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I’m the sort of sick that is not sick enough to sleep for 20 hours straight, but sick enough to not be good for much. I’m grateful not to be sicker, but tired of wandering if I'm not simply lazy. 5 minutes of attempting to do something convinces me otherwise, but then I forget.

But still, I’m not too ill to click around the Internets and put up a post. Jenny and I have been plotting photographically for awhile and today we launched Monday / Thursday, a twice-weekly photoblog of diptychs. We each pick one theme per week, shoot, and don't show each other the results until they’re diptyched. It’s partly inspired by 3191, which is far more hardcore since Stephanie and Mav post everyday with only the most general of themes (mornings for the first year, evenings for the second).

The first set is up, and is pleasantly surprising in its synchronicity. I shot my half in 10 minutes yesterday evening after a most unplayful workday. I’m looking forward to the next year of this, both for the reminder to play and for the mystery.

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(via Rocketboom)

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Puttanesca, salad with purple carrots, and an array of vegan deserts. With plenty of red, red wine. And excellent friends.

The resulting Wine and Chocolate Flipbook, shot by all of us with G's camera and featuring a smiling, happy M, is here.

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Funny how your definition of ‘nice weather’ ends up being so contextual. Back home, the crocuses and daffodils are up and the garden shows are in full swing, with bands of merry horticulturists rubbing their hands together in anticipation of planting in early April. Here, we're very happy that it looks like this:

Which means it’s as much as 60 degrees warmer than it was last week, depending on how you're counting. So we’ve all completely changed our wardrobes (from the Negatives Getup to the Dude, Above 20 Means Shorts attire), poked our heads out of our caves, and begun to congregate and remark upon the fact that spring is definitely coming, yes it is. I put on my yellow coat yesterday and reveled in my walk to an afternoon lecture, glove-less and happily stomping on slush that was decidedly not treacherous. Afterwards, I snapped photos all the way back to the parking garage and then drove home through the twilight with the Owls’ “Bury Your Mind” on a loop, intent on getting home ahead of my guest to throw the pot of soup on the stove to heat.

We poured wine and told each other that yes, spring was definitely coming. You can tell with these beautiful days, you know. The weather prophet is similarly excited, forecasting a beautiful, sunny weekend with highs in the 30s. The 30s! These concepts get Twin Citians very excited, especially after a particularly brutal winter, and we do such things as head out to play baseball on the frozen lakes.

Because really, yes. The winds have changed and you can feel the future in them, but the landscape still looks like this. The difference, for us? You can totally see all of the benches now, because they're not half-covered with snow.

We don’t care, it’s a start. Never mind the brutal, sneaky springs, the famous March Mess that is to come.

All we need is the light at the end of the tunnel. And actually, some of us like it just fine right now, right here, where it’s warm enough for the yellow coat and cold enough to keep the promise of snow and prevent the pollen from descending upon us. This stage is pretty fine.

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I’m still totally in love with this place and I still heart the winters, but good God February is a month that gets to you. It’s a month of same same sameness, every day the freakin’ same, and this year we get an extra day of it. Like, this episode of Dude Weather is from the 12th, but it really doesn’t matter one tiny bit that I’m posting it today.

I see from the Archives of Oblivion that about this time last year I was also posting maudlin entries. But hark! The one I was really thinking of is dated March 6! Because there are two more months of winter left in these parts. At least. (Alumni: remember that one time we tried to take a department photo in May and it all of a sudden snowed on us? Yeah. Crazy times.)

There better be snow, that’s all I can say. Fluffy white snow and penguins. And forced bulbs. And fondue.

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I knew from the outset that 2008 would take a toll, but it’s already outdone itself. It’s what, less than seven weeks in, and so far: my grandpa has died, leaving the rest of us to sort out the rather complicated emotional relationships he formed; my MIL has been in the hospital and is entering a transitional time in her health and living arrangements, resulting in some necessary Inordinately Grownup Activities for Mister Husband; a dear grad school friend was teaching in the building next to the one where the NIU shootings occurred; and a lovely old blog friend has been laid off in a rather awful way. So have two of my very smart nontrad students.

And while clearly the world is not all about me and my petty work issues, the fact that I am evidently dissertating ADD-stylee is also a factor for me. I am under the (probably mistaken) impression that Certain Other People begin at the beginning of these things, go on until the end, and then stop. I, on the other hand, have parts of every chapter and am always and forever filling in the blanks, or piecing my quilt together, or whatever metaphor works on whatever day. Maddening.

There are still good things, of course. 2008 has also been kind enough to dump some exciting professional opportunities on my doorstep along with all this other grownupness. Most of the friends and family are really doing quite well. My two Internet nieces appear to be lovely and smart — certainly the loveliest, smartest babies on Flickr. The world remains full of curiosities. New snow keeps falling with some regularity. I have a new plant, and one of the old ones I butchered and repotted is finally recovering. We in this house have discovered cheese fondue and watched a long string of excellent movies. Good people abound in the world, and I am honored to have so many of them in my life.

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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Useful for teaching verbal delivery, no? (via Infocult.)

Swiftly updated to include: Walken reads The Three Little Pigs whilst wearing a truly terrifying sweater. Quite curious. I cannot decide if it succeeds.

And what the hell — I’ll never tire of the Weapon of Choice video, no matter how many years pass.

Update, 2/17/08: Walken is Hasty Pudding Man of the Year. (Very important photo in that link, btw.)

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Wee bit of flare at the bottom, but it's Day Eleventy of Too Damn Cold and I am all, "Macros ahoy!" So there.

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is all-day-dinner-on-the-grounds at the UMN Networks and Neighborhoods in Cyberspace Symposium. The ongoing diss research will be among the demonstrations — and I get to finally meet Momo. (We might have met years ago, actually, but neither of us were paying sufficient attention so that one doesn't count.) There will be all sorts of fascinating Internet researchers from around the U there as well, including our local famous atheist, PZ Meyers. I don't see how it could be anything but a good time.

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I've been a long-time skeptic of Twitter's utility, but after watching Jenny use it so successfully in the workplace, I decided to incorporate it into my spring design for Emerging Tech in STC.

The course is completely online, and we’re using Moodle rather than Blackboard. (Shout out to UMN for giving us a choice and equally supporting both.) Since we're going to be working in an intensely collaborative environment and doing real-time editing of each other's writing once we get down to wiki-ing, I wanted to devote more time than usual to building community — while still continuing to explore at least one new app each week. Community is often such a problem in online courses with no f2f meetings, which is why I always spend so much time on introductions during the first week. Still, one-time intros only do so much.

Last week, we did some initial reading on distributed work in Anne Truitt Zelenka’s Connect! and Wikinomics by Tapscott & Williams. Then this week we did some reading from the same texts on workstreaming and social platforms, and fired up Facebook and Twitter. It took a few months last year for me to grok the value of Facebook alongside its function as a nonsensical tool for procrastination. I don't think we're entirely up to speed with the 4662W Group yet, although a couple of awesome people dove right in. What really surprises me is how well Twitter is working for us. This week, all 14 of us are assigned to post at least 4 tweets. Installing a Twitter aggregator isn’t part of the assignment, but it is heavily encouraged. I started out the week with Twitterific, but switched to Twhirl after the first unwanted ad hit my feed.

Having Twhirl sitting on my desktop has turned out to be key. The little updates scroll across without any prompts on my part. I’m following 16 people, which means not so many that there's a constant flow of more info to process. And I have a much greater sense of my students as actual people now rather than StudentTrons. I've watch them post tech support questions and help each other out. There have been tiny exchanges about the fabulosity of Mork & Mindy. People have posted when the lightbulb went on for them and they really got what we're doing this week. There was some discussion and schmoozing after Jenny's live chat with us last night. (Check out her VoiceThread lecture on workstreaming. You know you want to. If the text bubbles don't appear, click on the Floating Head of Jenny on the left.) All in all, it’s doing exactly what I had hoped: tying the participants more closely together as a team. (Note "the participants": not everyone has tweeted sufficiently yet.)

I’m still not convinced that everyone in the world should be on Twitter, but it is indeed a good thing for virtual teams who work with either less-than-optimal face time or none at all. We're going to keep tweeting along and see how things go, and I'll let you know.

(By the way, there's some smart, well-written posts over on the course blog. Give 'em some love, won't you?)

Update 2/5/08: Rachel has kindly pointed out this related entry on Lifehacker, which in turn links to this one on academhack. Evidently it is Twitter-teaching season in some academic circles.

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