It must be spring break because I don’t feel any particular urgency to accomplish despite the fact that I actually do have more needing my attention than I’ll be able to get to in a week, urgency notwithstanding. I blame the Robitussin. All over town I see blooms: tulip trees, pear trees, jasmine. Spring is coming and bring with it the usual allergy and asthma issues. I am in awe of the blooms. I cannot breathe. I take Robitussin, and suddenly hours have passed. I don’t know what they have gone toward, nor what the hours to come will make of themselves. But I feel no urgency, and that is improvement to me.
I know that I am not spending my spring break in Louisville, KY for CCCC. I feel sad about that when I see so many friends posting comments about their presentations. This will be my first time in several years to miss the Cs. I didn’t even propose. I was tired when proposals were due. I’m tired now. My bank account is tired. I’m staying home for a little while, but I do look forward to reading the online reports and reviews from the Conference on College Composition and Communication this week.
Meanwhile, my only known accomplishment of the day is that I’ve figured out how to make the slider thingie work on my Trailing Eudora site. If I figure out even one more thing about how to manage a WordPress site, I’m going to start calling myself an expert, though I do not know what that might mean or what good it might do me. I can say that I’m glad I figured this out before I really had any content on that site. It requires a little extra formatting on posts. You have to use custom fields and thumbnails to make it all work together. The theme I’m using on Writerly Haphazardry also has a the capacity to add fancier layouts and such, but I’ve already added more than 100 posts without making use of all the necessary formatting options. It seems unlikely that I would bother now unless I deleted everything that is already here and started over. There’s always the chance that will happen, but for now I’m just glad I’m learning new tricks on a brand new site.
I probably won’t get very far on Trailing Eudora this week. I need to grade, and I need to write some things I’ve promised to people who believe more wholeheartedly in deadlines than I. A little tweaking here and there is anticipated, however. My main goal is to have the mechanics of how it will be structured all smoothed out and ready to roll by the end of this semester so that I can devote more time in the summer to developing content. I seem to be well on my way.
My other plan is to build a podcast site for composition students. I’ll probably do that one as an add on site to something I already have in place rather than paying to set up a whole new domain, but it’s another thing I want to really flesh out technical details on now so that I can devote myself to developing content over the summer. I’ve been playing with Garage Band lately, and I’ll keep playing with it for the rest of this semester with the idea in mind that I’ll learn how to make more professional podcasts. That way I’ll be more prepared to create a whole site of podcasts for students over the summer.
So there you have my spring break plans. Possibly I’m missing something in the meaning of break.
