May 2007 Archives
I haven't really blogged much lately, I guess I've been too deep in so many other things.
First off, with the help of my friend Chris I have been able to get my garden going the way I want this year and I'm hoping that it actually produces something. Last year was sort of a flop because I gave up on it too early. This year I am committed to it.
Next, ware from the Spring semester at the studio has now arrived back at home, however, due to other events, the photoing and recording of these pieces has not yet occurred. This process has not yet been scheduled. My guild's spring barn sale was quite nice, I enjoyed being involved, and I heard a lot of useful feedback that will help me with future barn sales (or any other type of sale for that matter). I sold several pieces, which I am happy about. I have a nice little stash to buy clay with now :-). I haven't gotten back to throwing since things wrapped up at the studio. I want to get back to that sometime very soon, perhaps later this weekend.
During the past week I have been helping my aunt arrange things around her storage buildings as well as in her yard. I have also concluded that I am a bad influence on my aunt. Together we managed to spend over $200 on plants in one trip. On the topic of my aunt, tomorrow (Saturday) we are going to a wild flower hike at Crowders Mountain. I haven't really had any large amounts of time alone with her in almost 2 years. I think she has missed spending time with me.
Tomorrow concludes the first week of my summer classes. So far things are going well. I took my first quiz tonight and got a perfect score on it, which makes me very happy. Creative Writing is a little more of a challenge than I thought it would be, since I haven't written anything that wasn't technical in such a very long time.
I have no clue what the rest of the summer holds for me yet.
Hello and welcome to my blog. You might remember me from some previous time? My name is Curtis and I like to learn things, I also enjoy playing with clay and watching things grow in my garden. I get easily excited by my choo-choos and there isn't much that feels better than sitting in a swing and swinging during the late spring. I like drinking a cold Pepsi during the late afternoon as I work on homework, or just read for fun. My family is very important to me and I look forward to spending time with my aunt whenever I can. When I grow up I want to be a botanist, or maybe a potter, then again, maybe I might just do something with computers. I'm looking forward to eating watermelon from my garden this summer and I'm hoping that my tomato plants produce a lot and get very big and bushy.
The North Carolina Community College System's Common Course Library has recently been updated to reflect the changing times in the information systems academic areas.
The following courses have been discontinued:
CSC 136 Fortran Programming
CSC 137 PASCAL Programming
CSC 237 Advanced PASCAL
CIS 144 Operating Systems - DOS
CIS 146 Operating Systems - OS/2
To me it would seem that these changes are a bit overdue.
"Hello, it looks like you are writing a letter... would you like some help?" - Clippit (Office 97 - 2002)
"Press F7 for an automatic spellcheck" - Word Processing Instructors everywhere
How many times per day do you try to write something and then notice that something is misspelled, then you right-click that little wavy line under a word? Do you consider what is over time happening to our culture as a result? What about to your personal intellect? If every time you have a spelling error, you use the checker to check yourself, how long will it take for you to learn how to spell the word yourself? Will you ever? I personally have many words I can't spell without the aide of a spell checker, such as necessary.
I have been doing a lot of writing in NotePad, and WordPad recently and I noticed that I feel so much freer to write when I am not bound by the constraints of the analytical "intelligent" word processing tools. Another thing that has tripped this is how absolutely horrible the form-field spell checker in Mozilla FireFox presently is. I am told that it is based on a dictionary that is part of the OpenOffice.org project. I feel so distracted when I am having to continually deal with those little red lines everywhere, especially when I am typing something proper and the spell checker is deciding that it should alert anyway.
For effective communication, we must operate our language within a certain set of rules, but when it comes to some of these rules for the English language, it is just purely an anal fixation that demands their existence. An example would be the comma rules, while it is good to separate portions of thought, its presence or not before every and or or is simply annoying. Language is part of culture, much like art, music and food. The acceptance of music, art or food does not depend on some great authority mandating its "rules". Music and art must be pleasing to the aesthetic taste and food must be pleasing to the palette. Shouldn't language be pleasing to the ear and easy to read, not a complex collection of protocol requiring a syntax road map for proper functionality?
About that whole cultural thing.... as some of you may recall, my mother published a cookbook several years ago. When the initial draft review came back from the printer, it was covered in red markings, highlighting things like "cooky" as being spelled incorrectly. The cookbook is a collection of recipes that have been saved for hundred of years in my family, several of those recipes having some things spelled in an older version of the English language, when both "cooky" and "cookie" were technically correct. My mother decided to leave the "misspellings" intact because of the nature of the book, a collection of recipes from the family, and a tribute to thousands of family events involving food that have occurred over the years. Many of the final adoptions of words in this language that were then up for debate are unknown as to their reasoning. The best information that we have for "cooky" and "cookie" is that the plural has always been "cookies", and since we hardly ever speak of one cookie, the language was simplified to have a uniform "cookie" that follows the standard pluralization transformation of "add s".
If we are electronically held to the current version of English, then the language has very little chance of progressing to something more useful, or being melded with a more versatile language, such as French.
Erin - good luck with your English degree, this wasn't meant to be an offensive post to you.
Guy - you are a linguist, it doesn't apply to you, but you knew that already.
This has been an eventful semester for me, both academically and personally. Now that things are coming down to the last few days and I have only one more exam to take, I am beginning to freak out a little bit and things are getting stressful. The most active thing on my mind at the moment is that Tweedy missed her exams on Tuesday morning. The registrar gave her Tuesday and Thursday for her exams and she consented to allow students to be evaluated on Tuesday, but yet, she was no where in sight. Another thing on my mind is the glaze kilns, I know that several firings have been conducted, but I don't know the exact content of those firings or if the most recent firing will be completed on time for my evaluation on Thursday at 2pm. I worry that my present ware won't be good enough and I worry that my big sculptures are too big and simply won't get finished in time, because smaller pieces will go ahead of mine in the normal studio protocol.
Next up on my issues chart, I have been trying to get a specific course registered at CPCC for the past week. I want to take Creative Writing 1 at CPCC for fun, but because they have no record of my ENG111 (writing and composition stuff) credit, they are unable to admit me to the course and of course it isn't enough to remind them that I have ENG112 (the next level of english after ENG111) on my record. They apparently need proof of ENG111 to be able to allow me to register for the course. Finally last night I got a response from the director of the department, and I was told to fax my documentation to her and it would be taken care of. I did that, and today, I had no reply from her, and I am still not allowed to enroll in the course. What is a desperate student to do?
Next, It is spring, and this is very obvious to me. I have been so horny in the last few days, I don't know what to do with myself, I get excited at the tiniest little thing (probably bad wording, but who cares). I want to find something to do to expel my sexual energy that doesn't involve my hand. I have thought about focusing on working out more and finding more physical things to do, but somehow just the thought of being that physically active makes me feel lightheaded.
Finally, I haven't worked nearly enough on my personal website or any of my little projects and summer isn't looking good for them either, because I am planning to spend a lot of time outside doing things like working on my garden, swimming, hiking and whatever else I can find that will keep me out of trouble.
