I should point out that neither Annette nor I are exactly “high rollers.”  I’m pretty sure we gambled less than $50 between the two of us, all of it at either video poker machines or slots.  I should also point out, for those of you thinking “casinos?  in the midwest?” that we could have easily stopped at eight or nine different places, maybe more.  Once you start looking, you realize there’s lots of gambling out there.

We started at Jumer’s Casino and Hotel, in Rock Island, Illinois, just across the river from Iowa. This was mostly a breakfast stop for us, a little over two hours from my parent’s house.  I give this place high marks for convenience, with “easy on/easy off” of I-280.  It was all shiny and new, and probably not a bad place to stay on a road-trip– while we were eating breakfast, we saw a lot of people on the way out of the hotel part and back onto the Interstate.  I also give this place high marks because the whole thing was non-smoking.  I could see us stopping here on the trip to and from Iowa again. But the down-side for me was that I screwed up in my betting and managed to lose about $10 on one bet on a quarter poker machine.

Stop number two was at Blue Chip Casino, Hotel, and Spa in Michigan City, Indiana.  While there are lots of gambling options in the midwest, there are some kind of screwy laws on this, and in Indiana (apparently), gambling has to take place on the water.  So what you’ve got with this place is a giant and shiny hotel, theater (upcoming acts include Paul Revere and the Raiders), and a parking deck, right next to the casino, which is actually a giant barge floating in a pond right next to the buildings.  But you’d never know this if you weren’t looking– the connection between the building and the boat is permanently in place, and the boat clearly never leaves.  Where would it go?

Anyway, I give the Blue Chip a definite thumbs down.  Far too off the Interstate to make it worthwhile as a roadtrip stop, and you show me someone who makes a point of going to Michigan City to play slots and I’ll show you someone who has a bit of a “gambling problem.”

We wrapped things up in Michigan at FireKeepers Casino in Battle Creek (btw, sorry for the noises on their web site), where we stopped for a little gamin’ and dinner.  By this point, I think it’s fair to say that I was reminded of something I already knew:  every casino everywhere I have ever been– Vegas, Iowa, Michigan, wherever– pretty much is the same.  They all have that same kinds of blinking lights and things, the same games (with a few very subtle variations), the same hypnotic background noise of jingling machines, the same crazy-patterned carpets, the same smell of cigarette smoke (well, except for Jumer’s) and piped-in air/oxygen/air-freshener.  Annette and I did enjoy the nickel poker machines here though.

So, what did we learn?

• Midwest gambling is dominated by old people– in some cases, very very old people.  Though to be fair, I am sure all of these places attract a more youthful clientele after 8 pm.
• Midwest casinos are located in places where people would not otherwise go and/or stop– Rock Island and Michigan City, for example, not to mention a number of parts of Detroit.
• One trend I noticed was a number of “machines” that were there to replace/replicate table games.  At one of these places (the specifics all blend together), I noticed a computerized version of a three card poker game; at another, it was a roullette game.  In both cases, it was people sitting around a gaming table like they would be if it were being played with real cards and/or a real dealer, but it was all computerized instead.  Sort of like the casino equivalent of those machines where you scan your own groceries.
• Casinos seem to generally attract rather unhealthy-looking people, some who might even be zombies, cocktail-drinking, smoking, trucker-cap wearing zombies.
• A closely related observation– midwest casinos seem to attract extremely fat people, the kind of fat where my response, as someone who is himself clearly overweight, is “hey, there’s nothing wrong with me because I’m not that fat.”  This was particularly true in Michigan, where I recall seeing at least two people being wheeled around because they were clearly too fat to propel themselves and where Annette and I witnessed a rather grotesque scene in the restaurant that had us making cruel jokes about Mr. Cresosote requesting a bucket and being offered a “wafer thin mint.”
• Finally, stopping at the casino on the highway is not the same as Vegas, no matter how hard those Midwestern casinos might try.

I posted some pictures the other day; here’s a link to the Coos Bay/Bandon part of things, and here’s a link to the Redwoods part. One of these days, I’ll have to pull together a “highlight” reel of these zillions of pictures, though I have to say it’s tough to take a bad looking picture out there.  More than you want to know after the jump.

We stopped first at Shore Acres in Coos Bay, which is a lovely state park on the edge of the “big city” of the southern Oregon coast– flowers, exotic plants, roses, dramatic coastal rocks, etc. We spent the night in Bandon, which is a little town just south of Coos Bay that I suppose now is as well known for a world class golf course/resort as it is for the coastal views– we stuck to the views. Maybe when I’m rolling in dough I’ll try the golf course.  Anyway, the beach/coastal views were tremendous and really impossible for me to describe. Just look at the pictures. We stayed at a surprisingly nice motel right on the beach, tromped around, had dinner at an old-school restaurant with great views, watched the sun set, etc.

The next day we drove down the coast past dramatic views of the sort featured in car commercials to Redwoods National Park, which is really a series of state and national parks south of Crescent City. The main attraction here are the freaskishly large trees, prehistoric looking ferns, misty walks, etc. I kept wondering when the Ewoks were going to pop up.

Our first stop was the Trees of Mystery, which is probably the most famous cheesy tourist trap attraction in the area. You can’t miss it; it’s the one with the giant Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox out front. Besides the gift shop, the main attraction is an “interpretive trail” with various big trees and other wooded novelties, and a “sky trail”/gondola ride up to the top of the ridge.  I remember stopping at this place a dozen years ago and skipping the trail, but it was surprisingly worth the price of admission.  And they have a cool collection of Native American stuff in there too.  And we bought Paul Bunyan/Babe the Blue Ox salt and pepper shakers.

The main attraction/destination in the park was Fern Canyon, which is this extremely beautiful, steep, and (relatively) remote canyon/valley/gully on the ocean side of the forest.  It’s lined with ferns and other stunning plants and views. Remember some of those scenes in Jurassic Park? They filmed some of that there. I was originally hoping we could hike into it from the road, but besides getting there kind of late, I didn’t realize how long that would have been (10 miles round trip) and we were of course not prepared for that. So we did what we did a dozen years ago and drove in on this access road. I use “road” loosely; rugged and kinda scary wide trail might be more like it. Besides the hairy turns and twists up and down the ridge to get to the beach, we had to drive through three streams, two of which were at least a foot deep. Oh, and these are all normal conditions.

It was all worth it, though as the pictures and a chunk of the video I posted on Flickr indicates, our shoes got soaked. There is no path into the canyon per se; you walk in and around the shallow stream that carved out this canyon in the first place. It’s not all wet and at most, it’s ankle deep, but that’s deeper than ideal, especially when lacking a change of shoes (note to self: if we return to this area, bring some day hiking equipment, and bring a change of shoes, ideally something like Teva sandals). We found out later that in the summer, they put in a number of wooden bridges in places to make it easier and dryer. Once again, thwarted by someplace a little too early in the year.

Oh, another feature of this part of the park: elk, huge ones, just hanging around along the beach and near the campgrounds.  Annette thought they behaved more like cattle than deer, just eating and then looking up at us as we drove by.

We stayed that night at a place in Klamath, a town that is really little more than a post office, gas station, tribal headquarters, and our motel. The next day, I went across the street to a junky little laundramat with the goal of drying out Will’s shoes, which were his only pair and really REALLY wet.  There I struck up a conversation with an old toothless man who was in there doing his laundry about all sorts of things.  I could only understand about every fourth word– the toothless part probably didn’t help.  Anyway, to make a long story short, he suggested a different route for our drive back to Sacramento than the one I was planning, and my sense is that he gave us a good tip.  We stopped in Eureka and ate fancy pizza, drove along much of the “Avenue of Giants” and saw even more big-assed trees, etc.  Nice, but I think I preferred the Redwood National Park area…

Stayed in a kinda crappy hotel in Sacramento, got on the plane, got home.  Ta-da.

It was a great great trip in so many ways.  If I had to pick out one thing, I guess I’d have to say it was the Oregon Shakespeare production of Hamlet– it was really good. But really, it was all beautiful and fun.  I would make this trip again and again.

Though I have to say that in the end, I have no regrets about moving away.  Just as we were pulling out of the hotel parking lot in Ashland, we struck up a conversation with a couple of old ladies about how we were on this trip because we had lived here a dozen years before.  “And you left?!” they asked, horrified.  I remember getting that  quite a bit when we moved from Ashland– how could you leave such a beautiful place? Well, there are a lot of beautiful places, really.  Don’t get me wrong– Ashland and the whole area is really wonderful and I certainly want to go back again– but sometimes folks can be, well, a little full of themselves.  Remember that episode of South Park where everyone in San Francisco smells their own farts? Sometimes, it’s a little like that.  Actually, Ann Arbor is a little like that too, but I digress…

Anyway, vacation’s over.  House cleaning and rearranging on the agenda, not to mention taming the overgrown yard and garden. School starts again Monday.  Back to work.

Bandon and Coos Bay 2010

Redwoods 2010

Anyway, I’m happy to visit now as a tenured and content professor at EMU, one who happens to be married to someone who was just granted tenure, and I’m happy that we are sharing our trip down memory lane with our 12 year old son who left this town where he was born before he was one. Here’s a link to a bunch of flickr pictures of the area (including Crater Lake) so far; more details after the jump.

Ashland is first and foremost a tourist town centered around the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is an amazing theater company/festival that runs from late February until October 31. As far as tourist attractions go, this is a pretty good one in that it attracts a clientele interested in art, literature, fine food and wine, etc. But I am reminded again on coming back here that it is probably better to visit a tourist town than to live in a tourist town. Well, unless you like tourists.

We pulled into town and immediately drove by the little house we lived in when Will was born, and went out to dinner that first night at Cucina Biazzi, which is a very charming and very good Italian restaurant that was pretty much the way we remembered it. Though I have to say that 12 years ago, we thought it was so fancy. I guess with a few truly fancy meals in New York and Chicago and Vegas under my belt (not to mention Bouchon on this trip), I now think it’s more “charming.” Though still really good food, too.

Friday I got up and “ran” through Lithia Park and then we spent most of the day walking around downtown– lots of hippie-groovy stores, lots of touristy/artsy/fartsy stores, etc.– and walking around the park. And I have to say that going through Lithia park really is one of those trips down memory lane that has held up really well– it’s such a beautiful and lovely place.

Went to dinner that night at one of our regular spots when we were here, a British-styled pub called The Black Sheep, which was almost exactly the same as it was a dozen years ago, and then saw the OSF production that night of Hamlet. Easily the most accessible version of the play I had ever seen, and the acting and production was much better than I remembered. Much MUCH better than the few things I’ve seen at Stratford in Canada, to be honest. I’m looking forward to The Merchant of Venice we’re seeing tomorrow night.

And then today, there was Crater Lake. Now, Annette and I have fond memories of going up there a couple of times in the summer for picnics along the rim of the lake– breathtaking. So, in the trip down memory lane theme of the trip, we prepared a lovely little picnic of things for today. The problem was that we had taken those lunches oh so many years ago in late July and August, and it turns out that “winter” is still very much there in late June. You need to check out the pictures, but there was still several feet of snow around the rim of the lake– and by several feet, I mean like 10 or 12 feet in places. They hadn’t even bothered to plow out the picnic area. Oh, and it was freakin’ cold, too. Not picnicking conditions.

Happily, this all turned out well though because we decided to have lunch in the Crater Lake Lodge, which is a refurbished version of the hotel that has been up there since the early 1900s. We just looked around the common rooms and the dining room (where we, um, “dined”), but it looked very cool. Of course, like just about everything else up here, it’s only open a couple of months in the summer….

We have one more day here which will wrap up with The Merchant of Venice in the main and outdoor theater. Perhaps I will try to confront a few more demons and walk around SOU’s campus….

A couple of quick thoughts before Ashland:

The idea of this trip, more or less, was to cash in our frequent flyer miles (meaning the flights cost us about $40 or so) and to take a trip to see where Will was born and where Annette and I started our post-PhD program lives, Ashland, Oregon. But first, Napa.

Our flight into Sacramento was uneventful, but we didn’t get to the hotel/motel until almost 1 am west coast time or 4 am east coast time, so our first day in Napa was pretty quiet, actually. We stopped in downtown Napa for lunch– good food, but not much reason to stop there tourism-wise. Drove past wineries, stopped at Bouchon Bakery for lovely pastries and coffee, and then got to our hotel, a Best Western in Calistoga, CA. Great place, actually– lovely little town, nice hotel, reasonably priced, etc.

Tuesday night we went to Bouchon, which is a Thomas Keller restaurant in Yountville. I would have preferred going to Ad Hoc (because I have a cookbook from there), but it was closed both Tuesday and Wednesday. And The French Laundry, well, that would have been a little out of our budget. Bouchon was great, and surprisingly accessible and not crazy expensive. We have spent as much or more in a couple of different restaurants in Ann Arbor, and this was much better. Will had a great mussels dish, Annette had a bib lettuce salad that she thought was the best ever (and some good lobster bisque), and I pigged out over some deliciously fatty pork shoulder.

And then Wednesday, we got up and really had tourism proper. Napa Valley is a little tricky with a 12 year-old; as Annette put it, it’s sort of like how adults feel about a place like Chuck E. Cheese: sure, there’s stuff adults can do there, but the place is really made for kids. So is the case with wine country. As a result, we ended up keeping it pretty simple and mostly kid-friendly. We went to the California petrified forest and the “Old Faithful” of California; both were pretty much tourist-traps, but kinda fun. We went to the Sterling winery, which has the kid-friendly attraction of a gondola ride from the parking lot to the winery itself– that was pretty cool, and the views from that place were spectacular.

But the real surprise and hit of the day was Castello Di Amorosa, which is basically this pet/vanity project of a guy who has been active in the Napa Valley wine world for a long long time. Check out the link and the pictures to see what I mean; but basically, I would say it was an all-around hit for our group. I thought it was going to be super cheesy, but actually, it was a really well-done castle reproduction, and as some of the picture suggest, it looks quite a bit like quite a few things in Italy. We had a great guy serving us up too much wine in the tasting room, and it was pretty good wine, too.

We didn’t get to see a lot more than that, unfortunately, but what we saw was lovely. Oh, almost forgot– we did get a chance to go into the the west coast branch of the the Culinary Institute of America, which has about the best kitchen tool/toy/porn store I’ve ever been in. I ended up buying a couple of great looking CIA cookbooks, which are not the kind of thing you can typically get at a Borders or something.

And now on to Ashland. I’m finishing this post now from here, and I am sure I’ll photos to upload in a few days.

I’m slow mainly because I’m fat, though I have to say I think that while I could run faster if I lost 20 or more pounds, I don’t think I could ever be “fast” as a runner.  I just don’t think I have that sort of build or desire. But hey, I don’t care if I’m in a race like this and getting passed by little kids and old ladies; besides being a great way to exercise (I try to “run” 3 times a week for 30 minutes, which is for me a very good and efficient workout– and then I ride a stationary bike or the elliptical machine and also mess with wight machines two times a week), the Dexter-Ann Arbor run is a lot of fun.  I’d recommend it to anyone, even if you just want to walk it.

Anyway, this year’s race was was made a little more interesting, amusing, and even competitive by someone who Bill HD nicknamed “Mr. Coronary.”  An appropriate nickname, though I also thought this guy might stroke out and/or drop dead just from being crotchety at a couple of different points.  He was more or less with me for two-thirds of the race.  I’d guess he was in his sixties, maybe seventies.  At first, I didn’t actually see him; rather I started hearing him making these Tourette’s-like noises– just screaming out stuff like “GAAA!” and “SHIT!” every once in a while. Then he got close enough to me for me to hear him gasping crazily. He really did sound like he was in trouble.

The last 1.2 miles of the course is Main street off of Huron River Drive, and it is mostly uphill, not the easiest finish for a friendly 5K run-walk event.  Mr. Coronary and I kept passing each other; I basically kept my steady but turtle-like pace, while Mr. Coronary would go past me then slow down and scream out crazy stuff and sound like he was going to die.  He kept asking people on the side of the course “how much further?” and he never liked the answer.

And then, after he stopped for a moment, bent over and leaning on his knees (never a good sign to get into what can only be described as the “ready to hurl” position), he took off his shirt. Not a pretty sight, but oddly motivating to me.  The last tenth of a mile or so, something about the wheezing, foul-mouthed, angry, fat, old, and now shirtless man inspired me.  I thought well jeez, I can’t lose to this guy. So I kicked it up just a tiny notch and got past him, as the picture above suggests.

Victory is sweet.

Before I left for Purdue, I printed out my two talks– good ol’-fashioned paper, which I probably would have been using with or without a laptop, though I thought about going for the truly unnecessarily repetitive and redundant by bringing my laptop to project my presentations and my iPad to read from my script/notes. As I mentioned before, I prepared my Keynote presentations on my iPad itself to avoid the “translation” problems of converting a desktop presentation– basically, the desktop version of Keynote is just different enough from the iPad version to screw up fonts, some graphics, builds, etc.  Better to skip that hassle and just start with the iPad in the first place.

Both of the Keynote shows I put together were fairly simple, but not uncomfortably so– in other words, I ultimately didn’t feel like I was “lacking in power” by just using the iPad version of Keynote.  My shows had “builds” and graphics and the like, and the presentation I did about YouTube included about 8 minutes worth of video.  The “trick” to including the photos and the video I discovered through a little trial and error was to put together an album of photos and video I wanted to use for my presentations together on my desktop first and then uploaded it to the iPad, making note to check the box for including both photos and videos onto my album.  From there, building the presentation with videos and photos was easy.

I had heard the day before my presentation that some people were having “issues” with connecting their iPads to the projectors at the conference, but I did not find that to be the case at all.  Basically, I just plugged in my iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter and I was good to go– well, good to go for my Keynote presentations and a few other functions.  The reviews of this product on the Apple web site are accurate in that this adapter allows you to project Keynote presentations (and it’s not quite as nice as the dual monitor mode you get with a laptop), it’ll project photos/slide shows, and I think it’ll project movies (I haven’t tried it on anything long that I’ve ripped yet), and that’s it.  It is not a “mirror mode” device that projects whatever it is you see on the iPad onto a projector.  This lack of capability disappointed me after I bought it, but for my purposes generally and at this conference, it was not a big deal.

For all of my other basic “computing needs” while at the conference, the iPad worked fine.  I never had any wifi problems (though I heard that some folks with iPad did have problems connecting to the Purdue network), email and basic web surfing were fine, etc., etc.  There was only one time where the lack of Flash was a problem, and that was looking at some videos that Alexis Hart’s sixth grade niece had done– not exactly mission critical stuff.  And I was even able to open that with CloudBrowse, though it is slow and probably not worth it for most Flash applications.

And of course, the iPad was a pretty good conversation piece– not as much with people curious about what it’s “like” but more with people who have one and who want to know what I was doing with mine (and vice-versa).  There were quite a few people sporting iPads at this conference, too.  I ran into Kathy Yancey and we talked for a good 45 minutes, her mostly asking me questions about this or that piece of software.  It was interesting to me because we were coming at the device quite differently.  She admitted to coming at all this from a Windoze sort of background, and she wanted to know where the manual was; me, I always just “play” with stuff, and while the iPad is different, it is close enough to the Apple nomenclature to be pretty easy for me to pick up on quickly.  I think the iPad is one of those things that doesn’t really need any explanation; Kathy thought it would be good if I did a workshop on what worked well.  I’m not sure who is right, but if someone wants to bring me in as they iPad expert….

Anyway, on the whole, the iPad lived up to its “netbook-like” potential for travel for me.  It’s lighter and smaller, and with a kick-ass battery life. It’s not great for updating my WordPress blog or for doing anything too complicated, but for everything else, a thumbs up.

So, for the foreseeable future, my iPad is going to remain a sort of “second banana” as a writerly device, something to use when I’m writing and not here, which is to say not that often.

Which is not to say never.  Besides travel and the occasional coffee shop trip, I do like to get away from the desk once in a while.  Here’s a picture of my iPad set-up in the backyard on a Saturday or Sunday early evening the other day.  A couple of features I’ll note about this layout:

• The Apple iPad Case holding up my iPad is a must:  very convenient, and when it isn’t propping up the iPad as shown here, it also folds over to the perfect angle for in lap typing on the iPad’s landscape keyboard, and it closes up like a portfolio.
• The bluetooth keyboard.  As I wrote about previously, the dock that Apple sells for the iPad is completely useless; this keyboard on the other hand is great.
• Wine and iPhone optional, though I will say the iPhone does help me deal with some of my multitasking needs. The wine not so much.

The iPad won’t link up with a mouse– yet.  I saw a hack where someone did connect a bluetooth mouse to an iPad, and I will bet that some kind of app will come along sooner than later to either connect a mouse or to make your iPhone behave like a touch screen/trackball mouse.  That’d be sweet.  Anyway, what this means is if you want to do something other than type, you’re touching the screen– not a big deal, but not all key controls, either.

Oh, and while there is definitely some glare off of the screen, it’s not as bad as this photo implies.  It’s still readable/usable outside, especially if you’re under an umbrella.

So far, my writerly iPad work has been pretty much limited to Pages and Keynote.  As has been widely reported/noted, neither are as good as the desktop versions.  While I understand why Apple called these iPad versions “Pages” and “Keynote,” it probably would have been more accurate for them to call them something that distinguishes these versions of the software from the real versions of the software.  I dunno, maybe “Not Pages” or “Keynote Sorta.”

The other thing that is very annoying is that getting stuff from my desktop to my iPad and vice-versa:  I believe the
technical term for the rig-a-ma-roll one has to go through to get things from the computer to the iPad and then back again is “pain in the ass.”  There’s probably a better/smarter way to do it than all the synching, importing, and exporting that I’ve had to go through, but it isn’t obvious to me how to do that yet.

That said, both of these programs are  usable and even have some interesting advantages over their desktop versions. In Pages, you don’t have a lot of menu “junk” on the screen, a factor of its limited menu options.  But there are a couple of different word processors and similar software out there (Scrivener immediately comes to mind) that sell this lack of “distractions” and just the words on the screen as a “feature,” and for those uni-tasking writing moments, I agree with that.

Once I got the hang of Keynote on the iPad, I found it easy and even kind of fun to use because you can shuffle around the slides a lot more like index cards. I also figured out that the best way to build a Keynote presentation that I intend to show on my iPad is to make it on my iPad.  So for example, I’m giving two talks at the upcoming Computers and Writing Conference at Purdue: one part of a round-table on virtual mentorship, and a presentation about using YouTube to supplement my online teaching. To write them, I did the “words in a row” and video editing part of things on my desktop.  But then I pretty much put the Keynote presentations together on the iPad set up on my desk next to the computer.

For the conference itself, I’m going to try taking only my iPad and print-outs of my script/text of my presentations– plus I’ve already created “plan B” in the form of putting my talks up online so I can access them there in a pinch via Dropbox and the blog/web versions I link to above.  I’ve got an adapter that I can use to hook the iPad up to a projector, though that adapter is unfortunately limited– I can use it to project Keynote or to show a slide show, but no “movie night” with the Netflix app, for example.  I’ll also be reading my talk off of old-fashioned “paper.”  We’ll see how it goes.

Um, okay– but what are the advantages of using an iPad like this over using a laptop?

Well, for me, I guess there are four, maybe three and a half:

• The iPad is lighter (even with the keyboard) and more compact.  Now, I don’t do a lot of traveling of the sort where it makes a big difference to me if I’m packing/carrying something that weighs three pounds instead of a pound and a half, so the literal lightness doesn’t make that much difference to me.  But lighter is still lighter, and a bigger advantage is the iPad’s compactness.  I haven’t tried this thing out on an airplane yet, but I assume it will be a lot easier to work with than a laptop.  Probably sans keyboard, I admit.
• The battery life is super-duper long, which is always a problem for me with a laptop.  Even with my relatively new Powerbook Pro, I can run off of three hours on the battery only if I’m not doing much– e.g., not online, not doing any video, etc.  The iPad laps that three or four times easily.
• It is much MUCH more responsive than the laptop, and for a spelling-error prone typist like me, it does a MUCH better job of auto-correcting my errors.  In that sense it has a much more “snappy” feel than my laptop, and like I said, I’ve got a pretty decent laptop too.
• It does kind of “disappear” as a device a bit, which I think does make me think of writing a little differently, more akin to typing or writing on the page.  I don’t want to make too much of this (this is the “half” part) because I’ve always been a little dubious of various writerly habits like requiring a certain kind of paper or a certain color of pen or specific chair or whatever.  Those claims always strike me as somewhere between too pretentious and too precious.  And it could simply be the newness of the device.  Still, there’s something there about that.

More than you perhaps want to know.  As I’ve said before, the iPad is no substitute for a “computer”– that is, a more full-blown work station, be that a desktop or a laptop.  But for me, it’s starting to emerge as a reasonable substitute for a laptop.  We’ll see how the iPad only experiment goes at C&W.

It turned out to be a fantastic success, so I decided to “kick it up a notch,” so to speak, and thus was born “the huge square-foot garden.” Basically, the very far back part of our backyard has always been a bit of a problem as far as growing a lawn goes, and it is also the only other part of our yard (well, other than the front yard) where we regularly get sun.  So I thought it’d be a good idea to both eliminate the weedy mess of that part of the lawn and simultaneously expand the herb garden with four 4X8 foot raised beds.

This seemed like a good and even “easy” idea at the time, but damn, that’s a lot of freakin’ garden.  I don’t want to even begin to guess how many hours it took me to get it to this point, and don’t ask me how much it all cost either.  Had I known before I started how much time and/or money this was going to take, I would have just kept mowing the weeds. But right now, it looks pretty good.

“What did you plant,” you ask?  In the middle of most of the beds are perennials, mostly stuff from around the yard already just relocated here.  Around the edges are mostly herbs, also relocated from other places in the yard.  But we also have raspberries, a lot of vegetables I am pretty sure will work out well (cherry tomatoes, beans, lettuce), a few veggies I am dubious about (corn, for example), and some flowers from seed that may or may not actually appear.

I’m pretty confident that the stuff that’s hard to kill will do fine, and in a season or two, I am sure it will look lush and far less “new.”  I’ll be curious to see what does or doesn’t make it by August.

Anyway, some thoughts on the term that was, the coming spring, and other things, in no particular order:

• I’ve done more rethinking about 328 in the last two years than I think I did in the first ten years of teaching the class, experimenting with new assignments, changing orders of things, changing from the emuonline CMS to a WordPress-empowered web site– engl328.stevendkrause.com — and I already know about some other changes I will make in the summer term too.  I think that’s been one of the anticipated benefits of bringing in a new guy with new ideas about the course.
• Oh, and I will not be returning to emuonline for a CMS anytime soon.  I might put up some protections on the wordpress installs for 516 and 328 though, particularly 328.  In 516 (that is, “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice”), the openness of the class site worked great because we had about a half-dozen of the authors of articles we were reading stop by and participate in the discussions.  But in 328, I think the publicness of it all kind of scared a few students off.
• The next time I teach 328 (in the summer), I think I am going to have a peer review experience that requires students to get feedback from a reader from outside the class and report back on that experience.  I keep trying to impress upon students the idea that they need to keep that magical audience of a “reader beyond the class” in mind, but it seems like this is very difficult for most of my students to imagine in the abstract.
• It is really interesting to me how radically the “same class” (more or less) can be with different students.  My section of English 328 in the fall term was, to put it charitably, “problematic;” this term, it was great.  As I wrote about here last year, my graduate class last year was not the best, in part because of a rather troublesome exchange I discussed about a year ago here. I mean, I have always known that no two classes are ever the same because of the differences in readings, discussions, assignments, and students.  I guess I’m just struck now how a few really “bad apples” (which I did not have this term) really can make a huge difference for the worse.

Anyway, farewell winter term….