ODU Literary Festival- Friday

Coming soon: Writing to go with the pictures! Rishi Reddi, Douglas Kearney, Richard Bausch

ODU Literary Festival- Thursday

Coming soon: Writing to go with the pictures!

Gioia Timpaneli

Steve Almond

Mary Karr

Monarch Grille (Richard Bausch, Janine Latus, Tom Robotham)

ODU Literary Festival- Wednesday

Moveable Feast

Macs and Hurricanes

Great googley-moogley. I had written blog updates from July 31 to August 20. Then, August 21 I was writing on my laptop in the Des Moines International Airport. I was plugged in, because my battery conked out last year. Suddenly, POP! It was gone. My laptop snapped off, never to turn on again. The keyboard would light up, but the screen would stay blank, and the start-up music wouldn’t play (leaving me to believe that the problems extended beyond the screen). Gone, baby, gone.

The one good thing about my computer conking out last year is that I’ve been pretty careful about saving things to disk. I lost some photo editing, and my blog updates. I don’t think I’ve lost anything else, although it will probably be like after the tornado or the burglary. Months later I will need something and be unable to find it. Only then will I know all I’ve lost.

Now I’ve gone back with my calendar to piece together what happened from July 31 to now and type entries up on my shiny new MacBook, which came with a free printer and an iPod Touch (an MP3 player that also serves as a tiny computer--See photo at left and below left). The freebies made my choice of new laptop quite simple, as did the student discount. I even managed to convince my credit card company to give me 0% interest for six months and dropped my interest rate by 3 percent after that. Yay!

I think I’ve captured most of the events of the last month or so, though some details have been lost. After all, this is the first chance I’ve had to write.

When I got back from NYC, it was right back to school the next morning. I had to update my syllabus, make lesson plans, do all my homework and grading, and buy and get used to using a Mac. As I told my friend Kelly, it was like when I went to Spain and the accent and slang were completely different from the Spanish spoken in America or Mexico. And learning the vosotros form...say what? No right-click? Qué? (For example, where is Mac’s version of Microsoft Word hiding the upside-down question mark necessary to ask a question in Spanish?) Sigh. I’ll figure it out eventually.

As we speak, I'm waiting out a hurricane/tropical storm situation. On Friday they were discussing the possibility of evacuation and advising everyone to stay indoors. Todd and I went to Wal-Mart for hurricane supplies like hand sanitizer and bottled water in case we lost running water and non-perishable food that doesn't require cooking in case we lost power. An irrational part of me believes that the storm isn't as bad as they predicted because we bought supplies, and if we hadn't bought supplies it would have been more serious. Hopefully, my theory will continue to hold true and we'll ride out the storm with nothing more than some heavy rain.