Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
Welcome to this, the new and all-in-one Krause blog. Steven D. Krause’s Official Blog readers, meet Steve Krause’s Unofficial Blog; SKUB, this is SDKOB. All one big and happy family/identity.
What is this and why now? Well…
Continue reading “Welcome to stevendkrause.com (or should I say, Krause 2.0?)”
Makes some pretty good points, but in the end, I couldn’t justify the effort it would take to participate in the daily KOS’ campaign. Besides the fact that I have a hard time getting fired up to go through the whole primary voting rig-a-ma-roll for what amounts to a practical joke, I am a little worried that this little joke (ha-ha– let’s vote for Romney) will lead to nominee Romney and then president Romney. As Jack “who?” Lessenberry said/wrote, the last time Michganders did that, they voted for Reagan. And that turned out freakin’ hilarious, didn’t it?
I know that this has been posted on a lot of places, but I still enjoy it:
As I noticed in today’s Ann Arbor News, an employee at the Ann Arbor Whole Foods store (aka, the Food (W)Hole) was fired for grabbing a “customer.” See the story here, but the brief version (as I understand it) is pretty simple: John Schultz, who was a fish monger at the ‘hole until all this, checked out of work and helped grab a dude who everyone agrees had shoplifted hundreds of dollars worth of stuff from the store. Some time shortly after this, Schultz was fired for violating a company policy on touching customers.
A few thoughts on this:
Best of luck to John et al.
Normally, Christmas is an “every other year” thing with different sets of parents: one year we go to Iowa, the next year we go to Florida. But because of the way the holiday fell this year, because we decided to celebrate Krause Christmas the weekend before the actual day itself (a good time was had by one and all, btw), and because we don’t start school at EMU again until January 7, we decided to double-dip with family visits. So we flew down to Southwest Florida Christmas day, and we’re leaving New Year’s Eve day.
Florida is always a strange place to visit for me, and the holidaze time is not much different. It’s nice to be sitting by the pool and enjoying sunny weather in the low 80s, but it is strange nonetheless. It’s a lot more crowded than I remember this time of year, too.
Anyway, one of the highlights of the trip has been the visit to Everglades National Park and the Shark Valley Trail. Basically, it’s a paved road that goes out into the swamp 7 miles to an observation tower. You can get out there by tram, but, as the video above documents, we rented bikes (well, Bill and Irmgard brought their own and one for Will). The video doesn’t do complete justice because there were a ton of birds, quite a few big turtles, and many many more alligators. From the observation tower, we saw some giant crane kind of bird swim under water, catch a big fish, and gulp ’em down. Pretty neat stuff, though I cannot imagine how awful it would be to be out here in the summer.
Tonight Annette and I are going out to see Sweeney Todd and out for a fancy dinner. Tomorrow, we’re going to the beach. Monday, we’re going home. And in-between all this, I’m trying to get my ducks in a row for Winter term.
I found this via boing-boing: it turns out that while Martha Stewart was in prison, she made a really kick-ass nativity scene in ceramics class (session? time?). I would include the video here if I knew how; but just follow this link and deal with the first few minutes of introductions to get to the bit about prison pottery.
MY millions of loyal readers will recall that I said I wasn’t going to post until after the Christmas season, kind of in an effort to get away from teh Internets for a while. You can tell how well that’s worked out. Jeesh. Actually, the only reason I’m posting now is to procrastinate a bit and to post this video I made with my cell phone:
Annette and I were in a drug store and they had a row of all of these reindeer things that rocked in rocking chairs while singing “Grandma Got Ran Over By a Reindeer.” Naturally, I had to push the button to make all of them work. You can imagine how proud Annette was. As you can see, I recorded it with my lame cell phone video camera; rotate your monitor 90 degrees clockwise of optimal viewing.
Other Iowa travel news:
Anyway, back to reading and chasing after kiddies. Enjoy the reindeer over and over again.
We’re getting ready to do the family holiday thing around here (first to Iowa, then to Florida– an unusual “duel parental visit” Christmas season trip), and I’ve decided more or less on the spur of the moment to not take my computer. I’ll probably borrow Annette’s to check my email a couple of times in the next two weeks, but that’ll be about it. I dunno, I kind of feel like it might do me some good to have some computer “away time,” and I have a bunch of reading (both school and for fun) that I want to do, and I’m afraid that if I take my computer, then what I’ll do is pick at that instead.
But not to leave my millions of regular readers in the lurch, I thought I’d share with you a bery strange movie trailer I came across, Fiend of Dope Island:
It is completely apropos of nothing in my life, but man, this movie appears to have it all: drugs, sex, tropical climes, and Yugoslavian bombshells. Here’s what IMDB had to say. If anyone sees it over the holiday, let me know. See y’all next year.
Today was a snow day for pretty much every school in Southeast Michigan following the biggest snowstorm we’ve had around here in a number of years. Frankly, I thought the snow day thing was very unnecessary, at least in Ypsilanti. Sunday was pretty bad, but by last night, everything seemed pretty much plowed to me. I think what really happened here is that collectively and spontaneously, all of the school districts in the area decided that this was going to be the one and only legitimate chance to get a snow day yet this calendar year and they took it, necessary or not.
Anyway, the unnecessary snow day gave us the chance to go sledding– or rather, for Will, Costas, Rachel, Eli, Celia, and other various kids went sledding while I stood on the side of the hill behind Ypsilanti High School drinking coffee and recording with the trusty FlipVideo camera. Here’s the result:
A good time for one and all; besides the coffee, I (and Will and Costas) enjoyed some excellent hot chocolate afterwards. I even found some marshmallows that weren’t stale.