mamamusings

the long road home

We left the beach this morning. The condo’s owner had told us before our trip that the day you leave is always the prettiest day, and it’s so sad. Not so for us. We left in a torrential downpour, so bad we could barely see the road. It made it a lot easier to bid farewell to the beach.

First stop on the drive home was the family farm, which I’ve abandoned for the evening after discovering Eclipse Coffee a charming coffeeshop and bookstore in Montevallo with free wifi! It seems to have a primarily collegiate clientele (University of Montevallo), and it’s pretty entertaining listening to the students complain about homework loads while I work on my syllabi for next week.

Now that MT 3.1 has been released, I’m preparing to put out a 3.1 compatible version of the courseware. If you’d like to use it, you should install 3.1 (the educational license is quite reasonably priced for unlimited sites, or you can do the free version for one site), and then the TypeMover plugin. I’ll distribute the courseware as a single file that can be installed using TypeMover in one easy step, rather than as a bunch of separate template files and instructions for configuration. Yay!

I’ve got a couple of classes running under 3.1 already for this quarter. No big changes in operation just yet, but I expect to release another version later this fall that incorporates more of the nifty features of 3.1, like dynamic templates and subcategories.

As we head north I’ll be posting more pictures, and trying to shift my head back into a more professional and research-focused space. Blogging should pick up by next week. In the meantime, I’ll be seeking out connectivity on the road and checking mail as we go.

good morning

on the road again: alabama to florida

(This was written yesterday morning…)

One night in Birmingham at my stepdaughter’s house, four in Randolph at the Lawley Farm. Now we’re back on the road, headed to a week of relaxation on the beach in Navarre, Florida. The boys are in the back seat, playing Super Smash Brothers Melee (ah, the luxury of a built in video system with hookups for a game console), I’m in the front seat with several fully-charged batteries.

We didn’t have much Internet connectivity on this trip. I was able to check email occasionally on my mother-in-law’s dial-up connection, and last night Gerald and I went to dinner in Montevallo and made a brief stop in the parking lot of a cafe with free wifi. The cafe was closed, but their network was running, so I took advantage of it to grab the developer’s beta version of MT3.1 so I could work on the courseware this week.

While it was nice to see family in Alabama, it was also difficult in some ways. There’s something about being in a parent’s house that brings out the ten-year-old in all of us, and that’s often not a good thing. Being in recovery helped us deal with those stresses much better than we have in the past, however, and unlike our trip two years ago, we’re headed down to the Gulf already in pretty good spirits.

Much as I’d like to spend this next week doing nothing but soaking up sun and salt spray, September’s rapid approach has me thinking about work. I actually had my first teaching nightmare in a long time last night. In it, I watched from my office as my colleague Weez led a masterful class, which ended with the students singing and swaying with her gospel-style. That would have been fine, except the students that went into the classroom after her class sat there for 90 minutes before I realized that I was supposed to be teaching them—I’d somehow confused the times on my schedule, and thought I was teaching at 6 rather than at 4. I rushed into the classroom as they were beginning to leave, most of them angry and demanding refunds of their tuition. Ugh. (Weez thought this was pretty funny when I recounted it to her…I haven’t yet gotten to to that point.)

So there’s a balance to be struck this week. Some rest and relaxation, certainly. But also a gradual ramping up of intellectual activity—work on the grant research, and course prep (not to mention memorization of my teaching schedule!) so that the re-entry shock next week isn’t too great.