Quick Successions: New Mexico Edition

If I have done my math right, we celebrated the 168th anniversary of the Mormon Pioneers' initial arrival into the Salt Lake Valley on Friday. On Saturday, the members of the LDS church in Topeka, Lawrence, and the surrounding communities had breakfast and activities at Clinton Lake State Park. I woke Hannah up early and she and I went. She warmed up to the situation by going down the slide and playing in the sand. Then she had a pancake. After breakfast, she was ready to go play games and do crafts while I ushered her around. She didn't understand what we were celebrating, but she did like doing the stuff. Lots of people were there.  Playing in the sand.  At the doll making station. Riding around in a handcart. The handcart was her favorite. She actually took several rides and was a bit fussy when I told her it was time to go.  It has been really hot around here. Temperatures over 100 degrees and heat indexes at almost 120. We left the part...

I am a member of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA). This is a group interested in labor issues and instructional practices regarding the teaching of writing at the university. This year their annual meeting was in Boise, Idaho. I booked my ticket about two months ago and I realized that it was the first time I had bought a plane ticket to Boise since 2001. I lived in the area for the first 19 years of my life. I think I was due in for a visit. In order to save money, I went by myself. I actually had a really good time at the conference. There is a huge focus on networking and so they feed us all of our meals at the conference at tables where people can sit down and talk. They also do what they can to pick venues where all the sessions can be in the same building and that the hotel is the conference site or isn't too far away. In Boise, that meant that the Grove Hotel and the Boise Center were the sites. The other thing they do is give us "recess...

It was a really rainy spring and there are still storms every week. Here's the storm coming in about 4 p.m. today at the edge of Lawrence.  About 20 minutes later, here is the view looking straight up from my house. Soon after this, it started raining. When I went back inside the tornado warnings were on the television. The picture below is from last week when a twister touched down in a Kansas City outskirt called Lee' Summit. Apparently a tornado did touch down about five miles from us. It headed east. When I looked on the Internet to find a picture, there was this one below. I don't know if it is one from our area today for sure. If I find something better I will take it down and repost something.  This does look like the right highway though. Independence Day was spent reading, working on the dissertation, and making a little shopping trip. Brian made some hamburgers on the grill and we had blueberry, whipped cream, and raspberry layer parfaits ...

Hannah went to see Inside/Out. She liked it. I didn't think it was aged right for her. She said her favorite character was ANGER. Here she is inside the theatre waiting to go in. No trace of anger anywhere.  There was also tornado scare this past week. You can see the tornado path if you expand the image. Hannah slept through the whole thing. The warning lasted about about 2 hours from midnight to 2 am or so. After that, it was just a severe thunder storm warning.  When it wasn't storming, it was hot, hot, hot. Hannah and Brian broke out the "puddling pool" as it is called. This is a very inspiring summery shot, I think.  Our wedding anniversary always falls between Father's Day and the Fourth of July. Each are cake baking occasions in their own right. This year, I decided to make a Fourth of July cake, but a week early. Hannah helped with the mixing and the frosting. She can read the back of the box to tell the ingredients (because...

Hannah is old enough to participate fully in Father's Day. So this year I let her help pick the gifts and supervised her making a card. She gave her dad a tie, tie tack from his mission, and a Star Wars children's book that they could read together. I even thought I would let her wrap the presents. She still needs some practice, but she did have fun. We wrapped the stuff on Saturday and I thought her little heart was going to burst over the next 18 hours. It took everything in her not to tell her dad that she had a present for him and what it was. Here is the card she made. She put four heart stickers and wrote her dad a note. She also put to great big Hs for Hannah. I was impressed. I didn't tell her to do this. Hopefully the rest of her name will come quickly. At church Hannah went up to sing the Father's Day song with the other children, but they tried to get her to stand in a crowd of people and she recoiled and so they stuck her on the very end i...

I prepare adjunct faculty and staff developers from five school districts to teach ESL endorsement courses at BYU. I have done this since 2006. When I went to graduate school I decided that I would try to keep coming back to BYU to do this so that I could be sure and get to Utah at least once a year. Last year we missed the plane and had trouble getting the rental car, but this year the trip was a lot smoother. Hannah was very good on the plane. She is too big to fly in a car seat though. Next trip we are going to let her sit in a regular seat. While on the plane she ate snacks and played with my iPad and read the in flight literature. Eventually she just sat back and took a nap. Hannah helped pack her own suitcase this year. She even schlepped it though the airport on her own, for the most part. She is good at going up the escalators, but getting on the moving walkway made her more than a little nervous. It took two or three times to dispel her anxiety. Now she is a pro. W...

I like it when the school year ends because I can running in the evenings, rather than going to class. This is along my path by the Haskell Indian Nations University, which is also in Lawrence. I liked the pinks and the puffy clouds as the sun set. Kansas is a good place for watching clouds move quickly across the sky. A couple of weeks ago I passed my dissertation proposal defense and last week my ethics board approval went through, so I am officially working on my dissertation. I also finally finished the book I have been working on for just over a year. It is called Exploring Pedagogies for Diverse Learners Online. 93,000 words and 320 double-spaced pages. The book should be coming out towards the end of the year. It was a lot of hard work. When I sent the manuscript to the publisher I was at work. At the behest of my research partner, I took a victory lap around the building and came back to work on my next project, which is a textbook chapter about transitioning Special Edu...