i've been busy...even when i have a week off & stay home, there's never a dull moment. was visited by my daughter & her husband, and she wrote extensively about the experience, so i don't have to. another blogger who can fill you in on it would be my 13-yr.-old son Noah who is learning to walk that fine line between the personal and the public, entertainment & emotional unloading. It gives me nacchus as my relatives would say.

also on the news front:

-am writing my play, which is about conscientious objectors and the lives of lew ayres and ginger rogers....it requires some historical research.

-am making a calendar (annual event)

-the band is heading for the studio. in my opinion it needs a webpage. its new cd (our new cd?)...life goes on...stay posted.

-am mulling over the publishing business...this due to a possible opportunity on the horizon...again, stay posted.

the spirit of christa mcauliffe...

don't know if you remember her, but at one point someone got the idea that what we really needed to do was to put a teacher in space, someone who could tell the rest of us what it was really like, to get out there, and look back, and see the earth.

after a nationwide search, they chose christa, and it was tragic, because they screwed up somewhere along the line, and she died in space along with the other astronauts, in a terrible explosion that left a huge smoky question mark in the sky that was on television for days. but, and i'm not sure when it happened, sometime in that period of time, when they sent so many people to space they could afford to send a non-scientist, i was listening to those scratchy voices coming through the soundwaves, and one of the astronauts had just turned around, looked back, and thought earth was a pretty awesome thing back there, spinning around. and he said so in a way that reached me.

so tonight i went to an online conference, the webheads online convergence, and was going from room to room in cyberspace, where you click on little electronic icon doors and magically appear in some other room which announces your entry to whomever might be virtually present. in one room i found a woman, but she wasn't saying or doing anything, so i left. But in another room they were looking for her and saying she couldn't get in. unfortunately i couldn't remember the way i'd gotten there...

at one presentation everyone was putting things on a mutual whiteboard....colored letters, pictures, words, all at once...meanwhile chat was going on AND people were talking with that same scratchy radio wave voice. and i was thinking, as i scrawled out land-a-linkin on the whiteboard...what a small world.....

so i turn around, and here i am, in a small town, a small room, by a computer that appears to download the whole 'elluminate' program every time i enter one of these virtual rooms...but i feel that sense of connectedness, community. it's awesome...

beginning to collect my thoughts on actualism, but don't know what i'll do with it. what i really want is to sponsor an actualist revival. maybe for its thirtieth anniversary.

i really miss iowa city. i was young, i was an idiot, i was always leaving to hitchhike to mexico or whatever. i always thought of it as a contradiction in terms anyway (i'll get that postcard up here someday)...but now, this studying of these old poets is kind of bringing some of it back.

the good thing about poetry is, you can read it while you're holding a baby. sometimes i get in my '68 truck and think, if this is the only peace & quiet i get in a day, at least it's a kind of poetry. illinois turning to november and then late november all around me. people in a hurry. leaves blown up in the bed of the truck, but carried along in the vacuum as i amble on down the slow lane...they're suspended there, as if it could maybe be november forever. i wish. november is the spiritual journey...even if it is only out to the dog improvement lands...it's the journey back into the winter peace, if nothing else.

put a link to 100 things on my professional website. then noticed (thanks, j-funk, to my chagrin, that dyslexing a single letter, "ceslteachers.blogpsot" instead of "ceslteachers.blogspot", puts one at a religious site. now that's a little strange. do they have ceslteachers at that religious commune??? is blogpsot a word in hebrew??? where are they getting these cool urls??? huh???

it could be one of those mysteries that stays unsolved for a while.

eli made his 100th perler bead shape. got a letter making corey a leverett. older boys and j-funk & the d-man all coming for thanksgiving. welcome home!

vaya con dios...

here's something you might like...100 things to do with a weblog...it's mostly my own. you read about it first here.

performed for the first time on the fiddle, at the old liberty theater in murphysboro illlinois. it was a success. i get nervous, but managed and even came out ok. my new band: parsley & sagebrush. only parsley was there though, sagebrush hurt his back. true story.

getting ready for an online presentation...take a gander at the url.

have rearranged my walks across campus so they go by the japanese garden more...this has caused great curiosity about exactly what all those plants are that are turning colors and blazing around in perfect solitude (an occasional visitor)...it occurs to me that my weblogs are like gardens, in need of constant attention, blazing occasionally, and at other times, like a refuge in a storm.