Hey! I'm in
the news..well sort of. I'm the "technician" that Tammy Brown
refers to in the body of the article. I knew fame and glory would make it my
way.

I scratched my cornea
Monday morning in a botched dive for the alarm clock. Ow! Ow! Ow! It hurt –
Big Time. As the Tough Chick that I am, I decided that I really didn’t
need to go to the doctor. I just knew he would put drops in my eye and then
I wouldn’t be able to drive. Plus it is a bit embarrassing to have to
admit that I stuck my own thumb in my eye.

For some reason Little
Jack Horner keeps coming to mind.

Well, finally, the pain (and Lorie) drove me to the doctor. First he laughed,
and then he patched my eye and sent me home to sulk. I’m back at work
today and everything is almost back to normal. I have a little double vision,
everything has a halo, my eye is a bit throbby and red, and I’m light
sensitive. On the plus side I have an excuse to wear my super-cool blue John
Lennon sunglasses inside the office and all typos are forgiven because I am
doing most my work with my eyes closed.

So I was messing around yesterday with Movie Maker, a little program that comes
with XP. The idea is that eventually I'd like my teachers to use this with their
kids. The nature of literacy is changing. Kids today think in moving pictures
as easily as they do words. They live in a world of the visual interface. It
is silly to ignore the influence of visual imagery. The best way to understand
visual imagery and how it can be used to manipulate the viewer is to become
a manufacturer of visual products. Anyway, here
is my first little experiment. Hopefully my technique will improve, I was
just using a 15 second video clip from a Mavica.

Long time, no post...ah well. I’m more likely to post now that no one
checks for updates anymore.

News.. Michael passed his certification
exam last night. He can now officially go into private practice. As much as
social work as a form of public service is valuable, it certainly has a tendency
to chew you up and spit you out. When I think of social work, I always think
of Edward Abbey's description in The
Fool's Progress. In his world, social workers end up drunks or assholes..
or in a lucky few both. Anyway, I hope that Michael can find a happy medium
between serving the needy and serving himself.

Last weekend I went to the funeral
of Mike's grandmother. It is hard to describe what the experience was like.
I went to grieve the loss of a woman I never knew in a fashion that was foreign
to me. During the visitation, I found myself feeling a bit like I was at a party
and the dead woman in the room was a bizarre centerpiece. The funeral was more
somber certainly, but so disjointed from my own world that it could have been
a scene in a movie or act III in a play. The preacher rambled, the bible was
quoted, and a country song about angels was played while family sniffled.

It wasn't until the drive home that I finally felt like I had a chance to honor
this stranger. Mike and I spent the two hour drive back talking about his grandmother.
I may not have known her, but now I can remember her.