The Old Prof

Talking , pretty much just killing time, yesterday i said one of the students in class had been on the question “like a chicken on a June bug”. Not an unusual statement for my generation in my section of the west, when young. But more and more it seems like the old views have no currency. I explained what i meant and said that lately its getting like I’m teaching a foreign language.

Explaining my apparently dark aside I said that chickens can be pretty voracious and if they were bigger they would be eating us. After all, Chickens look pretty much like dinosaurs and some dinosaurs may have had feathers. so this morning I ran into a headline,

Study: Tyrannosaurus Rex Basically a Big Chicken

Vindication.

serendipity

And perhaps a bit off the topic of the day, “The Religious Communitarians of America. Back Woods Utopians”

I am easily diverted

And I miss the old days, the old ways, when no one had to explain anything. We just knew. We were a little closer to nature, which bred a natural homogeneity of culture. We had all seen chickens outside their natural habitat of Seranwrap and nuggets.

Posted by Old Prof at 08:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Or as my wife says, “there is no need to yell”

my wife has, among other things, diabetes. she also has a stubborn disregard of anything needed to control it. We, i, used to take her numbers, but after a while, ten years or so i noticed that it didn’t matter what the numbers were, she refused to modify her eating habits. i grew weary. And I couldn’t stand pricking her finger. I think i suffered more from that than she did. So what with one thing and another we just quit doing the readings.

We have a new machine now which works more easily and accurately and I have decided to get back into the whole miserable experience. This afternoon we did the test (with her doing the blood letting) and she was only at 501. No, i do mean 501.

So a few hours later when I saw she had just sneak eaten a whole Hearshey Bar I worried. She did not. She pointed out that it had almonds in it. Going into the kitchen an hour later I noticed the remnants of a recent root beer float.

I went for an hour long walk. Having regained some tattered scrap of sanity I redid the test, fully expecting the monitor to explode. 437

I’m thinking of giving her another candy bar and seeing if we can get it down to 120.

Posted by Old Prof at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m 74 now and have been teaching since 1959. it’s starting to feel like thats enough. Not the teaching part which is still fun and enlightening but the getting up at 5:45 to go teach. That is getting old. Ok, it always was but more and more I wake up still exhausted and think, “I really don’t have to do this. I could have quit years ago”. i was happier before that occurred to me. I’ve never gotten up happily. Early has always equated misery. i think the only thing that has ever seemed worth early rising is Pheasant hunting. I no longer do that. So last month I made an appointment to talk to a counselor about retirement. Thirty five to forty five minutes later I had a stack of paper and pamphlets that have to be filled out and a set of instructions about how to fill them (out) and which I no longer remember and never understood. I join with another compatriot in thinking that I’m not smart enough to retire.

as

Posted by Old Prof at 08:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)