Another Link in the Fence

In case you haven't heard, and I'm sure you have, I got placed at Johnston MS in North Las Vegas for the 2011-12 school year! I can finally resume watching back-to-school commercials with a critical and covetous eye! If you consult their website, you'll notice that one of the social studies teachers has an A+ logo instead of a photo. I think that's me. Still no word on what grade level or subject I'm to teach, but if my careful reading of the district calendar is correct, I may find out as early as Monday!

In gratitude for this, what we might call...cushion against the elements, I thought that I might owe the Universe a little bit of free labor. Although I slept in this morning (I'm still on vacation!) and arrived after most of the labor was already done, I did manage to make an appearance at Community Day at my alma mater, Hammond High School. Here it is now:



Ooh look at the pretty black fence!



There was music playing on the loudspeakers, there was flag football for the kids, sponsored by the Boys and Girls Club, and there was free food and Gatorade. I didn't leave until some lady insisted four times that I eat a hot dog. In the meantime, I had a good conversation with the athletic director. Apparently, this is Hammond High's first Community Day. They put it together in about a month's time. The idea is to get the community and alumni to come out in support of the school "and hopefully," he said, "get some pride back in this place."

I told him that I understand how important that is.

Then I came home and spent the afternoon staring at everybody's favorite database, ABC-CLIO, before heading to my most preferred pizza joint, Aurelio's, with my cousin Joshua, who is almost halfway through his college career at Purdue Calumet.

So it's been a pretty awesome 24 hours. Let's see if we can't keep the awesomeness going.

In Defense of Witchcraft Fear, Kid Fiction and Soft Serve

The local temperatures in Hammond, IN and the whims of nature have conspired to keep me indoors for most of the week. With no adventures to speak of, I feel compelled to report on two selections from my lite summer reading list: The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England, by Carol F. Karlsen, and Wicked Girls: a Novel of the Salem Witch Trials, by Stephanie Hemphill (on Kindle).

I was able to read them both this week while mostly trapped in the house. ...Devil...starts by summing up New England witchcraft beliefs, most notably this: most witches were girls. It sets up some demographic and economic hypotheses about WHY most witches were girls, covers some theology, and dedicates a chapter towards the end of the book to the identities of the accusers and their relationships to the accused. Because Karlsen includes the stories of real-life alleged witches, complete with misspellings-and-all excerpts from their trials, ...Devil... is fascinating: a crime novel, except historical and nonfiction. Dwelling on the fact that most witches were girls may have been an important contribution to the field in 1987. Or, perhaps, when it comes to history (especially long-gone eras like the 1600s), we get so used to the "givens" that we hardly ever ask what circumstances may have set the "givens" up. I'm glad I read Karlsen's book before reading the much shorter, lighter, and fictional Wicked Girls.

Wicked Girls is a book written in verse which took me five hours in total to read. It follows seven fictionalized "bewitched" or "afflicted" girls through the course of the Salem outbreak of 1692-93.

Following is my brilliant plan, assuming that I will one day teach U.S. history again (feel free to use it if you can, it's 'open source,'): I will devise a 10-minute lecture on the witch trials, take a "math break" and have students draw many of the same conclusions Karlsen draws based on tables and charts from her book, and then the whole class will read together Wicked Girls. This plan assumes that I will have a class set of Wicked Girls that I won from a grant. A girl can dream.

On a mostly unrelated matter, I must confess that I am using a calorie-counter app on my Android. The calorie-counter app is almost as fascinating as the Salem Witch Trials, because every day it sends you an e-mail telling you whether you met the previous day's calorie goal. In the e-mail, it tells you what nutrients you're missing, what you may be getting too much of, and what you should either eat more or less of in order to balance your diet. The calorie-counter app is called The Daily Burn, and there's a free version.

Anyway, on Friday I attended my long-awaited geocaching event, MsHendrix's Twisted and Rainbow-Sprinkled Social. Despite the 97-degree weather, it was fairly well attended and went over like a charm, considering it is the first caching event I've ever planned. There were many travel bugs to be discovered, and much fun conversation. I named the event after my favorite ice cream treat: the twist cone with rainbow sprinkles. I have resolved to get three this summer: the one that I got shortly after arriving to Indiana, the one that I ate at the ice cream social, and the one I plan to eat after Pierogifest next weekend.

On Satuday I received an e-mail from The Daily Burn, saying I should limit my intake of "soft serve chocolate and vanilla ice cream." Haha. Be that as it may.

Speaking of geocaching...I'd like to do some today if the rain clears up.
Otherwise, perhaps I'll have more adventures to share next week. Be well.

The Inaugural Postmodern

After taking me to the Hendershot cabin in Michigan, a U2 show in Chicago, to Valparaiso, IN where I snagged Aunt Nikki's delicious granola recipe, and finally to Sandusky, OH to witness the nuptials of the resplendent Oberle couple, my epic summer adventure of 2011 took another surprising and awesome turn.

If anyone had told me a week ago that I would spend yesterday bushwhacking my way through the spiderwebs at Ensor Sink Natural Area in Cookeville, TN, taking a tour of Andrew Jackson's house at The Hermitage, and then stopping off at the National Corvette Museum, I probably would have doubted them.

But that is the extraordinary way that life works.

Needless to say, my impromptu trip to Tennessee provided a great opportunity to add TWO states to my geocaching map, and that's what took me to the stone that I would have otherwise left unturned, the Ensor Sink. It's one of many caves in the KY/Tennessee vicinity. You are aware that these states are cave-rich if you have ever been to Mammoth Cave National Park, where I myself have not yet been. Hiking around in the natural greenness of Cookeville and doing math for an Earthcache were peaceful and relaxing ways to begin my day.



I hit the road for home late, but determined to stop at The Hermitage. I had NO IDEA that my route would take me directly past it! Another auspicious coincidence.
For me, Andrew Jackson is the embodiment in U.S. history of the dichotomy between the liberty enshrouded in the founding documents, and the amazing adventuresomeness of the few that advanced the country to the place of greatness that it found post-WWII, in stark contrast to the oppression of many of the people who called America home.

Here's a photo of a guide in period dress welcoming people to the tour of the plantation mansion.



The mansion tour is the kind where the rooms cannot be entered by tourists, but peered into through plexiglass. Since I loitered to better see the family parlor, I was able to ask one of the guides if the staff get to hang out inside the plexiglass rooms, and she said YES! She clarified that they enter the rooms for study meetings, to make sure that they're up on all of the latest information about the artifacts. HOW AWESOME IS THAT!? She said, "Oh it's really fun! It's not so fun on payday, but it's great as a part-time job, after you're done doing what you're meant to."

Good to know. [Adds Nashville to potential retirement destinations.] The down side?
"Summers here are always hot and sticky," reported the upstairs guide, before announcing that in the summertime in the early 1800s, guests would vacate their stuffy rooms and come sleep on the floor in the hallway. I asked whether any foreign dignitaries did this, and the guide responded, "Sam Houston." Heheh.

My only regret about the side trip is that I didn't have a full day to spend there.

I didn't make very good time on I-65 headed north, but I can't have a geocaching map with Indiana, Tennessee, and NOT Kentucky colored in. When I saw the sign for the National Corvette Museum, I knew that I would at least find a micro cache. Turns out, I found an ammo can. Sadly, I wasn't able to enter the museum and photograph myself with any Corvettes, because I pulled into the lot...at...5:02 p.m.

Ah, well.

I'm overnighting in Indianapolis now, and I'm already late for a party. The summer just keeps getting better and better. :)



Let's see if the book of Andrew Jackson's lessons on leadership, which I couldn't resist buying at the Hermitage, has any appropriate closing thoughts for this inaugural entry of my repurposed blog!

While I do that, allow me also to invite feedback on the new format.

Here's one. There may be better ones, but I feel that this is pretty good for a quick, random perusal:

"The enemy is near," he cried, "his 'sales cover the lakes,' but the brave are united, and if he finds us contending among ourselves, it will be for the prize of valor and the rewards of fame."

Well, alrighty then.