May 2003 Archives

It's just too cool today here in Missouri to be the first day, unofficially, of summer. I'm still wearing the long sleeved t-shirt from this morning. Whenever I go outside, the grass is still cool, and my feet get blue. Nonetheless, it's a beautiful spring day. I'll fire up the grill in an hour or so, but wait until later in June to go swimming in the lake.

There's a poetic quality to wireless computing. I'm sitting outsiide on the Purdue campus posting this with my wireless Toshiba PDA. The post will travel, voiceless, through the air until a technological wonder prints it on Voice. Poems are like that. They float around in the space of the brain, voiced but voiceless, until articulated by tongue, teeth, and lips, and the wires of our hands, at which time they appear on paper. In this case, here.

I'm leaving in just a few moments for the Computers and Writing 2003 Conference at Purdue. It's the annual get together of college writing teachers who use technology for teaching and research. I've skimmed the conference program without noticing much about using online technology for publishing poetry, though there is a pretentious pre-conference workshop called the Digital Publishing Project. Maybe it's more than using a layout program along with PDF, or maybe it's more than hypertext. Maybe I should go.

In case you follow the news and perchance heard, read, or saw a blurp about tornadoes Tuesday night in De Soto, and then connected that remote town in southeast Missouri with the home of 2River.

There were indeed tornadoes and straight line winds that devastated parts of town and outlying areas. Our house luckily came through with minor damage.

We lost some roof and some gutters and part of the sofit blew out, I think to equalize the pressue in the attic, so we have insulation all over the front of the house. But the damage to the house is minor, and we have insurance.

Several trees came down, and that's the worst part of it all. They were massive oak trees, and limbs in other trees broke. There's a lot of clean up.

Need firewood?

But nothing crashed into the house, unlike houses across the lake, where docks were picked up and blown into the sides of houses, and houses elsewhere that had trees in them.

The good news is the trees Ann and I planted during the last four years all remain.

So all is well.