Unhorse Shunless
hard-skinned spheres the size of a mans fist.
Maybe these were the
and here is Madonette, welcome, welcome.
are just one more sentenced crook.
Who is going to carry his own pack-
males soon became manic brick makers.
After we showed them how to

extruded sharp toenails, leaped high then climbed up my clothes,
Where is the key? the man in the cage asked,
but the boy was gone.
Wonderful, Floyd muttered. It may have seemed pretty obvious to him
I took another sip of water,
wished that it was a stronger liquid.
Thanks for the job offer-but no thanks. So the men beyond the wall
top of him.
manner.
can see quite clearly . . .

---

That is all for today's issue of Spam Poetry.
- posted by Nick @ 9/10/2007 02:59:00 PM | 0 comments

 
A few random things from Nick's life of late:
Wednesday/Thursday I was very nervous. Thursday morning was my first "Micro-teaching" experience in my choral methods class. We each were assigned a small segement of a lesson to work on (this weeks fragment was teaching rhythms and we each had a different aspect of basic rhythm/notation to teach) and had to make a lesson plan and teach the other students in our group this lesson. It was being critiqued by the teacher, another student, and was video taped. VERY NERVOUS WAS I. Well, I was the last of four in our group to teach, and after the first three I had pretty much thrown out my entire lesson plan and was trying desperately to formulate a new one. Thankfully we didn't have time for mine. Now I'll have to do my newly formulated one for her sometime. Also after seeing the other students screw up, get nervous, and not have things right (sorry guys if you read this!) encouraged me a lot. I felt a bit out of place, being a grad student in with a bunch of undergrads and not knowing as much as they know about this stuff.

Friday was nice, I didn't work at the VA because I had to be in Columbia at 3 to leave for the choir retreat in Charles Town this past weekend and had some things to do beforehand. So, rather than waking up before 6am I woke up after 9am and enjoyed getting some much needed sleep after the stress of the past couple of days.

We had a short time in Charles Town to eat dinner then headed for the church to rehearse for 3 hours.

8:30am I awoke and had a rushed shower and ate a dry nasty biscuit from the hotel lobby for breakfast. Yumm.

Made it through the morning rehearsal and we went for lunch, came back for a short bit more rehearsing and then headed back to Columbia. I was very grateful to be out of the back seat of the coup (roomy though it was for a coup) and in the front seat of my sedan driving back to Augusta.

Today I overslept for some reason, missing my cellphone alarm and not ever getting the alarm clock alarm which malfunctioned for some reason today. In my haste to get to class not nearly as late as I was going to be if I followed the legal speed limit I passed a Highway Patrol car on the side of the road as I was going 82 in a 70 zone. Before I even got near her, just after realizing that it was a HP car on the side of the road and not some other sort of car, I saw her brake lights light up and knew what my fate was. As soon as I was next to her and passing her (now 75, 70, 65mph) the blue lights came on. It wasn't even a quarter mile from where she had lain in wait (in plain view) to where I stopped.

She let me off with a warning, but the writing of which ate up the time I had saved in my haste. I got to class 20 minutes late. Oh well.

At least lunch was enjoyable--McAlister's orange cranberry club with their famous sweet tea, enjoyed whilst re-reading source readings regarding/from early twentieth-century composers. Schöenberg, club sandwich, and yummy sweet tea make nick happy.

Now I am utilizing the super-fast internet in the music library to download updates for my brand new XP install. An install which I am very happy with. Oh yes, that is what I did with my Saturday night. I had ordered XP Home SE last week, being so fed up with Vista that I decided to shell out the $80 for an OEM copy. I'd backed up my files on Thursday night and everything was ready Saturday. External USB drives make this process so very simple and quick. Lovely, just lovely they are! The install went very smoothly (though I had hoped to be able to back up the restore partition to DVD so I could recover, if things should fail horribly, Windows Vista (it would have had to have been absolute, unrecoverable disaster for this to happen) but the tools didn't work for that. I was able to backup the software disk at any rate (thereby giving me the ability to install the software into XP if i felt so inclined. Of course, I found out that all the drivers and Acer tools included with this laptop are designed for Vista. Acer has the XP counterparts on their website).

The above has lost all sense of flow and sentence structure. It is like a badly coded website and I am sure there are open tags all over the place. Please be like IE and ignore them. I don't want any Firefox grammar Nazis on my tail about it.

So, that huge rambling paragraphblobthing simply means this: I now am running Windows XP, it runs much faster, doesn't eat up nearly the memory (Vista was frequently ending up with as little as 50MB free ram out of the 756megs available, XP is running constantly with 300-400MB free while running the same software or more. And now I feel fully in control of my system again.

Say what you will about Microsoft and Windows in general but XP has served me well for years now, with minimal troubles. I rarely have to reboot due to a system crash or slow down. 98 crashed constantly and Vista is slow as Han Solo frozen in carbonite.

In other news: it is hot.

Goodbye.
- posted by Nick @ 9/10/2007 02:33:00 PM | 0 comments