Hehehehe....maybe I need to start a soilblog. That would probably exploit a blogging niche that hasn't been overrun yet.

Phil, thanks for the link. I was actually looking at an article on sandboils the other day and contemplating working it in to the section on soil water and water relationships. Some of the students struggle a little with the concepts of hydraulic heads and how they can develop and also with the idea of flowing wells (I talk a little bit about groundwater in my soils class).

Swep, maybe I'm too sensitive to student evaluation comments. I teach in a biology department but this is a survey course that students in other majors (like environmental health and safety) can take as an elective and I'm guessing the "want more engineering" came from one of them. (We don't even HAVE an engineering program here).

I dunno. One of the things I'm slowly coming to the realization of is that you can't make everyone happy, and there are some people that nothing will make happy - there are some people who live to gripe. And that trying to make everyone happy often means that YOU are not happy.

*I* think I've got a pretty good sophomore-junior level overview of soils, how they form, why they're important, how they support life, etc., etc. And there's really no one else in the department who could teach the class. And I've had former students (now out in the workforce) come back and tell me that what they learned was valuable.

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I've been working a bit on the quilt every evening. I've decided two things:

1. I need to finish off each night not at a good "finishing" point (having completed a design element or being ready to tie off the thread and refilly the needle) but rather at what will be a good "starting" point for next time.

They say "how you do anything is how you do everything" and one thing I've learned about myself is that a big part of getting anything done for me - be it writing a research paper (and, incidentally, one of my over-break projects was just that: I wrote a draft of the invasive-species paper and also an abstract for some meetings I want to present the research at), reviewing a paper for a journal, collecting data, cleaning house, working on a longtime project, even cooking. I need to break the inertia (overcome the activation energy, to use a biological metaphor), and it's easier to do that if the last time I stopped I left just a little bit undone.

This works for two reasons:

1. It goads my desire for "balance" and "finishedness" into wanting it to be finished

2. It leaves a clearer and easier "attack point" for when I start again.

So what I'm doing with the quilt is making sure I have a needle with a fair length of thread on it, and that I'm only partway through a line or a curve when I finish up for the evening.

I'm also trying to do the 10 or 15 minutes right before I go to bed. I'm thinking by making it part of my "power down" sequence for the night, it will do two things: become habitual and also help me "de-track" my mind from any of the things I've been worrying about during the day. Last night I put on some Bach (I have learned that turning off the tv when I'm done watching what I planned to watch, rather than just flipping looking for something is another good plan) and quilted for a bit before I went to bed to read.

Hand quilting is slow. There is no way to make it faster. With knitting, you can make it slower (by, say, knitting a cabled sweater of fingering weight yarn on size 2 needles) or you can make it faster (by using a superchunky yarn and fat needles). But with handquilting, the pace is pretty much the same regardless of what you do. (What affects the finishing-time is the size of the quilt and how much quilting you have to do. I once hand-quilted a double-bed sized quilt with a 1 1/2" grid. I will never, ever do that again). But it's also meditative, and I somehow think that it's good for a person mentally and perhaps spiritually to do something slow and quiet, especially in modern society.

I realized another thing last night, thinking over my quilts. I have three quilts - two of which I planned and pieced myself, and one on which I had some say as to what fabrics went where - that have a red and yellow combination in them.

I like red and yellow together. (Well, not to wear maybe - although I guess I was wearing something reddish and something yellowish together one day because an older lady I know kind of grinned and said, "Red and yellow, catch a fellow" (to which I went, "WTF?" although just in my mind, I didn't actually say anything like that)) Not all reds and yellows - some of them look ugly together, some of them "fight." But the right red with the right yellow is very cheerful indeed.

(I also like pink and yellow together. I remember vaguely reading somewhere - and this is probably somewhat stereotypical on the part of the author - but I remember someone writing an essay or a story or something who made the comment that "traditional" East Indian women liked the color combination of pink and yellow. Now, I'm about as far from East Indian as you can get, but I still like the colors together.)