Friday, April 16, 2004

Timed Throat Glorp and Achiness

Warmest day so far in Kansas City this year, and I'm shivering through pangs of some evil, nasty virus. I made it through the winter without even a cough, but now I'm flat out miserable with throat glorp and achiness. Lozenge? 

My good friend E. is featured in the Kansas City Star this week.  Access to the article requires another onerous registration, much like the ones described at the Chutry Experiment earlier this week.  But the photo alone is worth signing up (and yes, of course it's okay to use phony information).  Notice the kids in the background, holding push-up positions while the coach juggles a ball.  Futbol doesn't look like so much fun. What, E., you get paid for this? 

My dad sent me an email tonight wanting to know how much time I spend blogging each day, on average. Reminds me of a story I heard at UMKC about a professor whose mother was visiting from England.  A comp/rhet/lit prof, he'd spent most of the day at home preparing for the evening course with diagrams--a  map of composition studies.  His mother: "Now what is it you do at the University?  Do you often spend all day drawing?"  Funny.  Guess you had to be there.  For my dad, I'll send a more personal note, but I didn't figure he would mind if I brought the family backchannel (*source of a post to come!) here for mention.  See, the simple answer is that I blog constantly. It's the typing time that I limit to one hour or so.  Anything more than an hour of typing, and it's ready to post.  So EWM isn't filled up with the most polished writing.  Nobody complains.  Nobody gripes about atrocious sentences or my rambles into unintelligible abstraction.   Here's an example: last night, when I woke up at 3 a.m. to find that Max, our nigh 14 year-old Yorkshire Terrier had, well, messed the house, I was blogging things through until I had everything cleaned up a half hour later.  I couldn't type, spray PineSol and wipe the entire floor at the same time, but I was blogging it, connecting it, imagining the whole experience as part of my sucky, sore-throated, up-late, mess-cleaning life.  As for time management, I've spent less time playing Yahoo! Euchre in these months since Earth Wide Moth came about.  And I do miss the Euchre, but so few people in Missouri have ever heard of it, and even when I won (playing amongst strangers) it was never as satisfying as this blogging habit. 

What else?  I thought about canceling a meeting this morning with our division of online learning folks.  But I went ahead, wound my way through the Academic Underground to their newly finished space.  (I was blogging it, too.)  Amazing how completely the U. has rooted itself.  The development of the limestone mines into usable space makes for an incredibly odd site: subterranean institutionality. I snapped a picture with the digicam exactly for use here.  And later, when I lost my precious jump drive for about three hours--seriously panicked, searching everywhere--I was worried I'd have to walk all the way back down to the DOL offices where it might've fallen out of my pocket.  Turned out it was here at home, which was a relief because I didn't have the last two weeks backed up.  Gah!

Time to eat, so this timed fun's gotta end. Usually an hour, sometimes more, often less, and bear in mind that I'm under the weight of the spring flu. All total, I've been at it for exactly 49 minutes from sitting down to posting, if that's helpful for guaging my typing time.  Hoping that it is.

Posted by Derek Mueller at April 16, 2004 7:53 PM to Rhetorico-Geography