Gaining Yardage

I think I've mentioned that we're doing some major excavation on our property. Two months ago we hired a local lumberjack to cut down and sell several large trees that were on the verge of falling on our house. It seems the previous owner of our property had clear cut swathes of trees, thus damaging the root system of the very precarious Douglas Firs and hemlocks throughout our land. The thing about the root systems of these trees--they grow laterally as opposed to downward, so they rely on other trees to support them. So with all the damage done from the previous lumber harvest, we had a lot of very tall trees that were in danger of falling on us.

Anyway, we cut down a lot of trees. We had a lot of tree stumps. We hired an excavator to dig up the stumps. Our property looks completely different. I'll give you folks the before and after pictures later, but the excavator has been working on the land for the past few days and it looks like a completely different house. We actually get sunlight shining down on us. That means we can build our vegetable garden and we're quite excited about that, given the price of produce these days.

Now, don't worry . . . we intend to replant over 100 trees (we get them at a cheap rate--a dollar per sapling) in places where we want to build a screen.

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Other things--I'm in a teaching groove now. It's week 6 of the quarter which means we're past the halfway mark, and I've got my lesson plans as well as my teaching schedule well in hand. I still hate the 8AM schedule, but I've adjusted.

The prose poem class that I teach as my multigenre class is quite interesting. I've got a number of students who are particularly resistant to assignments which drives me crazy. For the longest time I couldn't figure out why it drove me crazy, but recently, I think I managed to articulate my displeasure with such resistance during class time. I basically said that they as artists should never be afraid to try things even though they may not get the best writing.

There are always students who are resistant to being taught. That's just a given. And I suppose I should endeavor to take such things less personally.

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I haven't written a damn thing for quite some time. That's okay. I've been busy with this killer schedule and a little boy who likes to say "Clock" and play with large Legos. A little boy who's also learning to say "no." Ruh roh.

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Current Spin: