the little guy, after a morning of swimming hard and practicing his new skill of jumping into the water, fell asleep after lunch, exhausted. it's 105, maybe, outside, has been for a couple of days, and this makes going anywhere difficult, even getting out of this low comfortable chair, directly under a large ceiling fan, in the cool back room, virtually impossible. i have a lot to do, packing mostly, but also updating e pluribus haiku and printing my new book boxcars on walnut (which must come out before i leave carbondale) but instead i'm indulging my ongoing passion for catching wild stuff on my phone and updating it directly. a couple rounds of instagram's yellow sun and hefe function and it's kind of like saturate, you get a wild color and a little black rim around the picture. so i drop this stuff on the boxcars site, also my work blog and even the pop art gallerie. at the same time i'm hauling in old photos from a clunker computer and getting ready to clean out my work computer which i should have said goodbye to on Friday, my last day of work. instead i had a party with workmates, ate carrot cake, reminisced about old times, and shoveled a few more students through the system either passing or failing or some combination of the two. i have a lot to say about work but ima wait 'til the dust clears a little, ima spill it out gently on the work blog, keep this one for purer thoughts like why i'm glad i'm not in northern minnesota now. true, the weather is haywire everywhere, and minnesota is drowning in it, whereas texas is normal or even mild, for whatever that's worth, but my idea is, now's the time, after eighteen years of it, i learned a lot, and being one who puts it all out there, now's the time to do it. the sooner the better. mulling over a lubbock site, which i would call rearview mirror, and which would be anywhere from similar to what the boxcars site is to carbondale, to much more of a useful resource that actually seeks traffic and plays a role in the community. trouble is, i've never even been there yet, so it might not do to just jump in there and start spouting, when i have nothing to say. but that's just a matter of time. i'm collecting resources already, and need a place to put them. texas repubs reject the teaching of critical thinking in the schools. textbook makers put jefferson back in the textbooks. etcetera. at work a huge retirement party was very sweet, but interrupted days and days of going through files and dumping almost everything, taking posters down, etc. and finally i left the place in a mess, hoping somehow to get some boxes of stuff out of there in the 105 degree heat: not going to happen, at least not right away. i'm home, i'm calm, the boy is down, i hope it stays that way, i'm in no special hurry to go out anywhere, everywhere i turn, it's just more packin anyway. my wife brought home a fourth kitty; this one is called 'little bird' for the moment. pictures will follow. i wouldn't mind giving away any of the first three, though the one-eyed sneezer kind of captured my heart, she gets up on my lap every time i have a cup of coffee, never fails to remind me who's loyal to me, who's watching out. even as i sit here, dogs and cats both hang around watchfully. they know someone new is in the house; they await our moves; they don't want us to forget, they knew us when.