That's my mother on a mule. She was a bilingual flight attendant in the years before I was born. I used her picture on a slide in the online class I taught last night; the particular slide was about which languages are supported by the knol platform. I'm not including the slide itself as a picture, even though it's in png form; it's a big file so it uses so much more space to host it. (If all my pictures were that size, it would still take about 500 posts to use up the picture hosting capacity Google has alloted me -- ah but, like most things I do, I am in this for the very long haul!)The 'CLEP channel' will be launched next week on a particular e-learning platform. There are six of us -- two in the US, two in the UK, one in Bolivia and one in India -- holed up with our computers, writing CLEP prep syllabi, each responsible for a subject, but collaborating by wiki... It's pleasant work. It always amazes me how so much of the world assumes that it's the unknown that causes anxiety. I experience very little fear of the unknown, and am pretty low, too, when it comes to performance-based anxiety. Oh no, it's the people I love that cause pain and fear, that turn me into the kind of glass ornament you see in kiosks before Christmas. Does that mean I don't want them in my life? Heavens, no! -- glass is beautiful, and some is priceless. Says The Little Prince: "You run the risk of tears when you let yourself be tamed". There are moments when it does behoove me to leave my phone off the hook while I concentrate on some "matter of consequence" (I take for granted that my performance will be high if I shut out all incoming news) but the phone will go back on soon.
The song that's playing in my head is "The Riddle" aka "There's a reason for..."
PS Just edited this -- The Little Prince discusses "matters of consequence" not "matters of nonsequence". (Then again...)
