so I’ve been spending days trying to figure out how i write. i know that sounds insane, but the thing is that i’m trying to figure out what i do with all these resources and references sitting around—do i have to carry all these books from place to place? do i photocopy the pertinent pages and carry those around? do i scan the pages? do i write out notes? what do i do?

somehow, inexplicably, stupidly, i can’t remember how i write anything that doesn’t just spring from my own whimsy. how did i forget how to write? when i wrote my thesis and papers and such many eons ago, i used notecards. i still have all my notecards ordered and banded together in card boxes. i wrote things out from the books in longhand on the cards. and i remember in some situations i typed the quotations or photocopied them and then taped them onto notecards. then i’d take the note card and arrange them in piles, based on whatever it was they supported or helped with. all that was for secondary stuff i think. i think that the poems or plays or novels that i was working with i just carried with me. i’m a big-time annotater. lots of notes in the book and lists of page numbers on the covers and endpages.

so i’ve been thinking am i supposed to do that? do i copy everything out on notecards? surely that’s insane. first it’s a waste of time cuz everything would need typed eventually, and second, my carpal tunnel would never allow it. i have endnote. i could try to type it all in there, but it doesn’t really seem suited to typing in notes. maybe annotation, but not extensive quotations. i’ve thought about creating a database and typing all my notes in there. creating my own online database. is that really how to do this? i keep wondering too if i can trust my notes. i mean will i catch everything or will i still need to carry all these books around to write.

i feel like i don’t even know how to write anymore and i don’t know when i forgot.

Harry Potter Personality Quiz by Pirate Monkeys Inc.

i am exceptionally tired of crashing my machine with a frozen printer spooler.

just finished a lesson plan on summer reading, which doubles as a lesson plan on persuasive writing.

i must have a zillion things on the desk that i need to get through. feedback would be so much easier if writers were all at the same place. with so many submissions in so many different places in the system, i’m feeling very scattered.

so inspired by my failure to finish things, I finished a list of ten on informative writing prompts and i think i’ve updated my online vita to include everything.

now i get to figure out what they changed in blogger and try to decipher the teeny tiny new fonts they’re labeling things with (someone should have tested this on a mac). at least i have harry potter to keep me company.

well, i gave up on that javascript and turned my attention to coming up with a proposal that will get me to MTU this summer. as a result, i had to look at all the stuff that i’ve started and not managed to finish. i so need to focus. you’d think that i’d manage to finish something.

do you ever go through all those old files you saved from when you were teaching, say, 10 years ago? i was looking for what i thought was a persuasive writing assignment this evening. it turned out to be an analytical/classification paper. what i found was more interesting though. i realized that before i ever knew what things like technological literacy and student-centered pedagogy were i was focusing on them in the classroom. okay, sure, i found some very odd and embarrassing stuff—we all have strange grammar exercises stashed away somewhere don’t we? i’ve managed to save piles of copies of things too. apparently at some point, i thought that i’d use that same peer review sheet or sample essay or invention exercise again; so i saved all the extra copies. going through this pile of stuff, somehow, i still couldn’t part with all the extras (or the grammar exercises). i’m not sure exactly what i need them for, but it feels a bit like an archive that i shouldn’t change. besides there’s proof in there that i knew things before i knew i knew them :)

well, i tried to figure out how to set up my archive links here so that only the four most recent show and you can control the order (most recent first or last). i thought that i followed the instructions on the Blogger archive script generator carefully. the result did create links, but unfortunately, they all read “undefined NaN”—not exactly the result I was hoping for :( Oh well. Maybe someone on techrhet will understand.


today, i edited and coded a readwritethink lesson plan on newspapers and short stories. other than that, i spent time trying to catch up on the odds and ends from being out of the office. and i had to spend some quality time with Stanley. he gets so crabby when he’s left alone in the tank with no human to beg for food. poor fishie.

spent much time reformatting my old vita. came to realize that it hasn’t been updated since 2002 or so. somehow revisions just slipped away as i began having depression problems. as i look at the piece now, i really wonder if anyone cares about all this junk that’s documented—every piece of software, every piece of documentation. it’s interesting to read it all. i find myself discovering work that i did that i had completely forgotten about. i end up wondering too just how much of my work over the last couple of years should be added. should i document all the flash and shockwave files? they’re all published. i’m guessing that i can list all the lesson plans as a group, as i do the tens, and point to the page on readwritethink. i’m wondering too about backups of the RWT work. should i be making my own backups of all those lesson plans so that they can be pointed to later? questions, questions.

despite the fact that i have had some horrible gastrointestinal ailment for the last 36 hours, got all the technotes pulled over, so that they’re part of the site and match. I just hope people still visit the real technotes page so that b/sm stays happy. linked the readwritethink stuff too. still need to update the vita, but no one is really looking at that right now anyway so i’m not worrying about it.

i really like the site. this may be the first time that i was really happy with my site. how sick is it that i want to just sit and look at the pages? it just seems polished and structured in ways that it hasn’t before and i like the colors and bkgd floral bits. sigh. it’s so nice i think i’ll look at it a big longer.