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Showing posts from November, 2007

small town hero

I played the role of super hero yesterday, donating a double unit of blood at the blood drive on campus. I even got a t-shirt out of the deal, one that says "I bleed brown and gold," part of the Border War competition between UW and CSU. I suspect the Rams out-donated us this year--the blood techs said they expected about 50 donors on Monday but that only 11 showed up. Turnout seemed to be better when I was there; another 8 people were waiting as I was in the process. The nurse who set me up on the apheresis machine used to live in Sidney; her son was a student of mine when I taught there. And the girl who sat next to me in the waiting area (I was waiting to leave and drinking a juice while she was waiting to get in) has family in Newcastle; one of her relatives (grandma or a great aunt) was a long-term substitute when I was in fourth-grade. I think my regular teacher had broken her hip, so Mrs. Elliot stood in for her while she recovered. Small world, and I like it th

change in the air

I realize that a lot of my posts are about the weather. I mean, they may try to be about more than the weather, but really it boils down to the weather. Snow, fog, falling leaves, the smell of dirt, crisp air, clean sunrise: it's all about the weather. Here comes more of the same. The predicted high for Thanksgiving in Laramie is 29 degrees Fahrenheit. That's roughly 35 degrees cooler than today's high. Walking home from Coal Creek tonight, I can sense the cold front moving in. It means I'll be able to wear my new sweater and my down vest, but otherwise I'm not feeling excited at the prospect of cold. Not this year. In other, unrelated news, I'm trying to decide whether I should make stuffing or my sister's ginger-cranberry salad for the turkey event I'm headed to on Thursday. I was set on stuffing, but now I'm thinking that the salad would be more impressive. I dunno. Maybe I'll just take a store-boughten pumpkin pie. Yeah, I know tha

falling off

Not sure what's been up lately. Haven't had much desire to post. Don't feel like I've got much to say. I got an email the other day about how friends are for "a reason, a season, or a lifetime," and it makes me think. Part of my frustration over the last year has been in hoping I'd find the perfect lifetime set of puzzle pieces: then it would all fit together. Slowly I realize that it doesn't work that way. The puzzle image keeps shifting, and our job is to accept the new pieces that fit the new image. Some parts of the picture may stay the same, but others shift. It's not about trying to find the perfect pieces: it's about trying to fill out the present image as fully as possible. Or something like that. The stupid part is running around looking for pieces to fit a puzzle that's already changed. Tonight I started to shape my own puzzle in some new ways. I think I found a summer job, and a new group to join. Not a bad night'