facebook

[sanpaku_backup]

- This afternoon I joined Facebook because someone invited me onto it, so now I am friending people I know from here. I never even got around to MySpace, and I must say that I see even less point to Facebook, given that everyone on it has graduation dates in the current decade. Not too many of my dear readers are on it, while just about all of my former high school students are, which is kind of unnerving. Time does hurtle on.

- The Mrs. and Jo are on Long Island, seeing to the horrorshow that my in-laws' life has become, so today was just me and Henry for the first time in a long while. He was really, really good, which is a relief since so much of the past 16 months has been screaming and frustration on his part; I really began to wonder if things would ever even out. But he's really very close to letting go when he walks around the table; he says "b'll! b'll!" when chasing balls around the house (he also knows "up! up!"); he smiles a lot and plays in the sandbox and scoots around at a mile a minute.

- In general this has led to a feeling of things improving, leveling out, getting one's life back, etc. I am happy with a couple of modest projects, mostly related to rebuilding the little outbuilding in the back into a playhouse. The one and only home improvement skill I ever acquired was when I lived rent-free in a former crack house in Baltimore and learned how to reglaze broken windows; happy thing, then, that the house had six broken windows from a neighbor's tree falling on it. These are all reglazed now and Jo and I picked out a nice green for the outside of the shed. This all has to be done very piecemeal, mostly after bedtime when the mosquitos are awful in the garage and in the yard, but it fills a need. (This and the gardening posts really deserve pictures, but somehow I never get around to finding the camera.)

- And there's nothing like a six hour flight with a depleted laptop battery to make one contemplate various untenable and delusional plans. If indeed I don't have any teaching in the fall, I really should use the time to write something Serious. Sometimes the only dignity I feel in having given up on academia is the sense that what I really wanted to do out of it was write, and you don't need to be a professor to write, just have some good research and some motivation and free time. In keeping with this philosophy I've piled up a lot of unanalyzed microfilm copies over the years here and there. So that would be a worthwhile goal.

Yep, all a man needs is a scheme or two in his heart and amnesia regarding his bank account, and all is right with the world.

Comments

[saltbox.livejournal.com]

Yay for schemes! Hey how do I find you on Facebook? I'm actually on there, mostly so that I can stalk my students. Plus I kind of want to make a facebook group to use as a bulletin board for my fall class; if you can't beat them, join them.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

It's my name. I'll look for yours and add ya.

[msmidge.livejournal.com]

Is Facebook basically another Myspace? A place for people with absolutely no sense of design to create something that burns the eyes and ears of anyone who looks at it?

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

I dunno. It seems to have some clever widgets embedded in it. It looks more powerful than MySpace and a shade less given to being turned into a page with backgrounds of rainbows and kittens and with "omg you guys i am so wasted now" as the main content. But only just barely.

[dvandva2.livejournal.com]

"Yep, all a man needs is a scheme or two in his heart and amnesia regarding his bank account, and all is right with the world."

Precisely.

Another alternative is a red guitar, three chords, and the truth.

[librarygrrl.livejournal.com]

I love that you can reglaze windows. Can you repoint brickwork? Say yes and I'll have to think up a nickname for ya, handy!

Please do post pictures.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

You know, Richie said that too, like he was really impressed with me for knowing how to do that, and he built a whole friggin' gazebo last year. But glazing windows is like the easiest thing in the world. Remove broken glass. Buy new pane from the hardware store. Put a little dab of glazing putty around the whole frame with a putty knife. Put glass in frame. Put four glazier's points into the wood to keep the glass in. Use a putty knife to put glazier's putty around the whole frame at an angle like the one on the rest of the window. Paint and wala.

I dunno, I just figure that any home improvement task that can be done successfully from a book can't be all that challenging. I do not even own power tools. I'm just another idiot poking around except for the one thing.