Thursday morning things

* Despite no lesson this week I'm still practicing. I started something new to stave off boredom. I have a book of Phillip Keverin arrangements of well-known hymns - he "resets" them in the style of various classical composers (previously, I played "Be Thou My Vision" reimagined as one of the Gymnopedies...)

The new one is one of my all time favorite hymns.



I just love that. I love the words to it, which are essentially "God is good so the whole earth should rejoice" - not a deep or heavy message, maybe, but in this world there's too much deep and heavy already and sometimes you just need the "rejoice" message.

I also love that it is (at least believed to have been) written by St. Francis sometime in the 1200s. (The version we sing is, of course, a translation). Again, that historical link - something that's been around for very long and stood the test of time.

The traditional tune works well with it, too....it's an old tune itself, dating to the 1600s.

The "revising" Keverin did works it into the harmonic structure and counterpoint of part of Mozart's piano sonata in C (ummmm....K. 545? It's the really well-known one, the one Carl Stalling (I think it was, or maybe it was Milt Franklin) chose as "Granny's" theme music in the old Warner Brothers cartoons). It works remarkably well with the hymn and it makes me happy to play it, or that I will eventually be able to play it - it's still kind of rough right now.

* Am somewhat disappointed to find, during my wal-mart foray of yesterday, that they've up and quit carrying the Applegate Farms chicken sausages I was buying - these were little frozen breakfast sausages and were JUST low enough in sodium that it was okay for me to eat them. They were an ideal "I need some protein but I don't know what to fix" food - they microwaved up quickly (they were fully cooked) and they were good.

In their place in the freezer case? Quorn. Which I dare not eat as this is a mycoprotein based non-meat food - it is made from a Fusarium fungus, and that is one of the genera I am *most* allergic to - it's entirely possible it could kill, or at the very least, hospitalize me. (I similarly have to avoid miso - it is made with an Aspergillus and the two times in my life I mistakenly ate something with miso, I got the worst migraine ever within about 20 minutes....)

That's what aggravates me about wal-mart and about them being the only grocery store of any size in town: they choose to quit carrying something and I can't get it any more. (The Kroger's in Sherman doesn't carry the sausages: I looked, last time I was there). It IS frustrating with one store having a near-monopoly. (Green Spray, as much as I like it for some things, is small, and they can't carry all that much). And no, I don't know if we're still getting an Albertson's. The site I've been told is the likely building site is extremely inconvenient and also too small for a decent-sized grocery.....so I don't know. Has Albertson's expanded into that "neighborhood market" concept, where they have small stores with limited selection that smaller or more impoverished communities get instead of a REAL supermarket?

* BlackBoard is back. I couldn't log in this morning; it claimed either my password or my username was wrong. I KNEW I had not changed the password and I was fairly sure I hadn't developed some kind of small-scale aphasia that caused me to forget the correct username.

So then I wondered: oh dear, did the fact that someone let ransomware in on campus maybe mean BlackBoard got hacked? I know that hacking a class-management website sounds bizarre but it happened here once before, shortly before I began using it: a "disgruntled" former employee of IT here apparently went in and "vandalized" a lot of courses, dumping all the material, making them go blank. This was a big issue as someone I know here was on maternity leave at the time and was depending on BlackBoard for her classes to run....and then it was all gone.

The other frustrating thing was, the local police, when told "this is what happened and we know who did it" (because of certain "fingerprints" left in the system) responded with, "If he was distributing kiddie porn* we'd be on him like a duck on a Junebug, but we don't really think this rises to a criminal matter"

Maybe not, but it was a giant hassle and really, it was a form of cybercrime even if nothing but time and peace of mind was stolen from people.

(*That same year there was at least one instance of that in my town....)

So I called the Help Desk. Explained the issue to the person on the other end and he said, "Wait.....let me try logging in." A few moments' silence and then, "Well...yeah....that's a problem."

It's not good when IT responds with, essentially, "I had no idea that is happening and I have no idea how to fix it." But he said he'd get on it and it seems to be back.

* And MAN but I am tired. I think it's summer teaching. I just hit a wall about 20 minutes before the end of this morning's classes and was like, "Can I make it until 20 of the hour?" (when class ended). I could tell my concentration tanked because I was searching for words and didn't feel as lucid.

I still have to set up this afternoon's lab but at least that's minimal work for me once it's set up.

But crikey. By Thursday I'm just wiped, and I think it's the combination of the double pace, teaching a class I've never taught before in the summer (soil science), the humidity here, and also doing almost nothing BUT teaching.

I'm still thinking this may be the last summer I teach. Summer teaching may be a young persons' game....especially with my allergies I don't quite have the "spoons" for it.

* One bit of good news, though: my stomach is no longer sensitive to peanut butter (if it ever was, it was very hard to suss out what would bother me and what would not). Peanut butter was a big part of my life because it was one of those "I need a quick snack that has protein in it" things, or one of those, "I need to eat a meal but don't feel like cooking" things. Or a "I have a really long day ahead of me so I need a filling breakfast but I can't face eating an egg at 6 am" thing. Right now I think the Jif Naturals is my favorite but I'm going to experiment. (I had been getting a refrigerated kind but I kinda sorta suspect I may have got a bad batch at some point....)