we stood there, she asked me what that smell was. It wasn't foul or dead or anything like that—sort of pleasant in fact. Laundry detergent! The whole place smelled Springtime Fresh; I assume the chemicals in laundry detergent make it through the sewage treatment process. (I've noticed the same phenomenon while bicycling past the Lexington sewage lagoon.) After that, I vowed to buy only the fragrance-free variety, but I capitulated. Target had a sale and I bought some Floral Medley All. Am I a bad person? I guess I'll use it anyhow.

One more ethical hurdle: the shared washing machines. My machines are just downstairs from my apartment, and two serve twelve units. I don't mind that very much, but I do get troubled when someone leaves stuff in a machine forever. I've got to watch it, though. If I get properly irritated when someone else does that, I need to keep a timer and run down when mine is done, lest I cause someone else to fall into the sin of anger. There's also the danger that my damp clothes will be piled on the shelf if I leave them too long.

Tears in my eyes

Happy tears.

I often have students who seem like they are in the wrong place: instead of college, they should be working in a gas station or something. H is one such student, and when he turned in his last paper, I seriously wondered if he was sober when he did it. Terrible. Illiterate. Incomprehensible.

Anyhow, I'm suffering from a lot of burnout right now, and decided that today's lecture would be about MY interests (and English composition as a way of expressing them), so I did a major thing with environmentalism. I showed them pictures of hellbenders. (Look THAT up!) Figured it was my own ego trip.

H went to the writing lab and said the lecture was really interesting—caught his attention and gave him something to think about.

Amazing!

Mom's Hamburgers

A Mansfield landmark has changed, and for the worse.

Mom's Hamburgers on Ashland Road was always my favorite burger place. The actual menu didn't sound like much—sounded like a clone of Wendy's, with quarter-pound burgers and "Frosted Malts" (sort of a super-thick chocolate shake). The big difference was that the ingredients were fresh and the cooking was done right. Wendy's tasted stale by comparison.

Alas, Mom's is no more, at least in its former shape. Now they are a sports bar. The new billboard says "Like nothing else" and the new sign out front advertises prime rib, longneck beers and full bar service. Maybe the area needed another bar. At least the parking lot was full when I drove by at 6:00.

I'll miss Mom's. They were like nothing else.

Coffee

Time for some.

I've been going pretty much non-stop since 8 a.m. yesterday, and a late lunch at Chipotle's plus a cuppa at Angel Falls sounds wonderful. I may even buy a pound of whole beans there.

My feelings are very mixed about that pound, though. Yes, it's a nice little local business and yes, it's all Fair Trade, but the owner (and roaster) is Venezuelan. Now I have no quarrel with Venezuela and Chavez, but Venezuelan coffee is about the lightest roast available. It's like green plants.

Somehow, I got to talking with a student about tea and coffee today and that reminded me of my own background. When I was in college, I had an old Sunbeam coffee maker in my dorm room. The one in the movie is glass, but mine was metal. Made an amazing amount of noise, heat and steam, was difficult to clean out, and made terrible coffee. I stepped up to a cheap aluminum dripolator from a dime store. It was similar to these. What an improvement! Mr. Coffee was far in our future, but I fell in love with drip coffee.

This must be an addiction. In addition to a LARGE variety of coffee cups, saucers, spoons, etc., I now own:

• 4-cup Mr. Coffee
• 8-cup Mr. Coffee
• Smallish Bialetti espresso maker
• Incredible hand-blown Chemex which I got at Goodwill for about $2
• and the cutest little Melitta plastic cone, which makes wonderful coffee.

I had a chance at a cheap French press a while back (Barnes & Noble closeout), but I passed on that, remembering the nightmare of getting Sunbeam cleaned after using it.

Time to go. My stomach clock has gone off.

My economic prescription

Yesterday I had to exchange a small part for the church's Mac Mini. Because I was already in Akron, I decided to go to the Apple store in Legacy Village, only about 20 minutes north of me, rather than all the way back to the one near Columbus.

Mistake.

Not counting the intense road construction, things got really insane when I was within two miles of the store. I'd never been to Legacy Village before, so I was depending on a Google map, which told me to exit the highway and drive "into" Cedar Lane. At the exit was a tight exit ramp, a crossroad, and a sign pointing to the right with the words "Cedar Lane." I thought things were going well. I didn't realize that the sign meant I should have taken the exit (which the sign didn't point to) rather than the street (which it did point to). Adding to the confusion was the Cleveland habit of putting road signs on only the minor roads—after all, you KNOW what the major roads are, right?

After I had wandered around on various roads for about half an hour, I began to think that the Apple store was located in someone's house and that this "Legacy Village" must be a subdivision.

Which brings me to my main point, and my proposal for some of the government stimulus money: use it for road signs pointing people to shopping malls.

There's nothing to alert a wanderer to the location of Legacy Village until you drive by the entrance. (I did have a Cedar Lane address for the Apple store, and that helped a lot.) Similarly, if you want to go to Eastland Town Center in Columbus, there's a freeway sign that tells you to take an exit that's totally wrong. Finding the right one is mainly a matter of experience. The Apple website lists the address as "4070 The Strand East," which is zero help to someone trying to drive there. Even humble Mansfield lists addresses as if you already knew: Macy's is at 715 Richland Mall. And where is Richland Mall? Their website has the answer: 2209 Richland Mall.

Woodies

Saturday laundry time.

One of the few things I rescued from mom's house was sheets. She's got a double bed at her new place, so all the twin sheets were redundant. I grabbed a couple of sets of wedgewood blue that were still in their packages. When I opened them to make the bed, I realized that the price tags were from Woodward & Lothrop. ("Woodies" to long-time Washington residents).

It was a great store in its time, one of the true old-fashioned department stores along with Landsburgh's and the Hecht Company (all gone now). Times have changed. If I want cheap Chinese-made shoes or jeans, I've got Wal-Mart, but a good sweater? Macy's (if I like this season's colors). Men's suit? I think I know of a place in Cleveland that might have them, or perhaps just drive to Washington. Until I discovered Crowe's Shoes in downtown Mansfield yesterday, I didn't know of any place where a shoe clerk would actually measure my foot. (Again, I don't think White Flint Mall in suburban Maryland is exactly local shopping.)

But Woodie's had it all. It was perfectly reasonable to buy a suit there, arrange for alterations, come back a few days later, and buy a belt and shoes to go with it.

When they finally went out of business in 1995, they were still profitable, but had been the victim of a leveraged buy-out. Yet another time when the genius financial wizards used their own greed to screw up something the rest of us really wanted. I think the Wall-E movie may have it right: the future of retailing really is sort of a super Wal-Mart vision where we all buy the same things, look the same way, and it all comes from China. And nobody will measure my foot, find a shoe that looks good, and wish me a nice day.

By the way, that Woodies tag tells me that Mom had these sheets on her shelf, unopened, for at least 14 years. That deserves a post of its own.

Supporting Apple

A few days ago, I bought yet another Apple computer. This makes four of them since September (all on educator's discount):

1. A MacBook for Anna Allen so she can work on her degree
2. A MacBook for me a week later because my old iBook quit and I wanted the upgrade rather than simply a repair
3. An aluminum MacBook for my sister (this wasn't too difficult a sell because she came to Washington intending to buy)
4. A Mini for our church to do PowerPoints

Yes, I really am going to be one of those tiresome people who tells you in detail that the machines are great. The last straw with the church's old Windows machine was the 30-minute freeze-up to update software when I needed to get in and download eight files. Of all the Windows glitches, that's the most annoying—like a small child who absolutely demands to use the toilet, no matter what else is going on at the moment. All action must stop to attend to his needs. (Oh, I know I could reconfigure all six of the Windows machines I use every week so the update takes place at a more convenient time. But I'm not supposed to do that.)

Anyhow, if you see that Apple Computer is turning a profit, I am the reason, even at a 10% discount.

How much student?

Grading papers this afternoon, I ran (again) into a very typical student phrase. My author was writing about the amount of Christians and Jews in the world.

I'll leave aside the interesting question why this oddity persists, but students are convinced that we measure people (not dogs or cars or pizzas) by volume and refer to "a great amount of people" at the meeting. I got curious. Let's assume I have a class of 20 students and an average weight of 150 pounds. The dean asks, "How was attendance today?" I could answer, "Very good. A ton and a half of students showed up." Or at an average of 2.8 cubic feet per student, the answer might be "56 cubic feet of student, which works out to nearly 419 gallons." (That's 349 Imperial gallons, but nobody uses those any more. If my students were all Canadians, the answer would be something like "1586 liters of student—1360 kilograms.")

Finished Harry Potter

I finally got to the last page of the last book. Though I might be the only living person on the planet who didn't blast through them all months and months ago, I won't do a spoiler here (though Kay Vega was right—the end is very satisfying).

In Shakespearean terms, it almost qualified as a a tragedy (everyone is dead at the end), but really comes off as a comedy (everyone is married at the end).

After reading the whole thing, though, I'm left with a couple of intriguing questions.

What do magicians DO?
Aside from the ones who work at the Ministry of Magic and the ones who teach, we see a few who do things like publish magazines or even drive buses, but the everyday life of the everyday witch or wizard seems unusually ordinary. I do my laundry by hauling it down to the machine; they do theirs by waving a wand. The task and the results are much the same. They just have a different technology. But I keep wondering if there's any point to being a magician.

Why were the Christians so upset?
When Harry Potter first came out, all the good church people were aghast. This was, they said, the tool that would haul a whole generation of children into worshiping Satan. Leaving Voldemort (see—I have the nerve to actually say his name) aside, there's incredibly little discussion of the source of the power. There's a bit of mention of "Dark Arts" versus what we might call "Good Magic" but almost nothing about the real source of the power. It just seems to reside in the witch or wizard, in much the same way that a good ball player has a natural feel for where a ball will be as it flies through the air. Just a natural talent. I think the only mention of deity in the whole series is an occasional "Oh my God!"

Which brings up a question. Why do some kinds of Christian feel a compulsion to suck all the fun and joy out of anything that doesn't begin with a prayer and end with "Amen"? Everything, for them, must be overtly baptized. My church is going to have a "Men and boys bowling afternoon" this Saturday, and I cheered because nothing like that has happened for years. Then it was announced that the whole thing would end with a devotional. Gotta pay the price. If you're going to have Christian fun, you have to do the devotional at the end to make sure nobody slips into thinking that there's something OK about simply going bowling and eating pizza.

I hope nobody brings his lucky bowling shoes. Now that WOULD cause an uproar!

Recession mentality

I find myself thinking such odd thoughts.

I don't have much money, really. If all employment ceased, I'd last maybe seven months maximum (living slim). So I look at the bank meltdowns and wonder if I should split my meager cash between two banks in case one fails. After all, when I first got to Ohio, the church here had its money locked up for several weeks when a state-insured savings & loan went bankrupt. Same thing in our future?

And I look at things to buy and assume that such merchandise won't be available much longer. Nice shoes, for example. Who will be able to run a good shoe company or shoe store in the future?

This does feel kind of insane, after all.

I remember laughing at my grandmother's husband, Cecil, when he rushed out and bought a car in about 1963 because the country was going down fast and people wouldn't be able to buy cars. Come to think of it, he hoarded the old kind of money, silver certificates, because they really did represent precious metal in some government vault. Buried $2500 worth in a tin box in the back yard of their Pennsylvania Avenue house here in Mansfield. Of course, Pennsylvania Avenue is kind of flat and back yards collect water, so when he dug the box up several years later he had a couple of handfuls of very expensive compost.

Maybe I should just go ahead and live normally. I don't know where I'd put a lot of clothes and shoes and stuff anyhow.

How I spend my break

Ashland University was on break last week. The University of Akron is on break this week. So how was I supposed to spend my time? I assigned both schools a major paper to be turned in just before they left. The idea was that I'd grade while they were gone. That didn't exactly work.

Last week, with Monday, Wednesday, and Friday off, I actually spend hours and hours doing stuff that will prepare for September classes. Today was much the same (though I took a couple of hours off to have lunch with an old friend and to visit an antique shop).

Charlie Brown's friend Linus stated that "big sisters are the crabgrass in the lawn of life." I think grading is the crabgrass on my lawn of life. I'm pausing at 4:46—just finished one class and about 15 papers to do for the next.

My family and friends tell me that I'm always saying I'm behind on my grading, and it's true. I don't like giving people bad news. I don't like reading papers that show I've been ineffective as a teacher. I don't like reading lots of papers that are substantially identical.

But the students need it.

I think I'll put a pan of brownies in the oven and grade half a dozen papers.

Smelling Good

Recently my mother revealed one of those little family bits that somehow gets forgotten when one is young. She said that a major disappointment was that Dad never smelled pretty. Her own father had been very partial to Old Spice. As far as I know the only artificial scent Dad ever used was cigars. I don't think he even used deodorant.

I guess that's why I never got into aftershave and such (though I do use deodorant). I have a little bottle of Brut that's been around since I was in college, and it still smells the same—one person who posted on Flickr says the odor will still be popular "as long as there are 16 year old boys who confuse sophistication with the ability to fumigate a room on entry." Maybe I should be glad that the Brut is still nearly full.

This is why I'm surprised at myself. At Christmas, I visited a trendy little French-themed boutique, looking for a gift for my sister. To my surprise, I actually found something I liked, and bought it for myself. To my even greater surprise, I just bought a second bottle of a different scent from the same (rather expensive) shop.

Who is the little outfit that caught my fancy (and nose)? Something called l'Occitane. So, depending on the season, you'll find me smelling like either "lavender, blended with the peppery, nutmeg scent of burnt wood" or like "citrus top notes underscored with sage, anise seed, fig and black currant."

Who would have thought?

(By the way, it doesn't hurt that the company supports a foundation to work against blindness and to enable women to earn a decent living in the part of Africa that supplies some of their raw materials.)

First post - again

Here we go again. I've usually got a blog—and usually forget about it for months at a time. Maybe this new beginning will work out better.

Anyhoo, the point of all this is to give me a general, and not terribly private, way to keep in touch with family and friends. No, I haven't enabled comments, so you can't reply here (that's to keep out all the spammers). But of course you can e-mail me, and I might change my mind later.

I think my past blog failures have occurred because I was trying to write the Great American Novel here. I've been following a couple of very personal blogs for a while, and they are very entertaining, even though I the individual posts are quite brief, and all this has given me a vision all over again.

Jared persuaded me to get a Facebook account (and you can search for me there if you like), but I got frustrated because the format is incredibly shallow and there's no real idea of doing an extended piece of writing like this.

So here I am. I'll try to do better this time.