Daily JPG 107

Bug’s-eye view of daffodils on campus.

Daily JPG 106

Once upon a time, there was a school called St. Margaret’s.

Today, over two hundred years later, St. Margaret’s has evolved into Boise State University.

Daily JPG 100

In celebration of my 100th Daily JPG, I give you…

…myself. In class, a while back. Captured via webcam.

Hey, this is kind of fun. Let’s do some more!

Hooray, late nights in the library grading and crap.

Barack does Boise

I was not one of the people who got there at 5 AM, but I did get up at 6 on my Saturday. Why?

We weren’t close enough to get to the rope line…

But we were close enough to make it into this shot, running on the Boston Globe’s website. I’m inside the little red circle, which you won’t be able to see very much unless you zoom in a bit.

This was pretty much an intensely big deal. Before Mitt Romney swung by Boise last June, the area hadn’t seen a visit from a major presidential candidate since the 1970s. Why waste the time and energy coming to Idaho? It’s the reddest of the red states. You kind of understand Romney swinging by; this is, in many ways, Salt Lake North, and he has his fair share of support here. But a Democratic candidate? A rock star candidate like Obama? In Boise?

Then again, Obama has had a very active headquarters and campaign staff in Boise for months now. He’s not giving up on Idaho just because it looks like a foregone conclusion.I’m not going to talk about Obama in this post; I may in a while, though. But there are plenty of people across the country talking about the fact that he took the time out of his busy pre-Super Tuesday schedule to come to Boise State’s campus and talk for a standing-room-only, hundreds-of-people-turned-away-at-the-door crowd.

• Boston Globe
• Baltimore Sun
• Associated Press
• Spokesman Review
• New York Times
• MSNBC (this article’s headline makes us sound like a Communist state… poor copywriting, or just funny?)
• Washington Post
• CNN
• New York Daily News
• Eastern Idaho
• The Oregonian
• Boise, Boise, Boise
• more popping up all the time…

(Just read this: “The Obama campaign organizers are estimating that the crowd reached 14,161 –- which would be a record crowd in the 25-year-old arena.” Damn.)

In Which I Remember to Post About BT20

I just realized that I said something about photos from the Blue Thunder 20-Year Anniversary and Reunion, and then never did even come back and say if it was cool or not.

It was. I’m kind of organizing my thoughts about it, because I’m supposed to write a 200-word article about it for some sort of campus newsletter. As a result, I’m really not sure what to say about it right this moment – other than it was a lot of fun to march again. I’m certainly not inclined to sign up for the 2008 season or anything (I’d almost forgotten how hard it all is!) but it felt great to get to do it again. Five or ten years from now when they have the next reunion will be soon enough for me to get back to it, though, I think.

Anyway, here are a few pictures, to make up for my total lack of anything to say.

In Which We March Again

Today I’m at the 20th Anniversary Reunion of the Blue Thunder Marching Band in conjunction with Boise State’s 75 Year Anniversary and Homecoming. That’s a lot of capital letters. Reunions are generally pretty depressing affairs, if you ask me, but this is being kind of fun if only because I really know relatively few people. Twenty years worth of alumni is a lot of people to not know.

Plus, I get to wear comfortable shoes and – gasp – blue jeans! – which is nice.

There are a lot of cute band babies.

Hopefully today’s game will be more fun than last week’s.

It’s fun to play again, though. Ryan and I are skipping the homecoming parade but we’ll be marching pregame. Hopefully we’ll get some good photos….

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For the win! Someone got to my blog by Googling “kappa kappa psi AEA meaning.” Hey, guess what? You’re not going to find it here. Sorry!(Psst: it’s “American Emu Association.”)

In Which I Bask

It’s Monday afternoon, and I’m sitting in a square of sunlight on the third floor of the beautiful new building on campus. Across from me is Ryan, all dressed up and dapper after an important meeting. I’m out of work at 3 on Mondays, and he had to take the afternoon for the meeting. Now we’ve got the next hour or so just to sit, soak in the sun (in my cold-blooded case) or the air conditioning (in his long-sleeved, walked across campus case), and catch up on things.

It’s really very nice here. There’s a quiet buzz of activity floating up from the first floor, where they’ve got surprisingly good food offerings and a coffee/smoothie stand. The furniture is all adorable, modular, and comfortable; the carpet is relatively inoffensive for what they put on campuses (same as casinos, usually) and there is glass and light everywhere. Ryan and I both are in butter yellow shirts, so we probably look like cutesy twinsies. It’s okay. Everything is kind of warm and lovely right now, and I don’t mind looking goofy.

To my right is a wall of window. A pair of crows just flew by at my eye level, and beneath me the campus is divided up into blocks of green grass and white concrete, big jade trees blotting out expanses of red brick. There aren’t many people down there right now – the next between-class won’t be for another ten minutes or so – but when they come they will come in droves. There are a lot of people on campus these days, the result of normal growth and a post-Fiesta Bowl enrollment boom. Don’t laugh – it really happened. Numbers skyrocketed last January.

Lots of good people-watching here.

This is a good feeling. Sitting here, in this shiny new building (it’s a classroom building, but made to function and feel a lot like a secondary student union) I feel young again, like a sophomore or junior, just starting out on this whole college thing. I’m sitting here with Ryan, and I remember sitting in the SUB planting the seeds of a chapter and – although we didn’t know it – a marriage. Now we’re here on the other side of the equation, and yet there are more seeds, more auspicious beginnings.

There are clouds in the sky, but they are faint and wispy and manageable. The greenness is much closer and more real.

In Which I Update! Eek!

Wow, I can’t believe that I haven’t posted on this blog for twenty days. I guess that’s just a sign of how crazy busy my life has seemed to be in the past few weeks. It’s hard leaving, starting, and getting used to jobs. Band camp is hard, too. So, as it turns out, is “intern teaching” – whatever that’s supposed to mean.

The worst thing is, I have very little to say…

I have the most awful blisters. Yesterday I tried to wear some cute new shoes to school – little orange leather slide-mules. Unfortunately, they made my feet sweat like nobody’s business, and I quickly found I couldn’t walk without stopping every few hundred yards to mop out the inside of the shoes with a paper towel. (Ew.) I guess that probably loosened up my skin just in time for me to put on heels for pregame; half an hour later, I was hurting pretty bad, and knew that blisters were starting. I wasn’t sure what to do, because I knew the orange shoes wouldn’t do much good, either. That’s about the point when I discovered Meredith’s flipflops under my desk and decided that they’d be an improvement. They were, too – all except for the tighter-than-anticipated toe strap, which rubbed oozing bleeding blisters between my toes. By the time I got home, I had silver-dollar-sized, teardrop-shaped blisters on the balls of each foot, and open sores between the big and second toes of each foot to boot. Today, I’m limping around in my plush slippers that – fortunately – actually look like normal shoes at first glance. I’m supposed to go camping tomorrow, and I’m really not sure what I’m going to be able to do other than sit in a camp  and whine. I definitely have to get some better shoes – there’s just no getting around it. No more Payless shoes for me.

You’d think I would have already learned that.

Yesterday was our season opener against Weber State. I’m afraid we beat them pretty badly, and broke one of their players in the process. Well, broke his leg, anyway, which isn’t as bad as it could have been. Unfortunately, the broken-legged football player was apparently scheduled to get married today, so that’s got to really suck. The band looked really good – and really big. Hooray, big band!

Owwww.

I’m not getting any reading, writing, crafting, cleaning, or anything else done.
Bleh.

That’s all for now. Got to go back to work. Smooches!

In Which I Stop and Look Around

Well, today is Tuesday, and Friday is my last day at MotivePower.

Earlier today I got tired of typing out procedures, so I decided to take down photos and posters from my cubicle walls. That, as it turns out, was a mistake. Now I’m sitting here in a depressing gray box, and it makes me feel sad and unwanted – even though I did it to myself. I’m tempted to print out a bunch of pictures of the workplace and put them up, if only to break up the grayness.

On Monday I go back to the band to serve as one of its graduate assistants for one last season. I’m happy and excited, even though I know it won’t be all rainbows and lollipops. (Rainbows and lollipops?! What the heck is that supposed to mean?) I really loved working for the band, and it will be fun to have one more season – particularly when it’s going to be as awesome a season as this one is shaping up to be. The band is going to be enormous, the team is going to kick butt, and – yeah. I’m excited.

(Also excited because my laptop ought to arrive sometime that week! Hurray!)

The following Monday is band camp, and I’m sure that will be an exhausting five days. They’re extending into the evenings two nights – looong days.

And the Monday after that, school starts. I’ll be working at the band office 20 hours a week, observing/student teaching at Capital High School, and taking nine graduate credits: English Teaching: Writing, Literature, and Language (T/Th 4:40-5:55); Teaching Secondary Students with Exceptional Needs (Th 6-9, yikes – Thursdays are going to be rough); and Content Literacy in Secondary School (Mon 6-9). Ryan will be in the Exceptional Needs class with me, which should be a lot of fun, I think.

Come January, I’ll be a full-fledged student teacher, and come May, I’ll be a certified teacher….

Well, I think I’m going to go home now. I’ve got some laundry to hang up (oooh, my aching wrists) and, hopefully, some pointless reading to do.

Creative Juices

Could someone please bring me a creative-juice smoothie?

I have to email a prospectus, so to speak, of my two main bookwork projects to my professor – today, hypothetically. I’m ready to present on my final project plans, but in the meantime we have another book due in April. Basically he handed us a CD full of photographs taken by an itinerant photographer around the turn of the century in northern Idaho, gave us a rough bio of the fellow, and told us to create a book inspired by these items. We can use them, we can depend on them, we can twist them, we can ignore them – as long as we can honestly say “yes, I was inspired by these things, and here is why.” Closer uses of the materials are probably at least somewhat preferred (less explanation). Any ideas?

I thought I had an idea. Then I decided I didn’t like it. Now I wonder. Maybe I should just go with it?

Eek.

Today is not a good day for me to need to spend lots of mental energy planning a bookwork…

To be honest, I also have some qualms about my final project. I’m definitely making the book, but is it going to fly with Tom – particularly considering I have less subject matter than I’d planned? Can I make a final-project length book with five subjects? (Answer: of course. But it’s 7:29 AM, which gives me license to dramatize and fret.) I have a backup final project that I can do if he frowns on my OAL idea, but that will increase my number of publications to three in two months – rough.

There’s probably not a lot anyone can do or say in response to this post, so let’s just leave it at “good morning” and move on…

UPDATE –> I opened my email this morning and had my horoscope waiting for me:

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Flora, a Komodo dragon in a British zoo, recently became pregnant and hatched five babies without ever having had contact with a male. This is the first recorded virgin birth among her species. She’s your power animal for the coming weeks, Sagittarius. Whether you’re female or male, you too now have the power to spawn a beautiful brainchild without being intellectually or emotionally fertilized by anyone. That of course doesn’t mean you should avoid the kind of intimate interactions that would fructify you. On the contrary, I urge you to seek those out in abundance. But my point is that you don’t need them in order to be a fount of creativity.