64. On Mowing

This week was my week again to mow the grass at church.  We have an enormous property, and it typically takes five to six hours to mow it all on a very good industrial riding mower.  Of course, today and tomorrow will likely be the hottest days of the summer, which makes mowing miserable.  So rather than wait for things to warm up, I got started at 6:45 this morning. 

I remind you, we've not had much rain, and no one irrigates the lawn at church, so it's pretty much a parched wasteland of dead brown grass with enormous green weeds every so often.  It looked to me like last week someone didn't mow an acre or so behind the pond and another acre in the back of the property--my clue was not that the grass was long, but that those parts had been overwhelmed by deep purple clover.  So I mowed them, in the process awakening a zillion tiny bugs from their peaceful slumber to swarm my face, mouth, eyes, ears, and hair. 

Normally, I very much enjoy mowing. But today's experience was an exercise in frustration.  Between the ever increasing heat, the swarms of deer flies, those stupid shoot like weeds that were the only thing I was actually cutting--and even so, only about one in three of them actually cuts when you ride over them with the mower--I gave up after a couple hours and called it good enough.

We need some stinking rain.

63. Fourteen

This fall I will begin my 14th year of teaching English at Bethel.  I don't know where the time goes other than to say that the present has a way of becoming the past very quickly.That will be fourteen years worth of essays I've read.  Sometimes I wish I would have kept some stats.  Here are some estimates.

Essays read/graded: 25,000
Portfolios graded: 1400
times reading the Odyssey: 25
add/drop forms filled: 120
student drop in office visits: 4200
committee meetings attended: 260
lunch time basketball games played: 4680
photocopies made: enough to wipe out a forest
number of times I've worn a tie: 0
number of times I've taught Lolita: 2
number of  Speech (COMM 171) sections I taught in 1999-2000: 5
number of sections of COMM 171 I've taught since 2004: 0
Office moves: 1
Office rearranges: 16
times I've wanted to quit and become a peach farmer who writes nature poetry:13
plagiarism cases I reported: 30
plagiarism cases I dealt with myself: 200
Bethel softball games attended: 45
chapel speeches: 7
faculty retreat presentations: 5
dissertations completed: 1
number of visits Morgan has made to my office: 23
humanities major graduates: 6
humanities major graduates prior to 2010: 0
days of class missed due to sickness: 13
snow days: 3