thankful 2020

Today, I just started Thanksgiving Break. This year our semester ended at Thanksgiving, so that students could go home and stay home to help keep a COVID spread away from the University. It's been a good semester regardless of everything going on. When things got underway in August, I had decided that I would simply treat the semester like any other; minus the fact that I had half the workbenches in the room, had tons of sanitizer in the room, and we were all staying 6 feet apart and wearing masks. I also decided to keep my attendance policy the same. Many of my colleagues dialed the expectations WAY back; even attendance! You can imagine what happened there...

I just approached each day like it was my last day teaching face to face. Somehow we made it through to the end of the semester. Travis and I were enrolled in an online training institute to develop an Art class for fully online teaching. The process made me realize: how little the rest of the University understands what it is we teach, how many contact hours we have with students, and what it takes to prepare for teaching a hands on class. The amount of money the University is currently spending on technology is appalling. I probably didn't win any awards for my evaluation at the end of the institute where I railed on the fact that I have no budget for repairs on equipment and students are provided with minimal materials and consumables to create work and YET there is money for headsets, microphones, cameras, computers, software, etc that will be worthless in three to five years. I brought up the fact that the tools we use in my classroom are probably 20-30 years old and still serving us. Talk about a quality investment for the future. Oh well, what do I know, I teach people how to work with their hands and actively make things. Never mind that this kind of work requires Synthesis, Creation, Evaluation, and Application.

Exams will happen after Thanksgiving but be fully online. I decided to just wrap things up with critiques right before we all left. As I mentioned it's been a good semester, but I'm tired. Since we had a reduced budget for supplies and equipment repair, I didn't have any studio/lab monitors for students to access the studio after class time hours. I ended up just staying in the studio from 7:30-2:30 on Monday and Tuesday (so I could pick up the girls from school) and then I stayed all day from 7:30-4:00 on Wednesday and Thursday, Friday from 8-5, and then I would open up on Sunday nights from 6pm-11pm.  It allowed the students a lot of time to work outside of class as they were not going to get anything done by the time I demonstrated techniques each class period and covered the necessary content. Since service on committees was limited this semester, it made things pretty manageable. Besides I'd rather be teaching or maintaining/repairing equipment than sitting on a Zoom meeting.

Our Subaru died a few weeks ago, so that was a challenging time to be shopping for a new/used car while balancing everything else, but I'm just thankful we could get a used Toyota Highlander that fit the family needs. We got through that week and then I just had two weeks in the semester left to go. My Toyota is in the garage at the moment up on jack-stands as I'm putting new wheel bearings in and rebuilding the birfields. Jill and I have been sharing one car this entire semester. It's worked out though and gives us time to talk each day; I'm grateful for that as well. 

Last week I mowed the lawn. I hadn't mowed for a few weeks since we had a cold spell and things hadn't grown much. We had a brief warm up though and I figured I could mow one more time. It always gives me time to think so I enjoy the time to myself. Several weeks ago, I had a very enjoyable conversation with my neighbor. He's in his 80's and worked for the Ford dealership for 30 years during Ford's "Race on Sunday, Sell on Monday". I was on my way back from picking the girls up off the bus and he was working in his garage. We started talking about cars, and pretty soon a few hours had passed and the girls were already long gone as they had made their way down the road, down our driveway, and back up to the house. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversations though. He showed me his 1968 Mustang fastback and we talked about the various cars he has sitting around his house. He has some good ones. His stories about going to mechanics school at Ford were great as well as his stories about drag racing in the 60's. It was just what I needed at just the right time in the semester. These moments of slowing down and participating in the life that is directly around me is important and grounding. 

My neighbor owns a little strip of property on the opposite side of my property that has a couple old vehicles on it. One of them is this Ford Fairlane 500 Skyliner. I think I've mentioned in the past that each time I mow, I swing a little wide onto his property so that I have been able to slowly uncover the Skyliner (contrary to Jill's wishes). I mentioned to my neighbor during our conversations how much I love that Skyliner and how it looks. I told him about me mowing around it and he said he used to mow around it too, but it just got to be too much work. I asked him if he minded that I was mowing around it and he said to do whatever I wanted. Well today, I finally got down to take some yearly pictures of it since I had the day off from work. This thing is so rusted out, but it's just so cool. If you didn't realize... this is a convertible or it's sometimes called a retractable. The entire roof assembly folds up and tucks away in the trunk (this explains the odd body proportions right?). If you've never see the roof retract on one of these then you need to check this out. I would have loved to have heard the engineering and design meetings that went into this idea. I guess Ford spent so much money developing the idea that was planned for the top of the line Lincoln, but the cost of the Lincoln was already too much, so Ford had to put this option on the full size Ford cars at the time. These cars have a little rake on them to compensate for when the roof is retracted due to the weight sitting over the rear axle. This was made for three years; '57, '58 and '59. This particular car is a '58.