I’ve come to realize that this is a vanity blog. That means that I can write about anything I want, when I want. So tonight I am going to write about a garden crap bench I made for my wife.
Tina is a funny sort. She doesn’t care for gardening. But she likes all that crap that people put in their gardens. You know like the little statues and creatures and stuff like that. Garden Crap.
This is the spring ’15 layout of Brayden Garden
So, yesterday I decided to make her some garden crap. Mostly she likes stuff with rust and decaying wood and such. So I took some really old wood and put it together into a little bench.
I see that there is a meeting in Menomonie tomorrow night, and on the agenda is this item:
“High School staffing and Budget including Music possible district program adjustment”
I have to admit that I am not sure what the conversations have been about to this point, but I certainly hope they are not planning on reducing the funding on the music program again. If they are, I hope they will think again. I would like to take tonight’s blog to tell you why.
I have spent the last 7 years teaching and learning at UW-Stout about communications technology and the influence it is having on our cultures, our communities, our lives. There is no doubt that our world is changing, more rapidly now than in recorded history, at least concerning the way that we communicate.
Performing arts help to develop balanced brains.
Because of the rapid changes in technology, there is also a rapid change in the kind of new jobs that are being created. These jobs sit at the crossroads of multiple disciplines that used to be treated separately. Fields like communications, art, design, music, computer science, math, business, languages and others are converging to address the problems of the new world. That is right, I combined math and computer science with art and design. I do so unapologetically.
Music is a form of math
My colleagues and I work really close with industry, and we listen to what they have to say. They are able to see the skills sets that they are going to need long before education can respond to the coming need. And this is what I am seeing.
We have become a society that is really good at producing specialists. We need lots of specialists. Specialists that can tuck right into their left brain or their right brain and think about things that can’t even be conceived by those of us who are not left or right brained, but who manage the world in a more balanced brain manner. We separate our schools into disciplines that don’t allow much cross over, allowing of course for general education credits that are a tip to a well rounded education.
But what I am hearing and seeing is that more and more, the careers that are being created in this technology driven communications world are jobs that require people to think in both sides of their brains. Students who are able to combine analytical and creative thinking are going to have a leg up in the new economy. Technology is not eliminating creative jobs. The one thing that computers cannot do is be creative.
Consistency is the key to developing a strong program
Music, especially in performing it, requires people to cross over between many parts of the brain (see for example Music on the Brain). Performing music is training our brains for the skills we will need in the future.
But when things get tight at the K-12 level, what is always the first thing on the chopping block? Music! And when you really get down to it, music and the arts in general are not very expensive. Especially when you consider the impact of the programs on the schools and our communities. If you don’t believe me, go watch one of the last two shows of “Bye Bye Birdie” at Menomonie High School this Thursday and Friday night. I am not sure how many people are involved in the show, but I know that the cast is approaching 70 students, add a dozen in the pit, and who knows how many technical and support people and you have a significant impact.
But do you know why Director Audric Buhr was able to put together a cast this large? Because music and drama are a consistent part of this school and this community. The key word there is consistent.
The performing arts should not be an easy go to place for cuts to our education system. They should be as important to this community as educating our children in Math and Science, History and English. We should have the same problem in cutting a music program as we would in cutting a science program. Our students deserve no less.
If there is a plan, or a discussion about cutting the music program, please reconsider. This is no time to be cutting the arts from education. I hope the community will join me in voicing support for the arts programs at the Menomonie School District, and any other district that is considering unwise cuts to arts education. Comments welcomed!
This is the day, it must be the day, the day when we can truly hope that spring is here to stay. We can look forward to nice weather from now until next November. Last night I had a heater running in my greenhouse, I unplugged it this morning and don’t plan to plug it back in this season.
I had the greenhouse all buttoned up tight to try to keep the cold at bay for the last week. Today the sun came out in earnest and really started heating it up inside. Think about a car with the windows rolled all the way up. It heats up pretty nicely. On a cold day it is nice to sit inside on a cold sunny day, but on a warm sunny day it gets too hot too fast. That is kind of what my greenhouse is like when it is all buttoned up.
The today swung from 34 to 101 before I opened up the vents. Now it is hanging at 88, a nice green house temperature.
One of the things that you need to think about when you are designing a greenhouse is air circulation. In a low tech greenhouse like mine, that can be a challenge.
Strategically placed folds in plastic allow for strategic ventilation
I use strategically placed folds in the plastic that can either be propped open like in the image above, or held closed with wires and ties that are also seen in the image. There are vents placed to catch breezes from the north, south and west. We seldom get wind from the east on a warm sunny day, so it isn’t necessary to have vents on that side.
This view shows a closer view of the same vent.
In addition to venting out excess heat, this also allows for the introduction of breezes that will prepare the plants for the winds they will face when they are moved out into the garden.
This is the view I can only get from a camera. Looking toward the door from the back vent..
But until that day, they will have to be satisfied with sitting in a warm, sometimes hot, moist greenhouse. They like it like that.
We used to throw a lot of watermelon away. Some of the old ways of cutting the beast left it difficult and messy to eat, and didn’t providing for those time when you just want a little bit of watermelon instead of a whole slice.
I needed something to write about in my blog today, so I am floating up this bit of fluff because I have pictures, and this is the kind of stuff some people like to see on the Internet. So, let’s get started.
I like to use a long sharp knife when I am cutting a watermelon.
Whenever I start to carve a watermelon, I think of my grandfather, Fritz. He had a definite and predictable way of starting the process. The first step is that if there is a stem, it should be cut off. No reason here, just the first part of making sure it is dead. Then, for the next step, you kill it.
The second step requires you stabbing the watermelon to make sure it is dead.
To kill a watermelon, you thrust the knife deep into the heart. Now this is where I break off from the tradition that I was taught. Fritz would always then split the watermelon down the middle and cut out that part right in the middle that has no seeds, he called it the heart. Removing the heart was the last step of killing it, then it was cut into slices with the rind still attached. This method meant that usually the only time watermelon wasn’t wasted was when there were enough people around to eat the whole thing at one sitting.
Cut off the top and the bottom, then the front and the back go give you close to a cube.
We start by cutting off the stem end, then cut off the opposite end. This gives you a melon that is flat on the top and bottom, much easier to work with. This method works best with round watermelons. When you have a elongated melon, cut it in half to give you your first flat edge. The proceed the same as with a round melon. The idea here is to turn the melon into a cube.
Start by Gutting off the stem end and the opposite end to keep it from rolling around.
Once you have cut off all the rinds you will have a cube. By cutting it in this way, you leave very little melon on the rind. You can scoop it out with a spoon or knife if you want, but it is that melon that is so close to the rind that it isn’t that tasty anyway. Not much waste, and what you waste isn’t the lower quality.
The melon cube wastes very little melon by leaving it on the rind and leaves little rind to be trimmed off.
You can trim off the corners and it should leave you will rind-free watermelon. Now you can cut the length and the width, but don’t cut all the way to the bottom, leave the last half inch or inch in tact to hold it all together.
Cut length and width at distances that will make for bite size chunks.
Now turn the melon over on one of the sides and now you can dice the melon into bite size cubes by cutting it across the slices you have already cut.
The last cut crosses the others to give you bite size cubes.
Eat what you want now, and throw the rest in a container with a lid that you can throw in the fridge. Now you always have a tasty and healthy snack just waiting in the fridge for you to eat a healthy option.
When it is cut like this, you can take just what you want, whenever you want.
Put it at the front of the shelf on the fridge so you have to move past it to grab for something else that might be less healthy.
There you go, much less waste because it is easy to eat and you only need to take what you want at the time. Make sure you take the rind out to the compost pile. No sense wasting that, your garden will love it next year.
In my last post, I mentioned how many students were involved with this show. I guessed about 90 people performing, but that leaves out the behind the scenes people doing tech, hair, makeup, costuming and all the rest. Anyway, it takes the entire cast and crew to do a show. This show is well done with the costumes, acting and music. It will be showing tomorrow (Sunday April 26) and then Thursday and Friday evenings at 7:30.
But in this blog post, I want to make some more photos available, and there are even more available on my Flickr page. If you are interested in any of the full sized images I took at the show, they can be downloaded from that location, unedited, many unfocused and in the rawest condition. But I figured with that many cast members, the only place I may have caught them was in an unfocused or poorly shot image. If you or your loved one is in the cast or pit, I hope I caught an image of you.
If you didn’t see your picture here, check out the Flickr page, there are a lot more shots there.
Tonight is the opening night for Menomonie High School’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie”. I went and watched the dress rehearsal last night and there were a couple of things that stand out about this show. The first is pretty typical of shows that you see in Menomonie. The quality of talent in this community is incredible. It is a direct result of a strong arts community that has provided support and opportunities for a number of these youth to be involved in many shows in which they have honed their craft.
Some of the students have been in dozens of shows over the years. My son, Jax (far right) is seen as Mr. MacAfee in this picture. He has been in dozens of shows in Menomonie.
The next thing that stands out is the huge cast. The cast is so big in this show that it is impossible to get them all into a photograph at any time during the show. The picture below is the closest that I was able to come to getting most of the cast in one picture. When they were first cast, there were around 77 students in the cast. That is almost 1 in 10 of the students in the school. Add the pit, the crew and others directly involved in the show and you are pushing up toward 90 people performing. Talk about herding cats!
When you have 10% of the students in a school this big in a production, you are doing something right.
Hat’s off to Audric Buhr for running an incredible program, and to everyone who has encouraged all of these students to be involved over the years.
Menomonie has always been known for the large number of students participating in their sports programs, especially football.
Menomonie has been known as a football town for a long time.
But if this keeps on going like this, we might have to start referring to Menomonie as an Arts town. Those of us who are involved in the arts community have always known it is an arts town, but with the numbers of students who are involved with the spring musical, it may just be time to give the arts equal billing and the credit that is due.
Menomonie has proven that it is cool to be part of the arts.
Alright, that may not be a realistic expectation. But here is a shout out to all the time, committment and dedication by so many to pull this together. And the really cool thing, everybody gets to perform in every show. That is what I am talking about.
Come on out and catch the show this weekend and next.
We have become a world that lusts violence. My oldest son will graduate from college this year, and there has never been a day in his life when we have not been at war. Maybe there was a period when we weren’t technically at war, but we were still bombing and shooting, aiming and killing, occupying the middle east.
We have been a nation of violence for a very long time.
We celebrate killing and embrace putting arms in the hands of people around the world. As best I can figure out, we have armed both sides of every conflict in the middle east for the last generation or two. When we are being shot at, it is often with weapons that we provided to somebody somewhere along the line.
Our leaders vote for military funding increases year after year after year, while denying funding for education, health and general welfare. We continue to make heavy weapons that we could never possibly need, but won’t support funding the infrastructure it would need to move those weapons from point a to point b. http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/09/army-to-congress-thanks-but-no-tanks/
We buy into the notion that we need to need to have the right to carry weapons that honestly have no purpose except to kill a lot of people and kill them fast, but we refuse to accept that the result will be that people die from those weapons. We occupy foreign lands with our military and fail to accept that it is our military presence in foreign lands that is the reason that we have people who want to attack us in our own. We always have a way of justifying our lust of violence by saying that those people are somehow different than us. We use religion and ideology as reasons to kill others, or arm them so they can kill themselves. We spend more money on military spending than the rest of the world combined. Combined!
What we fail to realize is the age old recognition that if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword. The biggest threat to our society is not whoever we choose as our enemy today, it is our idea that we somehow need to be at war with somebody, anybody, everybody. If you step back and really think about it, it should be clear that the path we are on is one that will ultimately lead to our own violent destruction.
I am against every war we are currently involved in, and I am against every war that we will choose to be in for the rest of time.
I didn’t know what I was going to write about tonight, and I try to avoid writing about work, but the way we are pulling off a web conference to get around technical difficulties is too good to pass.
We are doing a web conference with one of our professional content Experts from Thomson-Reuters FindLaw as part of our SEO course. This week, our Lync software was updated to Skype for Business. Along the way, some of the features changed. One of the things that changed is that we lost the option to dial in with a phone number instead of using the web audio.
When our speaker Jonathan Wilson connected, there were network issues that weren’t allowing him to connect with the audio. So, we had to find a solution. Long story short, I connected to the video conference and had Jonathan dial my office phone. As seen in the picture, I then placed my phone on speaker phone and placed my microphone by the speaker phone so we could broadcast his voice to the web conference. No problem.
Kicking it old school to get an analog signal into the digital realm.
Then we had to deal with the deck. Nope, that wasn’t going to work with the technical problems either. So he emailed me his deck and I shared it through my connection. No problem.
If you know Jonathan, he is not a lecturer, he is an interactive communicator. He asks questions and goes off on tangents based upon the topics at hand and does a great job of floating between instruction, entertainment, and conversation. So naturally, he asks the class a question at a point early in the class. One of the students answered his question and you guessed it, Jonathan couldn’t hear him.
Now we are getting into the hang of this, so I gathered up my speaker, placed it in front of the phone mic so that the phone can hear the student speaking over the web conference through my microphone. No problem! All is good.
Well, this is too good not to capture, and I was looking for something to blog about tonight. So, I whipped out my phone and took a picture of the mic, speaker phone and speaker sandwich. Well, I need to get this to a location where I can get the image into my blog, so I uploaded the image to my Google+ Photos folder.
Obviously I couldn’t blog on the computer I was using to do the web conference, so I pulled out my tablet and started blogging. I download the image to my blog and write this blog. No problem.
This is my version of a mash-up between high and not so high tech.
As I am writing this, Jonathan is still teaching. Right now he is talking about the Social links to SEO benefits. By the time he is done, I should have this blog ready to go, and we will share it with the class to maybe get some new first time visitors to my blog. Okay, maybe they aren’t the most targeted visitors to my blog, but I am still small enough that any reader is an ideal reader. 😉
I guess this would be “dark social”.
That is all I have for today, thanks for what you do Jonathan. And if any of the students in the class are reading this, welcome to my blog.
Last minute note, my computer crashed on the next to last slide. Go figure. No Problem!
If there is nothing else you understand about life, you should know that there are places and times when things change. It is in these places and times when you make decisions that will direct you until you reach the next.
At the confluence of two bodies of water, there is a seam that marks the point where the waters begin mixing. Usually there is a clear difference either in water color or temperature when the two first touch and the distinctiveness of this seam fades as the two waters begin to mix. If you ever find this seam, you should fish it, because that is where things are usually happening.
You see the same thing all over nature, seams that mark the change from one thing to another. If you are looking at a field that is returning from farm to forest, there is an area where they meet called “edge”. It is an area of neither field nor forest, and it is the place where life is more diverse, often more abundant and more interesting.
We also have seams in our clothes, you know, those areas where the sewing is done to keep the parts together. How well these seams are done is often the determiner of the quality of the garment. You could probably say that they are what determines if the clothes are going to be a good fit, or not.
In life, we have similar transition points or seams. We have the first day of school, the start of summer vacation, switching from elementary to middle school and then to high school. You know, those transition points when it seams that life is going to turn upside down until we go through it.
As we move toward and through adulthood there are also periods of time when we transition from one phase of life to another. These seams are often turbulent, stress filled times in which we make decisions and changes that could have huge impacts on how we live our lives from that moment forward. Usually there is an increase in responsibility after one of these changes, but sometimes there is a reduction of responsibility. To better understand this, let’s take a look at keys.
Keys are an indicator of how much responsibility we have at any given moment in time.
What exactly is a key. It is a mechanism for controlling who has access to what and in what way. It is the basis for allowing someone access to or use of something. It is the thing that controls the lock. In short, it is an outward sign of responsibility.
In my life, I can look to specific times when the change in keys was highly visible and it related to what was going on in my life at the time. The first marked change was when I graduated from high school. Up until that point in time, I had slowly accumulated keys. I had a key to the house, a key to my car, and maybe a key to a locker. Not a lot of responsibility. Suddenly, I went off to college.
At this point, there was no loss of keys, just a new and rapid accumulation of keys. I had keys to a dorm, and a dorm room. I still had keys to home and car, and even though these keys were seldom used, they still marked a level of responsibility. I suddenly had quite a few keys. When I got a job as a resident assistant, it came with a key to get access to the “jailers key ring”, and that had keys to everything. Everything. There must have been 20 or 30 keys on that key ring, and we would carry that set of keys with us as we made rounds through the dorm. I used to shake the jailer’s ring as I walked so people knew I was coming. I didn’t want to have the responsibility for having to stop someone from doing something stupid, so I let them know I was coming. It was a good arrangement.
Then I graduated college. No dorm keys, no house keys, just one key and that was to my car. I also had no plans, no vision for where I was going and no real need to know what was ahead. I had a year to “kill” while my future wife finished up college and we could start accumulating keys together. Do you see where this is going? More keys, more responsibility, less keys means less responsibility. Later, when you get that apartment key, or that house key that you have to pay the mortgage on, then the responsibility goes up way fast. That house key is a killer load of responsibility.
So let’s go back and take a look at the points when you have the least amount of keys. This is interesting times because freedom from responsibilities means that you have the freedom to make decisions about what you want to do. Just like the animals and fish are drawn to the seams, we are too because that is where opportunities happen. There is a world of opportunity at these times, because you don’t have keys to make decisions for you. The world is your fishbowl just waiting for you to decide what you want to do.
When you first finish high school, you are in one of these magical times. You are faced with a multitude of choices that are seemingly being carried right in front of your face just waiting for you to reach out and grab one. Are you going to travel, get a job, go to college, or just sit around and wait for decisions to be made for you? This is the time to be adventurous, a time to set your path in such a way that you will be able to do interesting things.
If that decision you make is to go to college, you will be blessed with another opportunity to drop off one set of keys and make decisions about what you are going to do with your life before you start adding more keys. I was talking to a person I know professionally last week and he said, “I started to work on the Monday after I graduated. That was the stupidest thing I ever did.” Essentially, what he was saying is that he grabbed a hold of the first thing that floated by and it dragged him immediately into the current and filled his hands with keys. He is now a very successful person, but he never got that time to go out and just move about life unencumbered by keys.
As a college professor, I work daily with young adults (and older adults) who are approaching that magical seam that comes when you graduate from college. Unfortunately, most of them are carrying a heavy debt load from student loans, so the window for them to play within their seam is usually limited to about 6 months. But, when they ask me for my advice, I tell them to take advantage of this time when you are free from the responsibilities that will start making decisions for you. Usually I suggest they travel. Go some place you have never been, see things you won’t get to see and do things you won’t get to do once you have passed through this seam. These are the transitions that allow us to make decisions that can lead us toward exciting lives. They are the chance for us to slip into the current, dance the dance of life and do the things that will carry us through the mundane periods of life between transitions. Many of us don’t take advantage of these opportunities. But we should.
There is one other of these transitions that comes much later in life, that is when we shed our careers and the keys that come with them, and transition into the age of retirement. I haven’t reached that one yet, but you can bet that my wife and I are going to swim into that one with gusto. I have been told that divorce is another one, but I’m not going to get the chance to experience that one.
Then of course, there is the last one when we give up all of our keys and we enter into the biggest seam of all and give up the last of our responsibilities whether we want to or not. I hope that I have the ability to enter that transition knowing that I have done well with everything has come before, and with the peace of knowing I am ready for that transition.
In the mean time, live life the best you can and don’t be afraid to do something big with your transitions.
I bought a boat in 2009, I sold it today for the same price I bought it for. It wasn’t much of a boat when I bought it, it was even less of a boat today.
One of the early pictures when I first got this boat.
I put it out on the front yard on Sunday, and within a couple of hours I had someone at the door. He wanted to see it run before he took it and needed to get the money, so we decided to do the sale today.
I put it on a trickle charger and the battery didn’t take a charge, so I… well, I’ll let the video tell the rest of the story. There is always a way of getting things done.
https://youtu.be/787POYs59uE
Later when I had cleaned up the cables and tightened them back on the battery, it worked to start the engine again so I could show the guy how it ran when he came to pick it up. The boat, she is gone.
