giveway

after a somewhat sick weekend (sick as in sore throat, not as in really sweet), i took my first real bike ride of the 'season' yesterday. i found some great maps on the onondaga cycling club website. each map includes a drawing of the route and the distance of each length of the route. so i thought to myself, i can't get lost doing this, its all right here! i was wrong. i made it through the first turn correctly and rather than making the second turn i ended up riding about 12 miles out of my way. i only went about 6 before i realized that i really should have come to that second turn by now and perhaps i should turn around. i found that turn and then decided to head back to my car since i had already been riding for about an hour. the ride itself was great though and reminded me of oxford in a lot of ways. for the majority of the ride i was alone on country roads - which is always nice - and passed the occasional cyclist - which is good to see.
i spent the rest of my memorial day preparing for teaching today. i decided to teach my class boolean operators (AND, NOT, OR) using bartending since they are 'challenging' students and often need a little something extra to shut their mouths and listen to me - i thought alcohol might do that. it seemed to work. they were all actually kind of excited about the topic and nobody freaked out today, so i owe some props to this article recommending using alcohol to teach these ideas, although i chose to ignore the disclaimer. i asked them to make drinks using different cans filled with colored water labeled GIN, VODKA and TONIC. i gave them recipes like: 1.tonic AND gin OR vodka 2. tonic AND gin AND vodka. -- so the idea behind all of this is that they will learn that when they put a whole bunch of ANDs in there, they will get something really specific and when they put OR in there, that makes what might come up as results really broad. i don't know if they picked up on all of that but at least i can use this to refer back to when they ask questions about searching.
yesterday was also my grandma's birthday which is the kickoff to what seems to be a birthday season. soon to follow are my mum and sister -- and erin just had her big 2-3. i talked to her (my grandma) on the phone for a moment which was nice and made me sorry i couldn't be there for the 'party.' she sounded cute as always and told me that she and my grandpa were the only ones sitting down for dinner and they were waiting for everyone else so they could eat and when she passed the phone to my grandpa, he told me he was kind of hoping the party would end before dark so he could ride his bike home. although i'm sure this is not how it went when i heard that i imagined my grandma and grandpa coming in, grandma handing the cake she most likely baked off to someone and coats to someone else, the two of them sitting at the table immediately, ordering their drinks and trying to get the dinner on the road.
anyway, talking to them made me excited for my one-day trip home for my mom's 60th b-day party at the end of june. i'll be in chicago for the ALA (american library association) annual conference for a long weekend at the end of june and i'll take a day (at least) away from there to par-tay with the mother. having a teaching job is a pain because it's really hard to take any time off so that pretty much ties me to syracuse every tues and thurs morning until aug. 13th (which i just calculated gives me two weeks off before i start school for the fall). hopefully i'll be taking one day off though to kick it with my fam in colorado this summer. we'll see.
ah, good times. i suppose i'll go read some books i'm trying to finish at the moment or i'll head to the library and return the 100 books i have checked out and replace them with something new. later (yes, this was a really boring post but i was looking to waste some time before a meeting and hopefully you were looking to waste some time while reading it).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31, 2005 at 10:43 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.