Classes start today

I'm thinking I may need to shift to writing most of my posts after my morning lecture sections are done - two, 75 minute classes back to back (different classes)...I'll need my early hour most days to read over the stuff again.

I do have more finished stuff to post on here, but I'm going to have to motivate myself to put on the dress and photograph it, and the same with the shawl.

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It's storming here (or very nearly storming). This is a little bit rare for this time of the year and I hope it continues. I can deal OK with hot weather or with drought, but both of them together, I find really depressing and difficult. While I don't necessarily want another summer like 2007 (where I had to cancel some of the field labs because the locations were under water), I really would like to see some rain this summer.

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Flipping through the news this weekend, I saw two very different crowds. First crowd: people massed in Cairo to protest that Mubarak merely got a life sentence rather than being sentenced to death (or, more likely - as Joan said - that the army got off without any consequences in this. I really haven't kept up with what's going on there other than that it sounds like a lot of the "minority" groups (like the Coptic Christians) are going to lose big in the coming government). The commentator speculated on whether there would be riots. I haven't heard much since so I presume said rioting either didn't happen, or didn't rise to a level considered meaningful by American TV networks. (And of course there's also what's going on in Syria, people protesting the government being killed for their protesting.)

The second crowd: the crowds in London celebrating the Queen's 60 years on the throne. Say what you will about the monarchy, somehow it seems like it would be nice to have something like that to celebrate. The crowds I saw seemed very happy and quite patriotic (lots of Union Jacks).

I wish we lived in a world where there were reasons for more of the second kind of crowd, and less of a need for the first kind of crowd.That there were more things to just celebrate.

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Not entirely unrelated, as you'll see in a minute: Richard Dawson died this weekend. (I hadn't realized he had still been alive). I knew him best from Family Feud, his movie work and stuff like Hogan's Heroes was a bit before my time.

A lot was made on the news about how many women he kissed on the show and I remember he had quite a reputation about that. One of the national news shows showed a clip of one of his last interviews, where he was talking about that and how some people went kind of bonkers over it (IIRC, in most cases, he kissed them on the cheek, which I don't see anything objectionable about). And he commented, something to the effect that all he meant by it was to be nice and gentlemanly, and "If we were all nicer to one another, the world would be a better place."

I mean, I know that's obvious, but hearing it unexpectedly, I will admit I welled up a bit.

I don't mean totally going all pacifist and allowing the "bad guys" to run all over the innocents and harm them (And I'm sure that's not what Mr. Dawson meant, either). But in everyday interactions..."please," and "thank you" and "excuse me" and doing stuff like listening to someone when they're sad. And I admit it: sometimes it's hard. It's easy to get caught in your own little bubble of busy-ness or unhappiness or whatever and to stop seeing the other person as a person. And I admit there are a lot of times when someone I know has needed to talk and I've REALLY not wanted to be the listener....but in some cases I'm either the logical one to listen and give advice, or I'm really the only person available. And sometimes you do just kind of have to square your shoulders and do the thing you'd rather not do, because it will help another person.