A Leap Day Update

Can't believe it's been over a month since I updated. I knew I was letting the blog slide, but the guilt stings a little more after seeing the numbers. At least I didn't let an entire month lapse (thanks to a quadrennial calendar quirk).

As I said in a Twitter note, I've been super busy, mostly because I'm launching a couple of new courses and needing to make a lot of midstream adjustments. But I'm having fun with them, most of the time. The best experience has been a writing class pairing my students with some kids from an inner city high school to survey some residents of their neighborhood and prepare a report of their findings to a community service agency. Here is one team (some of my students on the left side of the desk, the high schoolers on the right), banging out a draft:


Most of my students came away from the experience feeling it had left some mark on them. One said he hadn't realized his studies could make a difference in the real world; several got their first exposure to the inner city, and felt anywhere between suprised to dumfounded by the differences between "how we live and how they live down there," as one put it. Many were also impressed by the determination by people in that community to improve conditions there. As am I. I hope to make this project (a collaboration with a community foundation) a long term venture.

Other than that...we've been riding wild swings of weather here, with stretches of frigid weather broken by irruptions of April. After one sudden thaw, I went to take some pictures of swollen rivers to show my students next fall exactly how a floodplain works. Here's the Ottawa River outside Toledo, OH where it meanders through a local metropark. The river is ordinarily forty feed wide here:



Kristine and I went cross country skiing near Grayling a couple of weeks ago and got smacked by both ends of a weather shift. Saturday morning the temperature was near O (F); we had a fine, cold sunny afternoon of skiing with temps peaking near 20. An overnight warmup was expected with freezing rain by late the next morning. We planned to rise early for a last ski, but opened the motel door to see our car already covered with half an inch of ice. We got breakfast, then hit I-75 to inch home with a train of disappointed snowmobilers.

We're going north again this weekend to ski near Tawas City. The forecast looks similar, but the ice shouldn't hit until at least 11am Sunday. If weatherunderground.com was wrong about that, I'm suing.