4/28/08 Spring is Really Here!

It's our first day back from spring break and look what's blooming by the library!

4/29/08 Some Serious Snow Chains

I saw this machine a few weeks ago on my drive to Dixfield but couldn't get to it to photograph it. (It was off the main road and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get back if I drove down to it.) Today, it was right next to the highway, though I did have to make 6 U-turns (are you counting, Lindsay?) to be able to pull up along side it and photograph it safely.

4/19/2008 Happy Spring Break!!

It's spring break! I'll be on the road, so switch over to my travel blog to keep up with my adventures--I'll be on Long Island and then in Fort Lauderdale. I hope to come back to blooming flowers, but you never know. Before I left town, I stopped at the credit union to get some cash. They were having a snow lottery! Be the person who correctly picks the day on which there will no longer be any snow on the credit union property and you win a gift certificate for dinner at a local restaurant and two movie passes!

PS This is blog entry #350 just in "Life with the Mainiacs" blog! Congratulations to me. I personally would never have guessed that I would've been writing this long or made so many entries. And I never would've guessed I would've had so many different blogs. Just goes to show, "You never know."

4/16/08 Spring Frisbee

The snow has melted enough for these guys to be playing Frisbee! Of course, we've seen them play Frisbee in the snow, so maybe it's not quite the harbinger of spring one might think. You can see that there's still plenty of snow that needs to melt, but we're making progress. Today was a beautiful day! Gorgeous sunshine, temps in the upper 50's maybe even lower 60's, blue skies, no wind. Aaaaah.

4/16/2008 Symposium!

A really great event at UMF is Symposium. It started as a single day and is becoming a bigger event each year. This year marks the 10th Symposium. It's a time for students to showcase and share their research and creative works in a setting similar to professional conferences. Classes are canceled for the day and everyone goes to presentations all day long instead.

I'm on the University Culture Committee and one of its charges is to organize and carry out Symposium. There are programs to print, refreshments to order, rooms to organize, volunteers to recruit . . . all in all, it's a big day and a big job. Fortunately, there's a fabulous committee to work with and we pulled it off.

Here's a group of interested faculty and students interacting with students who are sharing their work in poster sessions. There are also paper sessions where students present in a more formal fashion to an audience.

This year we had t-shirts made for all presenters and their faculty sponsors--a first!

4/15/2008 spring thoughts

Welcome Spring. Goodbye Snow . . . Please!

That's the message on the bank sign in downtown Farmington. LOL. It's soooo true. As you can tell from the temperature, it's definitely getting warmer. This picture was taken right around 2pm so it was probably the warmest part of the day. But they're predicting highs in the 50's tomorrow (Wednesday) and maybe even the 60's by the end of the week. Whooop! I still don't mind the snow but I know that if we get to have 3 more seasons before the snow comes back again, I'll appreciate the snow even more. So I am looking forward to spring, short as it may be.

4/15/08 an odd parade

I'm not sure what this was about and this picture doesn't do it justice, but this "parade" was on the street moving ever so slowly in front of our house. Waaaay in the front is a street sweeper. Behind that is a front-end loader/tractor kind of vehicle. Behind that is a dump truck. And not in this picture 'cuz it just turned the corner, but behind the dump truck was a City of Farmington water truck. The street sweeper was cleaning the street but I don't understand what all the other vehicles were there for. I hope someone will comment and fill me in.

4/13/2008 we're a church again!!

Look how much of the church sign you can see now! The snow is really melting. (And look how black it's gotten over time from all the sand that was once on the roads but got plowed up into the banks and splashed up on the banks by passing cars.)

4/11/08 Dance

Friday night I went to the UMF Dancers' Spring Concert. One of my advisees, Katie Rose, a junior, is a member of the troupe and actually choreographed one of the numbers in the show. It was very cool. The concert was a lot of fun. I sat next to Geoff, a student in one of my classes last semester. He had been to the winter concert and told me that this was the best concert of the year. We both really enjoyed the show . . . a lot. There was a Red Sox game that night and many of the audience members were wearing Red Sox paraphernalia. Actually, that would happen anytime / anywhere in New England even if there isn't a game on, but I overheard several of them talking about the "sacrifice" they made to come to the concert instead of staying home to watch the game. However, I never heard anyone after the concert say they wished they had watched the game instead. There was a little girl on the front row who was watching everything very intensely. During a solo performance that was particularly beautiful, I noticed that she was mesmerized. AND she was dancing in her chair. Her little leg would stick out with a pointed toe, then she'd raise her arm just like the dancer did. She was copying every move the dancer made. It was so cute. I expect to see her enrolled at UMF in a few years and auditioning for the UMF Dancers.

3/10/2008 Town Meeting

It's that time of year again. If it's spring, there must be town meetings. Here I am at Farmington's Town Meeting. It didn't last nearly as long as last year's. One of the big items on this year's agenda was the library budget. For the first time in the library's history, they were paying insurance benefits for the employees. Seems more than reasonable to me. Yet some people objected. There were some pretty heated debates in the budget committee and selectmen meetings that led up to the Town Meeting. Fortunately, it was approved. In this photo you see the budget committee on the left and town officials (town manager, head of the police department, a few selectmen, . . . ) on the right. They had the same guy as moderator. He's really good. He knows his Robert's rule of order, kept everything straight, knew practically everyone's name, kept his sense of humor, and got us through everything.

The state passed some law that mandated that certain issues be voted on by secret ballot. Even though it was pretty obvious what the vote would be, they voted by ballot because they had to. The issue was raising the taxes in order to have a balanced budget since they had approved more expenditures than last year's budget.

They have a pretty clever system to make this go quickly. The ballot box has obviously been around for a very long time, but for ballots, everyone got a white card approximately 3x5 that had "YES" on the left and "NO" on the right and a perforation down the middle. So you picked up your ballot, tore it in half down the perforated line, put the half with your vote in the ballot box and put the half with the side you weren't going to use in the trash can.

Make your own springtime

There's still a lot of snow on the ground, but it's amazing how much has melted already. Two weeks ago, when I was walking home from school, I wouldn't be able to tell if either of the cars were in the driveway because the piled up snow in the yard was taller than the cars. Now, there are even places where I can see the ground! (Especially where MRM and her neice and nephew built a fort.)

So in honor of spring that's already here on the calendar but not in the local scenery, I changed my blog background to have a springtime look. One of my EDU 101 students (Rachel L.) showed me a cool website pyzam.com that has hundreds of free templates for Blogger, MySpace, etc. Always learning new stuff!

new photos

I found some old photos on my camera (I've been using my iPhone for photos so much lately that I forgot I had photos on my "other" camera). And I finally got around to doing something with the photos on my office computer where I took photos of my window at work. So the next bunch of postings are a backlog from the past.

I also added photos to this blog entry (Ashley had photos posted on her Picasa account that I downloaded):
http://mainiactheresa.blogspot.com/2008/02/29-102008-national-toboggan.html

and this one (Another presenter took our picture on Beth's camera and I got the photo from Beth):
http://texastheresa.blogspot.com/2008/03/352008-our-site-presentation.html

October 2007 Windows

I became a serious Red Sox fan this fall. Kevin Youkilis is my favorite player. At one point, I could even name the batting order. I learned so much. (I never heard of a "walk off home run" before but I think that's cuz the Rangers never had any of those.) I followed the playoffs very closely and changed the window appropriately.

12/7/2008 Dead Fred the Fly

This is the view from Heidi's window (see the edge of the "Under Construction" sign in the top left corner?). And that big black fly is stuck on the outside of her window. Or is that a really big fly on the wall across from the window? He was stuck there for over a month according to Heidi. She named him Fred . . . Dead Fred.

12/7/2008 Window Conversations

When I took down "Let it Snow" so suddenly (at the request of Mary who was blaming me personally for all the snow that was falling in Maine), I put up my usual "Under Construction" sign. Next thing I knew, the windows across the way had a reply. :-)

11/9/2007 - 12/7/2007 Let It Snow

I love this window design! I pictured it in my head for a long time before I went about to make it a reality. There are lots of little silver snowflakes hanging in it that barely show up in this picture. I'm still learning about the scale of the window and what shows up and what doesn't when your audience is so far away.

I put it up in November but by middle of December we had had so much snow, it was requested that I take it down.

12/18/2007 Good Luck Heidi!

Heidi is my "across the way" neighbor that always spotted my windows first. She was a big fan of the windows. She was offered a job in her local school district which will cut down on her drive time (a big consideration as the price of gas keeps rising) and has her working the same schedule as her kids who are in school. How could she resist?! We'll certainly miss her at UMF. This window was in her honor.

1/10/2008 New Year's New Window

What better way to start off the new year than a really large text message?!

4/4/08 New Spring Window

It took 3 days to change the window, but this was the plan all along. I couldn't have picked a better day to put up the new window with all that snow going on outside. Even though it's been getting warmer and things have been melting, it's not really spring yet--no matter what the calendar says.

4/1/08 April Fool's Day Window

It wasn't snowing on April Fool's Day when I put up this new window, but it was pretty cold. There's a comma after "Spring" but I guess it doesn't really matter.

Fond memories of Easters past

Look what came in the mail! It's a nighttime egg hunt kit! David and Virginia sent it with fond memories of many "Easter Egg Hunts After Dark" from days in Dallas. Someone is commercializing on our idea. But it's such a fun party, I don't mind sharing the concept with the world. This kit has 20 glow-in-the-dark eggs filled with candy and 2 flashlights. I made folks bring their own eggs and flashlights. Then we divided into 2 teams. Team A would count all their eggs, then go hide them in the front yard. Team B would count all their eggs and then go hide them in the back yard. Once all the eggs were hidden, the teams would switch yards and look for eggs. So as grownups, you got to hide and hunt Easter Eggs all in the same night. I had no trees in my yard and not much other place to hide eggs. But when you're searching for eggs by flashlight, it doesn't matter that they're not well hidden. They're still hard to find! So much fun! I hope everyone who gets one of these kits has as much fun as we did.

3/22/08 Easter Vigil

Here's the choir at St. Joseph's for Easter Vigil. There were two new singers that I've never seen before but who obviously had sung with this group in the past. You can also see our cozy choir area. Andrea is at the keyboard, Patty (pink sweater) is our cantor, Ruth and Randy (guitar player) are both backup cantors. There's another choir that sings at the Saturday night mass. During Triduum, they sang Good Friday and Easter Morning and our choir sang Holy Thursday and Easter Vigil.

2/27/08 really damp snow

Look how thick the snow is on the tree limbs! It's so damp, it sticks really well. Fortunately, it didn't get so heavy that it broke tree limbs.

4/9/08 A new blog

I started a new blog today. Check out "Write On, Wipe Off". It's about the messages that college students (and others) leave on my message board on my office door. I'd been collecting the photos for a while, though I was never sure what I was going to do with them. I just knew that I wanted to capture the fleeting moments.

There are 14 entries to get the blog off to a jump start. Mostly this blog will be about the photos but there are stories to go with the photos sometimes. It's actually an extension of this Mainiacs blog because it's still about life in Maine, but the new blog will be specific to UMF Mainiacs that I know personally. You'll have to check it out to see what I mean. ;-)

4/6/08 It's Baaaaack!

Here's the sign at church! It's almost visible again. :-)

4/4/08 Out the Classroom Window

It's Friday so here's more snow for the weekend. This storm was actually more than a dusting. It was about 2 inches and it really stuck. It was in a slush state for a long time on the ground making for pretty bad driving. The reaction from my students when we saw the snow start out the classroom window was NOT "Oh goody! Snow!" But it has made for a nice and extra long ski season (and snowshoeing and cross country skiing, but snow mobiling is pretty much over--a man died when he was going home after a day of snow mobiling and crossed a frozen river that wasn't frozen anymore).

Buried Political Preferences

The spring thaw really is happening. Check out this political sign that hasn't seen the light of day for a while but now is slowly emerging. These photos were taken over a period of 3 days (one photo per day).

Wow. That really was buried for a long time. He's not even running anymore!

3/31/08 Not Wednesday

Well now it's Monday and it's snowing. You can't see it very well in this photo, but trust me, it was snowing. I guess it's not so much that it snows only on Wednesday as much as it is that it seems to snow more often on Wednesday than the other days. Actually, the real problem has been that the Wednesday snows have been the worst and we've had more school cancellations on Wednesdays than any other day of the week. Makes it tricky for classes that only meet on Wednesdays, or in my case Monday and Wednesday.

3/28/08 Wednesday or Weekends

Today's Friday and not Wednesday but this really is a different picture than the one from two days ago. It's actually been warm enough that all the snow melted off my car since Wednesday. Last week I mentioned to someone that it always snows on Wednesdays and she replied, "Wednesdays and weekends." Frankly, I hadn't noticed the weekends as much, but here it is Friday morning and it's snowing in time for the weekend.

3/26/08 Wednesday. You guessed it!

Wednesday morning looking out my window . . .

3/22/08 A Poor (Rich?) Alternative

You saw the "good" butterfly nets at Reny's for 99 cents. Here's the cheap plastic imitation with a much shorter handle and a smaller net for twice the price at Hannaford's (a "local" chain that serves the Eastern United States). This is the very kind I was talking about in the Reny's posting that are the typical butterfly nets.

3/21/08 Spring?

Seen outside the student center. There was an email to the whole campus saying someone had cleared the snow away from a garden next to the library and that tulips were coming up. I wonder if someone cleared the snow away here, knowing this (whatever it is) would be coming up. I don't know what it is, but I think it's a sure sign of spring.

3/21/08 Ultimate Frisbee Fund Raiser

A pie-eating contest as a fund raiser--there's an interesting notion. So they arranged for two faculty members to be in the contest and then they sold chances for 4 other slots. People bought tickets for the privilege of maybe being in the contest. OR they bought tickets for the privilege of possibly giving someone else the privilege. Three students and the athletic director (second contestant from the left) won. The athletic director said she didn't buy a single ticket. I think they could make even more money if they allowed people the opportunity to buy a ticket back. So for example, if there were 10 tickets with the athletic director's name on it, she could pay $1 a ticket to take those tickets out of the running. It's just an idea. ;-)

Preparation:

Go!

That's my co-teacher Beth in the bandana with "the look" on her face. She was one of the two faculty that agreed ahead of time to participate. I think we can call her "a celebrity contestant".

3/19/08 It's Wednesday, Therefore . . .

You guessed it. It's snowing today . . . all day, and into the night.

3/19/08 Bob Marley at UMF

It's a really bad photo, but it makes the point. I went to the Bob Marley concert at UMF tonight. Bob's a famous comedian who's been on all the late night shows multiple times and has played all the famous comedy clubs. He's famous for his stories about Maine. He's actually FROM Maine and in fact, many people have told me about him and his humor ("You should get his CD, he's really funny" or "If you want to know about Maine, listen to this guy."). But nobody mentioned he was a UMF graduate. Apparently, he was a really good student who majored in Community Health. But he told the chair of the department when he arrived, "I want to get a degree and I want it in Community Health, but my real career aspiration is to be a comedian." He would drive to Boston on a school night, perform in a Boston club, and drive back that night in order to be in class the next day. But it all paid off. He's doing what he loves and he's really good at it. And he comes back to UMF about once a year to do a fund raiser for the Health Club. What a great guy.

So I went to the concert and everyone was right. He's hysterical and if you really want to know Maine, listen to his stories. (Or if you already know Maine, listen to his stories and just laugh a little more than the rest of the audience.) I laughed and laughed and laughed. The event was sold out. This is in the gymnasium, so there are folks filling the bleachers on the side and then the entire gym floor is covered in chairs and there's a little portable stage at one end. As you can see from this photo, it's hard to see him because the stage isn't very tall. But I could see him well enough and the most important thing was to hear him. He's sooo funny.

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3/19/08 and 3/27/08 Elf and the Dog Beds

Any port in a storm . . . Elf will sleep in Benny's dog bed, in his own bed when it's stacked on top of Benny's dog bed, . . .

3/18/08 A Day That Will Live In Infamy

Today we had a special visitor in our department meeting, Mike (the tenured professor who is on leave of absence for 2 years with a possible one year extension whose position I'm filling as a visiting professor for 2 years with a possible one year extension). He announced that he's resigning his position as of June 1, 2008 which means there will be an open tenure-track position. The department will do a formal national search in the fall. Suddenly my timeline is drastically altered. My visiting professor gig is up earlier than I had planned. I wanted to be a Scarlet O'Hara about it ("I'll think about that . . . tomorrow") but now I have to decide . . . do I want to stay in Maine or move on?