Dr. Dan took this photo of Mr. W comfy in his winter sweater, blanket, and bed, comfortable and warm, within the reach of the wood stove.
Season's Greetings from Dakota State from Tom Jones and Kevin Rydberg on Vimeo. Colleagues put together this cool video to extend greetings from us here in Madison to you where ever you are. Cheers!
Little Walter doesn't have a lot of insulation on his bony frame, so getting outside on a day like today (about 10 degrees) to do his business just does not offer any bonuses. Does it help to add pink booties and a little doggie jacket? I doubt it.
Yesterday I had the privilege of attending Dr. John Laflin's introductory literary criticism class as a visiting poet. It was a pleasant experience, with students who don't typically get to see me in that role, and they had good questions that led to some interesting discussions about individual poems and about writing in general. 
The previous post cited G.E. as the source of a great idea, but a magazine article I read afterward put a real buzz-kill on that, noting how G.E. is the scourge of the Hudson, pouring millions of gallons of PCB's in the river since forever ago. 
As I buzzed around town today, doing errands, helping neighbors, tending my own business, I couldn't help but notice the many flags flying to commemorate Veteran's Day, once a day celebrating the end of war. We do seem to have lost some of our aversion to war, though perhaps too few of us pay enough attention to the costs, in life, respect, and dollars not spent on better things. 
23 kids in two houses? Next door to each other? That's what it was in the 1970's when the Johnsons lived next to the Nelsons in Ft. Pierre. There were more kids on the block, including the Comptons, whose boys were notorious for mischief. 
landing the lead role in a production of Hamlet, to be played in the park. He doesn't want to do it. He hates Hamlet. His agent appears from California with a lucrative offer for another TV series, "Night School," to feature an idealistic high school teacher who moonlights as a semi-super hero.
I was intrigued by this story on the New York Times about a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, Arthur Rothstein, who in 1936 traveled through South Dakota documenting the drought years. He was apparently fond of the skull, hauling it around and taking pictures of it willy-nilly to document how damned dry it was here then, cows dying everywhere. His photos are in the Library of Congress, still with misleading information about them, at least according to James Curtis, who published a book on the subject in 1991: Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: F.S.A. Photography Reconsidered.
Subway riders looked around confusedly when we didn't shuffle through the doors Wednesday morning. Food vendors wondered what to do with their "chunky luncher" platters. Playgoers pondered what might have resulted in the four empty seats, ones usually populated with the most responsive audience members in Broadway (or off-Broadway) history. Empire State Building residents looked out at the Rock and saw that these four were gone (sob!) gone.
And we avoided landing belly-up on the slippery highways Saturday morning as we left Minneapolis. We got safely home again.
and 11,000 other runners took to the streets at 8:00am to tackle the 26.2 miles that makes up the Twin Cities Marathon course, navigating the streets around the lakes and rivers that make up the most beautiful urban marathon in the US. 
It's probably a good idea that I'm not running the Twin Cities Marathon this weekend. I was out in back, running the chain saw, cutting up some small chunks of wood, and one caught on the chain and jumped up and bit me in the knee-bone. Here it is just getting a good start on the swelling. This on the same leg that sports the damaged foot at the end of it. 
I love this picture of all these women at DSU displaying what position our university has in the recent rankings among public universities in the midwest, according to U.S. News and World Report.
Okay, so you're wandering in the aisles of Sunshine Foods, the pleasant treasure of a spinach quiche riding in your midsection, just along for the ride since your spouse has asked you pleasantly to go along for company, and you've got it in mind to ferret out a little dessert item, something to top off the quiche, tamp it down with a lump of sweetness, passing by the Oreos, the "home-made" O'Henry bars, the four-dollar brownies in the bakery section, and then the thought of a little pie takes hold of you like a mental lasso, towing you down the frozen foods aisle, where Mrs. Smith and her ilk linger to lure the appetite with real pies--apple, peach, French silk--but you resist, one hand clutching the cold chrome handle of the case, and your eye lingers on the smaller boxes, Mrs. Smith's sidekick Edwards, an unassuming product offering of two pieces of pie--Key Lime--and you waver, your hand reaching in to bring it in, bring it home, where, on a plate, it's not to be denied, small as it may be, fresh from its yellow cardboard wedge, a serious, albeit small, piece of pie indeed, and the first taste is golden, the next better, the rest delicious, creamy, lime lime lime, a very fine pie indeed, worth the trip, worth eating slowly, slowly, every bite a miracle.
ACU Mobile Learning from ACU Videos on Vimeo.
The move toward the laptop as a device for having students be online all the time has been growing, and there is evidence that students and faculty are getting used to the new teaching and learning methods that the devices allow. Now Abilene Christian University is suggesting that they can take the mobility one step further, not just netbooks, but Apple's iTouch or iPhone, which they're distributing to students and faculty. The move is described in "The Mobile Campus," on Inside Higher Ed. Are we ready for that? One of my consistent concerns is that the course materials and actions occur in the same stream as all the other things that vie for students' attention, coming through the same channels as Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, and all the other cool stuff that students do online.
Here's the scene when I walked in to my first class this fall, a group of freshmen on a Tuesday afternoon, some of them in their first college class. They're ready to go, some of them full of sass, some of trepidation. 
Sometimes a parking space is just too good to be true. You cruise up, every other spot is taken, and there's this one juicy parking spot right where you want to be. Why might that be? Best not to look. 
Last summer brother Jess and I rode our bikes out to Idaho and back again, quite a journey for a guy who used to rarely put 1000 miles total on a bike before I sent it down the road (some of them rarely ran). But that trip saw a little spill up in the mountains in northern Wyoming, and my Concours took a beating from that, just not enough to stop the trip. So I gathered parts and planned over the winter to get it all back together, but that didn't happen. Spring came, and the bike still was not fully assembled. Then roofing came. Then a bad foot. But over the past few days I took some time and finished the painting and got the bike all back together. Here's a pic just after I've cleaned off the accumulated dust and readied the bike for its first ride in almost a year. It's working good!
You don't think about your feet as much as you should most of the time. Take one out of commission, and you have an entirely new perspective on the importance of having both feet available for transporting yourself across a room or up and down a flight of stairs. Another note you too might recognize is that armpits are not meant to play a major role in getting from here to there. They don't like it.
Throughout our roofing project, we kept saying how good it was that nobody had gotten hurt. We could have had a sign up that said "Days Without Injuries--All of Them!" But that's not the case now. 
I'm still thinking that the signature on the board found in our old porch is Gustav Marzion (or Murzion, perhaps more likely). I found a reference to Emma Marzion in our own Smith-Zimmerman Museum site; she's buried in Graceland Cemetary here in Lake County, SD. She died in 1910. No Gustav, though; perhaps he moved on. A search for his name exactly, however, turns up nothing but this humble blogger's reference to him.
Seemed like it was time for a new post on ole' Horseshoe Seven, so the wife has hijacked the site to offer a little dedication to her hardworking roof cowboy.
My sister indicated that I had not yet put up a photo that shows some of the color we're adding to the house, so here's one. Sorry, it's a photo with my phone, not so great. Note that I'm about ready to shingle the roof to the right of the dormer pictured here. 
