The game's afoot!

Yes, survived the onslaught of students on our first day back to school after summer vacation, and I'm pretty excited about the year ahead. I think I have some good brains on board, who are curious and interested in things beyond the reach of their own body heat.

They all started blogs today, and reading them, I was struck again by the immediacy of the medium. I really love what the web has done to the world. In so many ways, it enables people to share with each other in such a profound mesh of interrelated threads.

Nightmare - Sleeping with the fishes

My boyfriend is conveniently out of town. It's 1:30 am. I didn't stay up too late. I was sound asleep.

About half an hour ago, the new puppy, who is turning out to be about eighty percent bull dog, miss bowling ball body herself, woke me up. She had to go out. Fine.

I staggered to the door, opened it for her, and she trotted into the night so I figured she was going to uh, how do I put this delicately? Divest herself of some of the vast quantities of pork meat she had consumed yesterday as she ate bone after bone while I tried to get work done in my classroom.

I had given her one bone, but she soon figured out that if she stood on her stubby little hind legs, she could reach the table and drag the bag to where she could reach the remainder of the bones, and I let her because I was desperate to buy enough time to make serious headway before students arrive in less than two weeks. And now she was up in the middle of the night.

I went back to bed, figuring she would soon nudge me, wriggling her whole body with joy at her own wonderfulness and waiting for the indulgent lady elevator to drag her 30+ pounds of plumpitude back up onto the bed, because even though she's capable of jumping onto the bed herself, she prefers to be lifted.

I dozed off, and the oldest dog, Mrs. Beasley, came back from the living room where she had been sleeping and demanded to be let under the covers and into a space wholly taken up by Bunny Shmenkleman, the largest dog. I was in the middle of telling her how unreasonable she was when I remembered that Bosco the puppy hadn't returned, and it was now at least fifteen minutes later. Hmmmmmm.

I flung my tired self out of bed once again, into the garage and to the door. She was quietly sitting there. How odd. She was doing something, and I couldn't see what. I got the flashlight. Wait, what does she have in her mouth? Is it, OOOO NOOOOOOO. A dead.... fish? She's gotten the last one from the little pond? EEEWWWWWWW!!!

She must have sensed my complete inability to cope, because she put IT down and came when I called her. She climbed back into bed and it was then I realized that she STUNK of fish.

And so I'm here, in my office, wide awake, wondering if my boyfriend could possibly fly home and remove whatever it is from the yard and then go back to Savannah? No? Why not? If I go to sleep with miss fishbreath, I'll have to wake up and face the carrion in my back yard. And I don't think I can do that. Really.

So that's the latest from house of dog breath.

OK, I'm really tired, so I'm going to join the snoring one, the huntress who lies dreaming with blood on her snout. This is what I get for living the 'clan of the cave bear' lifestyle, sleeping wedged between three dogs stretched out all over the sandy, furry bed. So much for my inner priss. Goodnight.

at long last links!

Haven't blogged in oh so long for reasons of obsession. Total driven focus on one thing, and one thing only. Not a man, not a dog, a website. Creating a web site. I know, I know, how mis-guided and pathetic.

But wait, the site is really just the manifestation of taking the time at long last, in year seven of teaching design, to take a deep breath and think it all out, plan, strategize, focus every molecule of creativity on coming up with the best ideas and projects and approaches I'm capable of imagining, and then getting it all down on, uh, not paper exactly. Pixels. It's down on pixels. Yeah.

Video production, web design, graphic design, advanced design, and my new class, journalism, aka the school paper.

Like most arty types, I'm good at going with the flow, winging it, being spontaneous. And that was fine for the few kids every year who had that special brand of self-direction and focus that meant they were going to work and do great things no matter what. But for the other ninety percent, I didn't have enough structure. Which meant I couldn't be very demanding of them, since expectations weren't clear, which resulted in a bunch of kids with too much time on their hands, not knowing what to do. But no more.

Without further ado, here it is. Be sure to check out Bean's elements of mastery, and the words page with word O' day. Fun, I hope.

themeanmissbean.com

That's the mean miss bean dot com, for those of you who can't read words when they're all squished together.