Your recurrent nightmares?

If you're not 10 minutes early, you're late. My dad

I have a similar nightmare at least once a month. No, it is not Mr. Bean's head on Pamela Anderson's body. It's even worse.

Invariably in my dream I am scheduled to do a presentation and I am either late, far from the presentation site, can't find the right equipment, or am supposed to speak on a topic of which I know nothing. And what makes it particularly nightmarish is that I willfully seem to do everything possible to make the situation worse - usually wandering around and getting lost or doing absolutely trivial things.

Yesterday, for the first time in 15 years of doing professional presentations, my nightmare actually came true. I got the wrong date on my speaking calendar. I was in my office in Minnesota when I should have been five hours away in Madison, WI. Actually I got the date right, but it was changed to a day earlier and I somehow missed recording that change.

I keep a semi-accurate list of organizations for which I've worked. I count now well over 200 days of doing talks or workshops - or probably a low ball estimate of 600 individual talks or workshops. I've driven all night because of cancelled flights to makes some of these. I've never "called in sick." Even equipment failures have been blessedly rare (knock wood). So you might say missing only one out of 200 ain't bad.

Well, it's bad to that one who counted on you.

I feel terrible about it. And I am genuinely sorry.

I'm adopting a new procedure to verify all information at least a week in advance - including the date I am speaking. Just the first of a series of compensations for an aging brain?

Photo from http://www.wayodd.com/baywatch-nightmare/v/4986/

Thinking about time

• Do you find yourself with too much free time to devote to your family, hobbies, or charity work?
• Do you feel like you’re wasting time reading books, taking walks, or working on a Master’s Degree?
• Is your mind so demented that you believe people want to read your every waking thought?
• Do you want to come home from a full-time job and then work some more? ...

If you answered YES to all 4, Congratulations... you have what it takes to blog. And it is quite possible that you are a moron, slightly creepy, and in a word… breathtakingly odd (sorry, two words… and there is no chance I want to ever meet you in person). from The PrincipalsPage blog

One of my favorite quotes come from Annie Dillard who writes, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." Seems like quite a number of bloggers have been reflecting lately on how best to spend their time.

• Mr. Wham at Grocery Store Feet, complains, "Still, FIRST SEMESTER IS OVER!! I didn’t get what I wanted to do done at all."
• Dr. Bell is timing the boot speed of different operating systms to save a few seconds and writing "..the music box in my head is playing another old song, Pete Seeger's "Turn Turn Turn." Only the words I am hearing are instead "Time time time," as in I never, ever have enough!" (I've noticed lately that I use the time it takes for my computer to boot to check my e-mail on my iPod. How sick is that?)
• Will Richardson is "rethinking [his] online reading habits" and has deleted most of his RSS feeds. So have I.
• And Paul at quoteflections (one of the feeds I did NOT delete) first decided to stop blogging completely and then relented, stating that "I have changed my slogan from daily to regular."
• When I twitted that I was using an early release from school to work on presentations, my "friend" Keith Curry Lance commented "Some people are a waste of a snow day!"

So how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, eh, Annie? I've been thinking a lot lately about how I use my writing time. In an old column on time management  I once asked:

Is this a job that will have a long-term effect?... too often, the minutia of the job pin us down, like Gulliver trapped by the Lilliputians, and we make small progress toward major accomplishments. Remind yourself that that the big projects you work on often have more impact on your students and staff than the little attentions paid to them. Spend at least one part of everyday on the big stuff.

Am I following my own advice? You have to know that I have about 6 primo hours of writing time each week - Saturday and Sunday mornings. It's the only time my brain really works well enough to think very hard about things. (I suppose that is why I can blog any old time...)

Which leads me to ask which sort of writing has the potentential of making the greatest contribution to one's profession - books, articles or blog posts? I'm leaning toward the first. The first of my poor, sad books has not been revised for a dozen years.

I can't stop blogging - too much fun and too addictive. I like writing articles and columns, and it is still a thrill after all these years to see one's name in print.

But this year I am revising at least one book.

Hold me to it!

(Calvin and Hobbes cartoon found at http://www.cgu.edu/pages/792.asp)

All the rubrics

While I am sure they will be works in progress for some time, I did clump all the revised beginning rubrics together here: <http://www.doug-johnson.com/dougwri/code77-rubrics-beginning-2009-version.html>

Use them as you can!