landed at the paducah (ky) airport on friday night, st. patty's day, a little depressed - had lost my wallet in tampa; it was 40 degrees colder in kentucky/illinois than in florida, and i was back in a kind of isolated part of the country, away from the ebb & flow of the modern world. my green '68 truck made it back home ok, but i got back on the chat with the webheads on sun. morning at the first opportunity - hadn't seen much of them in tampa, actually. the chat was typical - we talked about photo storage on the web, moodles & wikis, a new year in iran, trying to get flash animations to pause (???)...but then two people got on who were actually in paris and were trying to connect with each other in order to meet....as a result, paris-type names were flying about: latin quarter, rueil-malmaison, roissy-rueil, etc. it was mentioned that the students are rioting; students are planning something for thursday; it's quite lively out there, and the words "1968" are being heard frequently.

i thought of my green truck, and then, the fact that, at least in my head, the words "1968" are heard a lot here too. i was encouraged by the feeling of being there, in paris, because, while the rest of us, alone at our computers, had one foot at home (bc canada, carbondale, abu dhabi, nantes, tehran, changsha city china, boston), the other in cyberspace, these two were on the ground, working out a reunion, actually giving us a feeling for the place. a feeling, maybe, that just came mostly from the place names, but an interesting feeling anyway.

then it turns out that the wallet is on its way back, my faith in the good people of tampa/tesol/ramada well-founded, my karma still good, or maybe just the luck of the irish. happy nowrooz (iranian new year) to all, and a good spring too. may the flowers return...and the last cold spell break for good.