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LIKES workshop

I am at the LIKES workshop... trapped for two days and a half... hee hee
bye bye and have a good weekend and a fun Halloween

Plans for Halloween?

What are you doing for Halloween?
Well, you can do any of the following:

1. Come to the LIKES workshop. It will not be lots of fun! (You need to be in Blacksburg for this)
2. Go to the Time Halloween party! It will be lots of fun! (You need to be in Merida for this)

If you are not in Blacksburg or Merida... well, you kinda suck.

Nyuujuu Tokusentai

I really like the dairy products from Homestead Creamery here in SW VA. I pretty much kill one bottle of their non-fat milk a week. The cool thing about it is that you get the old school glass bottle, and then you return it for a $2 deposit. The not-so-cool thing is that if you are lazy and let the bottles pile up, you end up with a big collection of bottles in your kitchen that now it's not so easy to transport to Kroger and get the deposit back.

This is not the first time it happens, but when I had a similar collection of empty bottles my nephew Xavier was here, and he took them back to Kroger and got his money. Maybe I should keep the bottles for decoration purposes.

From Concho's classroom

Professor Concho River: We are going to make an exercise with XML.
Megan: Eczema??

The last time I saw Zenobia

Probably not many assistant professors get to interact frequently with university administrators. I was lucky enough to be a member and chair of the VT Commission on Equal Opportunity and Diversity. I made many friends in that commission whose salaries double or triple mine, and whose responsibilities also could triple mine. One of the hardest working and smartest friends in the admin I made during my time as chair of CEOD was Dr. Zenobia Hikes, our VP of Student Affairs. I didn't know she was sick. If anything, Zenobia always looked healthy and active, constantly walking around campus and town with her fancy shoes in a bag as she wore her sneakers to walk fast from meeting to meeting. The last time I saw Zenobia was a couple of months ago. I was walking by Henderson Lawn with Aarnes, and she said she missed me at the commission's meetings. She also asked if the goatee was coming back (I shaved it in late August and kept it off for a few weeks). I told her I didn't know. She never got to see the goatee again and I never got to see her again. When I found out she was not doing ok I got really worried, and reading about her death a couple of hours ago really made me sad. She will be missed.

Pain transfer

Just came back from the dentist... can't talk. my mouth looks like Sly Stallone's in Rocky III. It's amazing how my dentist is so good at pain transfer: all the pain you don't feel in the mouth when they are treating you goes straight to your wallet when you leave.

Radrick and technicommunication

When I used to teach freshman composition, a long, long time ago... I made this joke with my students, telling them that no one has ever walked into a bar and successfully picking up a girl by saying "hey baby, I know my college rhetoric." Well, that kinda almost happened this morning (emphasis on almost) when I was at Starbucks. There were this two undergrad girls prolly studying for a speech comm test. They were talking, yes, you guessed correctly, about rhetorical delivery. One of the girls just couldn't tell the difference between epideictic and deliberative rhetoric. As I was reading my morning news, I had to do something and help the girl, and I just walked over to their table and used my pick up line of "I have a PhD in rhetoric," and gave them the mnemonic that Becky Rickly used in class, of the guys who are at a political meeting marching as they chant "e-pi-deic-tic, e-pi-deic-tic." The girl was happy and said it made sense. Sure, I didn't pick up the girl because a) probably she was 12, and b) I am chubby and ugly... but you get the point.
Now I feel horrible for being a geek. I need a cookie

P.S. If you don't get the title of this post, then you were not a TCR student at TTU 2000-2004... hee hee

Much better

Daily Grind cup with a decent lid... much better.
Having it closer to the office than ABP and Starbucks does have its advantages, but I still don't really love it.

I am afraid, anyway, that the dentist will put me off coffee for a while. I am gonna undergo a treatment for periodonti-whatever prevention whatever, and it should last about two months and a couple of weeks. I am almost sure that they won't let me drink coffee during the treatment. We will see what happens. Back to writing about Hispanic construction workers.

Dentist

As you read this, I am going to the dentist. I don't like dentists. This will be the first time I go to a dentist in the US. Don't get me wrong, it ain't like I never go to the dentist. It's just that I go to the dentist in Mexico, or at least I used to go. I don't like dentists, and somehow going to the dentist in Mexico made it less horrible. At least that was my assumption. But I need to get my teeth cleaned so I am going to the dentist today. Yuck. More later. Woody Allen help us.

The sucky grind

This is what happens when you cheat on your loved ones. Everybody knows I have a serious and solid marriage with Starbucks. I really love the Sbucks on University City Blvd, which I consider the center of my (non-existent) social life, and people know me there and say hi. I rarely go to the Sbucks downtown because that's where someone hit my car last Spring, and the one on Christiansburg is well... weird. But I don't need more. I have my Starbucks as my wife and we get along ok. Sure, I am allowed to have a "casa chica" and that comes from Au Bon Pain in Squires. ABP is that little cute girl who listens to me when I have a fight with Starbucks or who doesn't ask for money (and this is true, since I frequently get free coffee from ABP because the girls are nice... I never get free coffee from Sbucks... never, ever). Well, with my Starbucks-wife and my ABP-k’eech (en maya pa' que lo entiendan los huiros), you would assume that I don't need anything else. Well, according to Pender (I don't buy this), there is a shorter walking distance from Shanks Hall to the Daily Grind (another coffee place in the Burg) than there is from Shanks to ABP, so when you really really need coffee and a) can't wait or b) simply don't have a lot of time, it kinda makes sense to go to the Daily Grind. In the past, my experiences with the DG have been super mixed. When I first moved to the Burg I liked the DG because it was a fast lunch place, and Gena and I were frequently there. At one point I kinda made it the center of my coffee operations, and had many meetings there with Don Manuelito and other collaborators, but then it closed in 2005 or 06. It opened again with a new look, and while the coffee was pretty decent, it soon went downhill because the food was all outsourced (nothing was cooked in house) and the salespeople and clientele were looking more like the Bollo's crowd (keep in mind my allergies to hippies). It was also a dark place with almost no lights and unfriendly staff. It closed again, and then it came back a few weeks ago with new people and a cleaner, brighter look. There's new lights in the place, and it looks decent, and they are cooking some sandwiches and stuff there now. Well, yesterday I cheated on both the wife and the "casa chica" and went to the Daily Grind. The coffee was not bad, but the place needs to become a BYOL (bring your own lid). Their lids are a bad joke! They are like tiny thin... even skinnier than the ones ChubStation puts on the soft drinks. And to make things worse, the barista girl went ahead and ripped a hole on my lid, so I was walking back from the place spilling coffee everywhere. This is a nightmare for someone like me, who is always spilling his coffee anyway. And did I mention we are in autumn now (also known as fall)? The leaves are falling off the trees, and little leaves were getting into my coffee through the huge hole that the girl made in my very skinny joke-of-a-lid. Me is not coming back to the Sucky Grind soon... balls no.