Spring Break, Day 5

I still haven't heard from either of the students who didn't turn in a paper.  Argh.

But I've made other progress!


1.  Grade 12 more papers.
2.  Reread Faustus for class on the Monday after break.
3.  Reread Reservation Blues for the Wednesday after break.  (yep, conflicted!)
4.  Reread "Yellow Woman" for the Monday after break.
5.  Write the next assignment sheet for the first year writing class.
6.  Clean up the garage (mostly sweeping at this point).  Move the kayak up out of storage, if I can get some help.
7.  Read Sing for your Life, which a friend lent me.  I wasn't as impressed by the writing as my friend was.
8.  Red up my campus office.  (The clutter bothers me!)
9.  Practice violin every day!
10.  Get out and ride my bike!
11.  Put up art in the living room.
12.  Do some birding!
13.  Start drafting the paper I worked on at the British Library.
14.  Clean up the house as I can (as the painting gets done).
15.  Put fishing line on birdhouses
16.  Cut a branch from one of the pine trees.
17.  Meet with person from the campus teaching center about a project.

I've been slowly reconstituting parts of the house as the paint dries.  I'm loving the colors!

The meeting (17) went well.  

Our campus is doing a three level social justice/inclusivity thing.  The first level was that everyone had to do a PoS stupid computer module thingy.

The second level involves having a variety of workshops and such on different aspects of social justice/inclusivity.  And the third level involves completing ten of those workshops and doing a project over three years.  I've now done five of the workshops, including the first, which I blogged about.  So the meeting was to learn about project ideas.

The person who came to talk with me is a prof from a very different field, but she's good.  So, she showed me some information, and we started talking about ideas, and she wondered about content in my classes, so I explained that I already teach an Intro to Lit course that's all Writers of Color (well, one might not consider herself a person of color, but she'd be thought of that way by most USians).  And I've taught a Critical Race Theory and Early Modern Lit course, and so on.  And she said she thought I was already way ahead of the game.  I think I'm pretty in line with my department colleagues, though.  

Anyway, it turns out the project doesn't have to be massive, so I should be able to do it in a reasonable way.

In sad news, I found a dead female Common Redpoll today.  I was out cleaning up doggy land mines with my neighbors' dog, who is my guest while her family is away, and she sniffed at something in a way that caught my attention, and then decided she wasn't interested, and it was a dead bird.  It was under a tree, so it wasn't a reflective glass collision, I don't think.  But there was nothing obvious, and it wasn't the work of a predator.  So I don't know.  It did make me a bit sad, though.

I've been feeding a lot this winter, mostly because I've got 20-30 Common Redpolls in a mixed flock with some American Goldfinches, and I think, one or two Pine Siskins.  But this bird didn't seem to have that eye problem that House Finches sometimes get.  Or anything else obvious, except that it was dead.  

Speaking of House Finches.  They're back!  I've been seeing a couple visiting the feeder, but not with the mixed flock.  And they're quite a bit bigger, too.  American Robins are way more visible this week, too.