Yesterday was not off to an auspicious start. I sat on Beeler Street -- my destination in plain sight -- as a gang of turkeys staged a very long, very disorganized roadblock. They strutted. They stood. They displayed their feathers. They looked ornery. "Just try to make us move. We don't have anywhere we need to be. GRAHLAH GRAHLAH, suckers."
(That last bit is what Bea says when she sees a turkey (um, minus the "suckers" bit). I think it's supposed to be "gobble gobble.")
Those turkeys were lucky it wasn't November...
(Aside: I had to google the term for a bunch of turkeys and came across this fabulous list and now I'm going to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to work "a shiver of sharks" or "a bloat of hippopotamuses" into conversation.)
I survived the first day of classes this semester. That was not a given, considering how nervous I felt and the fact that I'm usually in bed by 9:20pm, not talking to a room full of students about the software development lifecycle.
A few highlights and absurdities:
(1) One of my students from China gave me a lovely bookmark for the lunar new year. I smile every time I think of it.
(2) We made the software engineers do impromptu speeches on a topic they picked from a bag, which they just looooooved. I might have somehow said that they could put us on the spot next week. Crap. WHAT was I thinking?
(3) Speaking of impromptu things: This was on the white board when we walked into class yesterday. WTH? Doubly puzzling since this room is used only for software engineering classes. That said, I kinda wish I could have observed that particular class.
(4) NO ONE FELL ASLEEP in my software doc class. I mean, it's such a scintillating subject to begin with, and when it's from 6:30 - 9:20 pm in a small, windowless conference room, well... I count that as a minor miracle.
(5) I watched someone plug in a hot pot/electric kettle thing and cook noodles. "So what?" you ask... It was in the middle of the freaking floor in the student center. She walked in, plugged the pot into the outlet on the floor, and cooked her lunch. Do you know how many people nearly walked into or onto that pot? Yeah, I don't either because I was too lazy to count, but trust me... it was a lot.
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