I just wanted to report that Jill just tried to come in the house with a dead mole in her mouth!!! We discussed it, and she spit is out and let me throw it into the woods.... while she was not happy, she seemed to understand that dead moles were best left outside! No pictures although I may try to find it later and post one.... Cheers, john

This and that!

Well - I have been absent. I have been doing work around the house and keeping up with my 63 on-line summer school students...........all day today I communicated, corrected, and created new stuff for my on-line classes......................... Sandy was at the beach with her girl friends for 5 days and while she was gone, I did house/yard work....... I hauled 1600 lbs of dirt, spread it around where it was needed, spread grass seed, and covered it with straw and straw-like roll outs................... here is Jill chilling out on some of my work!!!!!!!!!!!!

The pic is a little fuzzy because of the screen - but, clearly, she is in charge of the new seedlings............... a mother's instinct!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I hope you are all well - God bless you......Remember, take good care of yourself so you can take good care of another... love, john

Around the yard...................

day lily!







Around here these are called red hot poker.....

real name.....Kniphofia Alcazar....

Easy to see why they are called red hot poker!!!!

close up..................well dah?

This is a wild flower called a mullian - I think they are great, Sandy dislikes them a lot. They remind her of tobacco plants and she has had to harvest tobacco in the past...........ugh.

This plant will have a tall spike, yellow, flower later. Mullians are biennials.....they do not bloom the first year; then they bloom the second year and die!!! I am glad I am not biennial!

This is a columbine plant - pretty yellow flowers. I had a hard time buying a plant called columbine..... but I am glad I did!!

That is Jill. she is playing with her rope ball... She gets an A+ for plays well with herself!!!!

That is a butt hole beer can.... How do I know it is a butt hole beer can? Well some butt hole threw it out their window into my yard.......... anyone who throws stuff out of there vehicle window is a butt hole!!!!

Japanese fern.

Strawberry - oops, it is not quite ripe. There were a couple of really ripe strawberries in the garden when I watered yesterday evening, I didn't get them then. I think the rabbits beat me to them, they were gone today!!

Our new grill....................

Remember, take good care of yourself..........so you can take good care of someone else. Peace, john

Howdy everybody - haven't blogged lately because I was getting ready for the start of summer school..... I have two classes and they each run for 8 weeks... both classes have 28 students and they are both on-line courses..... I have been busy the last couple of days answering e-mails and posting lecture notes for the students.

Both of these classes are information systems classes - one is called Management Information Systems and the purpose of this class, a core class in the BBA curriculum, is to expose students to the strategic advantages of using a wide variety of information systems in organizations - the other class is a Management elective and is called Data Management. In that class we discuss using information as on organization asset and we study the relational database approach to the creation of data models in the organization.

Both classes are heavily weighted toward the successful completion of information systems assignments. In the MIS class, 30% of the grade is derived from 13 assignments the rest of the grade is from four exams and participation in on-line discussion forums. In the Data Management class 20% is from an exam and the other 80% is from ACCESS database tutorials, Internet assignments, a database that is the same for everyone, and a database the each student creates to solve some problem that is important to the student.

Summer school moves at an amazing clip. There is almost no chance of getting in trouble by being bored... In fact, it is an exciting time because of the pace.. I cannot afford to get behind in either class. The great thing about on-line classes is that the student is responsible for keeping up with their work without me looking over their shoulder.... no hidden cameras, so to speak.....

My friend Matthew his having his last, prayerfully, chemo therapy treatment this week. My friend Dennis is having his last radiation treatments this week.... Thank you all for all the prayers you have offered for these two wonderful people. May God shine his light upon them and their caregivers...

Well, that's about it for today... no snappy pictures today, just words....

Please, take good care of yourself so you can take good care of someone else. God bless you, john

Ok - here goes.... Give me an H - give me an A - give me a PP - y...... what do you have.... HAPPY.... give me a BIRTH.... give me a DAY..... what do you have.... HAPPY BIRTHDAY.....

Tomorrow is RUTH's birthday

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

RUTH

ain't is great, Ruth is __ __!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ps: she is still younger then I am..

Tennessee Iris!

Three in a row!





Today I went to work for a few hours and then I was off to buy mulch and garden fencing to put on the open part of our deck so that Jill dog could come out and be with us on the deck without being on a rope....

I came home and noticed how pretty the iris plants looked. We got them a few years ago from a lady at our church.


After eating lunch I installed the fence and here it is.













I bought my mulch from Boone's Creek Outdoor Equipment (the SCAG dealer) because they keep it inside and it is always dry when you buy it - I bought 10 bags and as you can see it is still in the truck - It will be in our perennial garden tomorrow...


After I finished the fence I cut the grass and then Jill and I sat on the deck and had a nap!


Here are pictures of a visitor to our garden Sunday morning before church.....
here is a close-up!
and there he goes!!

I hope you had as a good a day as I did- remember, take good care of yourself so you can take good care of someone else... Peace be with you, john

I'm finished with the spring semester 2007....thank God. One week off and summer term begins....hee haa.....

New news about Matthew Fay - check his blog - http://www.mattfay.blogspot.com/

And, keep praying............. thank you all, john

Voice mail from Doc Colyar:

NO ABDOMINAL AORTA ANEURYSM

Praise God!!!

(Actually, praise God was not part of the voice mail!)

Fact is, much of my blog could look like Michael's. Do this, do that, do this, do that, grade, grade, etc. etc. One big difference, he is grading English papers and I am grading information technology assignments.....about 120 of 'em...... Most of my time over the weekend was spent grading. I did take time to cut the grass...... the grass grows regardless of my schedule... In order to stay on the better side of sanity, Sandy left town on Saturday..........she went to Asheville with her long time friend, Alice.... (For those of you that go to our church, Alice is John Sperling's mother - she is a new grandmother, Danielle, John's spouse, had a new little baby last week). I digress. They shopped, I graded..... Made total sense to me. While in Asheville she bought Dennis and I a present..... two bottles of Franziskaner Hefe-Weisse........this is what it says on the label - "The classic naturally cloudy Munich wheat malt. Brewed in full accordance with the Bavarian "Purity Law" of 1516." Are you by any chance wondering about the 1516 purity laws like I am? Well, I am taking those to dinner at Dennis and Marie's home this Saturday and we will drink them. Here is a picture:

Well, there you go.....

In addition to grading and sleeping and eating and mowing, I have taking a little time to hoe the garden - if I had used parallel structure in that sentence, I would have had to have said..."and hoeing." But I was afraid I would have been misunderstood by the morality police.

On Friday, I went and had pictures taken of my abdominal aorta.....ultra sound pictures, that is. In February, while having a health screening, a ultra sound of my abdominal aorta indicated a minimal aneurysm.... (in my mind, there is no such thing as a minimal aneurysm - it is just an aneurysm). Given the fact that my father and uncle had abdominal aorta aneurysms (AAA), my physician, Doc Colyar, thought we should follow-up on that original screening. I will say one thing, or maybe two, the process Friday was much more involved then in February. I had to fast after midnight, nothing by mouth, that included spit, which I had to spit - I'm kidding about the spit. I had to have a low/no fat dinner the night before - I will let that speak for itself..... They were a half hour late taking me back and the technician did a very thorough job, taking pictures for another half hour - she also tried to push the ultra sound gizmo into my abdomen through my belly button - she said she had some bowl that wanted to get in the way - that is no shit, she said that..... when we finished, I went home and ate and had coffee............. and graded papers... Okay, I know nothing.... will probably not know anything until May the 9th when I go see Doc Colyar........... I can eat that morning before my appointment!!

Well, this has been a nice break, and now I will continue grading - it does seem like I am leaving something out of this blog, but I can't think of so............ Remember, take good care of yourself, so you can take good care of someone else. God bless you, john

Hockey is a physically demanding game and like any other sport there are those who would rather do harm than play well.... I was lucky to have played in the no helmet era - no concussions and I didn't loose any teeth. I am quite certain that much of my joint problems are due to he pounding that I received while playing hockey...... so it goes!! After yesterday's blog, I went looking for some proof that I actually did play.... My sister and her family saw me score a goal when we played in Huntsville, AL.......... what fun... so here is the team and here is a picture of me.. the photos, scanned today, may be of poor quality, but I hope you get the picture!!! These were taken in Macon, GA...

When Sandy and I first started dating, I gathered together some pictures of me from different times in my life so she could get to know more about my past... I remember sending these to her and signing the picture of myself in a vain attempt to impress her..... must have worked, she kept me...

More images of a life, my life, will follow now that I found them and scanned them.....

Remember, take good care of yourself so you can take good care of another, peace, john

I am an ice hockey fan - have been so since I was 10 years old and moved from Texas to Michigan and learned to ice skate, while playing hockey, on a stream in Flat Rock or Rock Wood, Michigan that same winter when I went to the two room school in 1953-54. I love it, I loved to play it, I never played on an organized team until the late 1960s after I had moved to Atlanta, GA. There we had a team called the Atlanta Knights. I had the number 27, somebody else already had 9, which was Gordie's number, but 27 is 9 x 3, and I thought that was close enough. We played in towns like Macon, GA and Huntsville, AL and Charlotte, NC - we played in the coliseum in Charlotte and I was crossed checked in front of the goal and broke my tail bone..... it was a long ride home from Charlotte to Atlanta......... shortly after that I started in the PhD program at Georgia State and gave up playing hockey forever. One of the saddest days of my life.

When I was a boy in Detroit, my friends and I rode the bus from where we lived to downtown to the Olympia where the Detroit Red Wings played. We were allowed to enter, without charge, and watch a practice. After the practice, the greatest hockey player to have ever played the game, Gordie Howe, come out of the locker room and chatted us up (that is what the kids today would say - we actually would have said talked to us). It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life and I will never (I hope) forget it. We talked about hockey and our ambitions and he was just a normal guy to us., not a super hero, not too good to talk to kids - Berry Bonds, Kobe Bryant, etc, etc..... We didn't ask for autographs we just enjoyed the moment. And the moment has stayed with me for ever.

Well, I was and am and will always be a Detroit Red Wing fan..... and yesterday they won their first round series with the Calgary Flames..... The Calgary Flames were once the Atlanta Flames and they were the only other NHL hockey team that I had seen play besides the Detroit Red Wings.... but Atlanta was not ready for hockey then and the Flames moved to Calgary...... Now there is the Atlanta Thrashers and they lost in 4 games to the New York Rangers.... HIHO!!!

You can click on this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordie_Howe for some information about Gordie Howe.

So the flames move on to the second round..... Go Red Wings and live on, my memory of Gordie Howe (he is still alive), the greatest hockey player to have ever played the game!!!

And so in a time when we think of the 33 deaths at VT and the thousands of deaths and wounded from an unjust Iraq war, let us think about a man who would take the time to talk to kids and make a lasting impression............. and remember, take good care of yourself, so that you can take good care of someone else, love, john

In class today we were discussing the fact that information technology (IT) has become a basic item of infrastructure like water, and sewer, and telephone. That has not always been the case, but it is true today. Organizations rely on IT to operate in the 21st century..... there are still a few hold outs, but not many. We were talking about safeguarding our IT with things like fire walls, passwords, and virus protection. And I made my standard joke that the fire wall at ETSU used to be called a fire screen door - not a fire wall.

Well, here is my point, and I know it is in poor form to have to tell your readers when you are making a point, but I just did anyway....... The purpose of the university is to foster a learning environment in which there is an open exchange of thought. No locks on our minds and no closed doors to our ideas. No fire walls, just fire screen doors.

While the rest of the world lives behind locked doors, including our church, the university invites visitors to come and go without having ids checked and metal metal detectors at every entrance.

Yesterday the open environment was threatened by someone who must have lost touch with their spiritual compass. No need to relive the facts of the violence that occurred at Virginia Tech University. I watched in silence today as they began the healing process without a word of reprisal or vengeance, but only words of healing and the hope for a return to sanity within their community.

I got up this morning thinking that maybe I had been teaching long enough and that it was time to stop doing it. But I went to class and remembered that teaching in the university is the one place that remains open to thought, difference in opinion, and true hope for the future on the faces of the 20somethings that I am in contact with every day. Why would I want to stop doing that?

So I pray to God and the spirits of the universe to keep our learning environment open so that those yet to come may have a better place to live.

God bless you, john

ALL GONE?

There is a new posting from Nancy, Matthew Fays mom..... Here is the address....

http://www.mattfay.blogspot.com/

Peace, john

SNOW ART...or...BRAIN FART?

SEE? - SNOW!!

While it sticking only on my deck, I am looking out my window at snow...... Not the usual thing to see on April 15............ Keep the home fires burining... I am, Sandy is at a meeting at church!! Peace, john

A recently posted interviw with Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Vs. the !*!@
By Joel Bleifuss, In These Times Posted on February 10, 2003, Printed on April 12, 2007 http://www.alternet.org/story/15098/
In November, Kurt Vonnegut turned 80. He published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952 at the age of 29. Since then he has written 13 others, including Slaughterhouse Five, which stands as one of the pre-eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century.
As war against Iraq looms, I asked Vonnegut to weigh in. Vonnegut is an American socialist in the tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, a fellow Hoosier whom he likes to quote: "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What has changed, and what has remained the same?
One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here. There were already all these games going on when I got here. ... An apt motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or currency or whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball manager Casey Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing professional athletes: "Can't anybody here play this game?"
My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just turned 20, finds herself -- as does George W. Bush, himself a kid -- an heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an AIDS epidemic and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment's notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. And to the choice between liberalism or conservatism and on and on.
What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with our president and Saddam Hussein and on and on, has inherited technologies whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.
Based on what you've read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush's policies and the impending war in Iraq?
That they are nonsense.
My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we've lost reason to hope?
I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka "Christians," and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or "PPs."
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot. The classic medical text on PPs is "The Mask of Sanity " by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.
What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how would you compare the movement against a war in Iraq with the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era?
When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.
And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of grievances, "ain't worth a pitcher of warm spit," as the saying goes.
As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between how the cultural leaders of the past and the cultural leaders of today view their responsibility to society?
Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the Stalinist Soviet Union? What about responsibility to humanity in general? And leaders in what particular cultural activity? I guess you mean the fine arts. I hope you mean the fine arts. ... Anybody practicing the fine art of composing music, no matter how cynical or greedy or scared, still can't help serving all humanity. Music makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up.
But that is the power of ear candy. The creation of such a universal confection for the eye, by means of printed poetry or fiction or history or essays or memoirs and so on, isn't possible. Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author. Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best to seem responsible to small groups or like-minded people somewhere. He or she might as well have given an interview to the editor of a small-circulation publication. Maybe we can talk about the responsibilities to their societies of architects and sculptors and painters another time. And I will say this: TV drama, although not yet classified as fine art, has on occasion performed marvelous services for Americans who want us to be less paranoid, to be fairer and more merciful. M.A.S.H. and Law and Order, to name only two shows, have been stunning masterpieces in that regard.
That said, do you have any ideas for a really scary reality TV show?
"C students from Yale." It would stand your hair on end.
What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today?
Assholes.
Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/15098/
Dianne Gray, LCSW, CEAP Senior Consultant, EAP (800)728-9492, Ext. 8206 Fax # (858)278-8911 Dianne.Gray@Wellpoint.com <mailto:Dianne.Gray@Wellpoint.com> ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Kurt Vonnegut Died Today

I have read all of his book and many of his short stories...

My most favorite author died today and I am sad and there is a very large hole in my life.

God bless his soul, john