Two Out of Three's Not Bad...

I mowed the lower-40 (actually only about half of it, since it's getting dark much sooner these days) tonight. Unlike the last two times, I didn't mow over a bunny rabbit this time. As the corn husker might say, "aw, shucks". We had a great meatloaf for dinner last night... one of the best meatloafs I think I've ever eaten. Great potatoes, homemade creamed spinach, carrots... And tonight, we had breaded pork bites, with broccoli, cauliflower, squash, and a huge Idaho potato baked to perfection. Fantastic meals. Two in a row. And both cooked up by the Bopnopper. Bry's company got their loan so they're afloat for awhile. Er, I guess airborne would be a better metaphor. Sounds like he got tapped as the company's shop steward (their pilots are Teamsters, not ALPA or APA). Huge job for a young 22-year-old. I guess it says a lot about how much he's looked up to by his peers. I had a nice phone call to Lint Monkey, too. She's happy, and healthy. I caught a rumor that the Big Al may be home for a couple of days shortly. Niiiiice. I'm staying busy, busy, busy. Haven't had time to even post, let alone go walking in the mountains. I've got over a hundred students this semester. Plus I'm faculty senator, on the MBA policy committee, and just was appointed to the D.A.P. Committee. And I'm in charge of our Academic Program Review, which hopefully will culminate in an external review team visit in a couple of weeks.

My Grandpa's Hat

One of the things I remember best about my Grandpa (whom we called "Paw"), was his hat. Any time he left the house, regardless of the reason, he always wore his hat. It was a distinctive hat, soft felt, and looked good on him. I especially remember the Bailey logo on the hatband, because it was cursive, and I was learning to print at the time I noticed it.

This picture was taken when I was about six months old. That's me on the left, in the arms of my Grandma (Maw-maw), and my cousin Mike on the right being held by Paw. And Paw is wearing his hat. Well.... Dubby dragged me into this store in Williamsburg yesterday, and *surprise*, there was Paw's hat! The exact style, shape, hatband, everything! And it even had the Bailey signature inside! I couldn't resist.

I'm still keeping my eyes open for my other GrandDaddy's hat. My other grandpa wore a hat too, although it was quite different. It was also quite distinctive: gray straw, with a little tiny red feather in the hatband.

By the way, my grandparents were always *really, really old* from the time I can first remember. I mean ancient. . Elderly. Looking at the picture above, you can see how old they were. But when I consider the date, in that photo Paw was only nine (9) years older than I am now! And Maw-maw was only six years older than I am now! Ummm.... I guess that makes me.....

Benjamin Franklin's Glass Armonica

No, you didn't miss the "h"... there is no "h". It's Armonica, not Harmonica. Around 1750, Ben Franklin went to Europe and saw a musician playing music on glasses filled with water by rubbing his hands around the rims. That assembly was called a "glass harmonica". Ol' Ben got an idea. He contacted an American glassmaker, and had a set of glasses manufactured, each one a different diameter, and each with a hole in the bottom. He then strung the holes on a long pole using cork to hold them in place, and mounted the spindle horizontally and spun it using a treadle. See the photo below. He called his invention "the glass armonica". Although quite popular in the late 1700's, the musical instrument had disappeared by 1820. It was re-discovered in the 1930's and a few were actually constructed. There are only a dozen or so players around the world today. At Colonial Williamsburg today, we saw a professional musician Dean Shostak playing one. He plays numerous instruments including the violin. He also plays a set of musical glasses mounted on a piano sounding board, a set of glass handbells, glass rods, and other glass instruments. He calls himself a glass musician. A prominent Japanses glass company found out about his "glass musician" status as well as his violin ability, and manufactured for him a glass violin. Shostak also played the Baschet. (See the Wikipedia entry on the French Baschet Brothers for another picture of the Baschet! Talk about an unusual sound! The concert was only 7 bucks, but it was worth several times that. The music was great! The Armonica sounds heavenly, and this fellow was a master musician on it. The chords, harmony, resonance, timbre, and tonal depth were indescribably pretty. He played everything from Fur Elise to Danny Boy, from Amazing Grace to America the Beautiful. He also played several pieces written just for the Armonica by Mozart, Carl Philip Emanual Bach, Richard Strauss, and even Beethoven!

Yes, Yet Another One This Morning...

It's obviously a good year for possums. And a not-so-good one for rabbits (see post below).

Hare-Brained ... and totally unbelievable!

I've wondered where the term "hare-brained" came from. Now I know. It happened night-before-last. I was mowing the grass in the lower-40 (the field out behind our back-yard). It's been raining the past few days, and the grass is nice, lush, and thick. I haven't mowed back there in several weeks, so the grass is fairly high, and it was slow going. Now, from a rabbit's point of view, I would think that a human mowing grass would be a scary apparition. My mower is a lawn tractor. It's made by Husqvarna, and is painted bright orange. It has a 15-hp Briggs and Stratton on it which makes one whole-heap heckuva lotta noise when it's running. In fact, I've often thought that perhaps I should be wearing hearing protection when I mow the grass, as my neighbors both do when they ride their lawn tractors. And in addition to being loud, the thing vibrates the ground as it rumbles across the yard. And the spinning blades vibrate the air, like the chop-chop-chop of a helicopter. And to top it off, I was mowing at the end of the day, right at dusk, so I had turned on the headlights. So visualize this: Here's this huge, orange, vibrating, rumbling, light-bearing, deafening monster out in the grassy field right after sunset, wreaking havoc on the grassy meadow. I'm mowing merrily along, and come across this family of rabbits. They are eating grass, and as I get near, they stop eating and watch me out of the corner of their eyes. They aren't looking straight at me, but I can tell that they see me, because they all stop what they are doing and just sit there. They don't move, as I on my loud, bright, noisy mower get closer and closer and closer. Now, if I were a rabbit, and had half a brain, I would take off like a ... jackrabbit. And more importantly, I would run... AWAY... from the noisy, vibrating, huge, lit-up thing that was devastating the grassy meadow. The key words here are, "run", "away", and "from". So what do these rabbits do? They all just sit there as I approach, until I get within about eight feet of them! I don't know, maybe they are busy soiling their underwear or something. They just sit there looking off into space! It's not like they can't hear me ... their ears are half the size of their body! And it's not like they can't see me... I've got the darn headlights on! And I'm sure as heck vibrating the ground! The crickets and grasshoppers have all been hopping out in front of me all evening! So when I get within about eight feet from these rabbits, suddenly, the big one jumps, almost straight up in the air about three feet, comes back down, and takes off like a shot, but ricocheting around. He moves two feet to the north, two feet to the west, two feet back to the east, two feet to the south, two feet back to the north, taking one leap in each direction, and he's moving at full throttle so he makes about ten direction changes in the space of about a quarter-of-a-second! And the other, littler, rabbits, take off too, and they too run full throttle and they too change direction with every single step or bound. It's sheer pandemonium, and at the end of the first half-second, the rabbits are ALL right back within the same three-foot circle they started in! But by now, the lawn tractor has now moved about four feet closer, and I'm about to run over them in the next half-second. And they keep on with the confused running around, until finally they all scatter and take off in different directions, and, get this! I'm not joking and I'm not making this up (and I've got the evidence out there in the lower-40 to prove it!)... one of the little ones runs STRAIGHT for the lawn tractor, and before I can even step on the brake, runs (!) right between the front wheels of the tractor, apparently trying to take cover UNDERNEATH the mower deck! Unbelieveable! This rabbit runs right underneath the deafening engine, between two rolling wheels, and squeezes under the one-inch opening between the mower deck and the ground, right into an area which is emanating rumbling vibrations and spitting out chewed up grass clippings! Unbelievable! I don't have time to react. I watch in disbelief for the tenth-of-a-second it took to happen, as this little bunny disappears into the sliver of darkness and ... --- ... thump-thump-thump. This makes the tractor two for two its quest for eating bunny rabbits this month. Unlike the last one, where the tractor went over a rabbit hole and the hapless thumper apparently decided to poke his head out to see what all the ruckus was about, this one is a prime example of those "what in the world was he thinking?" moments. The mower is positively deafening, it's moving, it has two bright scary lights, it appears to be in attack mode, it is ridden by a freaky-looking gray-haired pot-bellied hunched-over dirty dusty human whose pants have ridden up his legs exposing the hairy shins above his socks, the contraption is shaking the ground and vibrating the air, and is coming right at him, so to get away this hare-brained hare decides to run ... UNDER IT?!? Anyway, this makes two rabbits in the past two weeks. I've heard of being as crazy as a March hare... I guess it also goes for September hares, too. In deference to Dubby's sensitivities, I refrain from posting a picture.

New Semester

Second week of classes... Going well so far. Once again I've played the part of the pushover pansy, and let far more students into my class than my boss requires of me. My department chair capped my classes at 30, which is the department standard teaching load. But since I'm in a classroom with 44 chairs, I gave out overrides to students who begged me to let them in. Consequently, I now have 44 students in one class, and 43 in another. Since it's primarily a lecture course, I figured the education quality isn't suffering too much. But I give 12 quizzes and 4 examinations during the semester, so the grading load is going to be quite heavy. In addition to the 87 students in two sections of that course, I have another 26 students in a graduate course, even though there are only 24 seats in that room. Actually, this third course is taught in a conference room, and there are 24 seats around the table and six more in the back of the room at an auxiliary table. So technically, everyone can sit down, but two students will always have to be at the back table. I asked the students if this was okay, and everyone said yeah, they'd take turns at the back table, since everyone wants to be in the class. I've already given a quiz in all three classes (the two undergraduate classes have had two quizzes already), and the scores are coming out about average (the mean of both undergrad sections was around 70%, which is about where the first quizzes usually come out... although they creep up to about 75 to 78% by the end of the semester -- a lot of the D and F students wise up and drop). This week has been full of meetings. Lots of church meetings on Sunday, although I have no idea why I'm in most of them.... and... --- Oh, my branch clerk financial audit went great, by the way. My books were perfectly clean except for the stinkin' problem that SLC HQ refuses to clear up on their end! A full year we've been working on this trying to get them to correct their error, and still it's not fixed! Maybe my letter will work... my branch president, who I sent a copy of the letter, says he's never seen anyone threaten Salt Lake HQ before! My stake clerk, on the other hand, told me he was glad someone finally had the guts to write what I did, and maybe this type of harsh (polite, but, uh, straightforward) wake-up call will do the trick and get someone out there to get off their duff and fix the mistake.) Okay, back to all the meetings. Meetings, meetings, meetings. Staunton ham radio club meeting Tuesday night, Faculty senate meeting Wednesday (yes, I was elected our department's senator for this year), Harrisonburg ham radio club meeting Thursday, faculty Promotion and Tenure Committee meeting and curriculum study committee meetings today... and next week's calendar is already full of meetings, too: nomination committee meeting, faculty position search committee meeting, instructional technology steering committee meeting, two training seminars, ham radio club Board of Directors meeting, ... Good Golly Molly. Notice that "meetings" are on my list of things that irk me, over to the right of my posts! The ham radio operators in Virginia are in standby mode. The remnants of Hurricane Fay are supposed to cause rain around here, but I personally think they are full of beans, to use a Dubbyism. We're making sure our batteries are charged and our go-boxes are ready for deployment. I hope we don't get a lot of rain. I hate bailing out my garage out back.

An Opossum, Not a Possum

Trivia Question: What's the difference between a Possum and an Opossum? Answer (mainly for the benefit of the Computer Repairperson, who detests Trivia Questions almost as much as I detest groundhogs and blankety-blank rabbits): The Opossum is the North American marsupial, order Deldimorphia. By contrast, the o-less term Possum denotes the animals native to Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand, order Diprotodontia, which includes the sugar gliders, ringtails, and cuscus, and other Phalangeriforms. Next question: Did I know this, or did I look it up? Answer: I didn't know it until I looked it up. The above picture is my latest Opossum. The Bopnopper and I took this young one out to the Madison Run Wilderness area last night. Bopnopper held the flashlight while I unlocked the cage, and we watched as he skedaddled down the bank to the rushing mountain stream which is flowing again from the recent rains which constituted the remnant of Hurricane Fay. I decided against posting a picture of my most recent blankety-blank rabbit. I was mowing the yard, and as I ran the tractor over a rabbit hole out in the tall grass of the lower-forty, I heard a "thump" under the mower deck. Perhaps this is where Disney got the name "Thumper" for his rabbit in the Bambi movie. Anyway, I decided against posting a picture of this Thumper, for reasons which should be obvious. Let's just say that I'm happy to save a little bit of gasoline because I won't have to take this one over to the meadow by the park. One down, about twenty left to go, I'd guess...