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June 24, 2006
Diggin' in the dirt...
Today was my first day working at Grindstone Farm, the organic farm that provides the produce for the Community Supported Agriculture of Central York pod program. At the beginning of the season, share partner Kelly R. and I enrolled for a working share. What this means is that we agreed to work a minimum of 20 hours over the course of the 20 week season in blocks of at least 4 hours at the farm, doing whatever farm chores were required that day: weeding, picking, planting, etc.
On the Saturday after I returned from Florida, I drove north toward Pulaski to Tinker Tavern Road and my first encounter with Grindstone Farm. What an awesome place it is! Not just fields, though they are sooo cool to see, but also woods and a pond and a great and old blueberry field. Yippee! Walking through the woods on the way to the blueberry field that morning reminded me so much of walking in the woods back home in western Washington that I grinned all morning. It was a cool damp morning, and it was just fabulous.
So today I made the trip again, a quiet serene drive north on 81 with little traffic and the same sense of ease and contentment I felt on the open road last summer. The city and its commercial suburbs gradually gave way to the farm and pasture lands of the rural north country, and there were few other drivers venturing about at that hour.
Todays chores began with hand weeding a shallot field. I put on my invincible floppy hat, and my as yet unused spiffy new Atlas Glove Original Nitrile Touch gloves I got for Christmas and set about the task. Diggin' in the dirt. Diggin' and scratchin' and pullin' up weeds without disturbing the plants. Coooooool. There were seven of us altogether this morning, and we finished the shallot field in a little over 2 hours. It was gratifying to look behind myself in the rows and see nice clean rows of shallot plants with no weeds. There is a surprising sense of victory in that. The gloves are awesome. They fit close and stretchy, cuz they're thin knit, but are tough because of the nitrile coating. Weeding with them was almost like using bare hands, but better. The fit was great, the flexibility wonderful, and the best part was my hands emerged pretty clean afterwards.
On to the tomato field, where we hoed the weeds from between the plants. We only got about half the field done before the workday was over, but even that was satisying. Note to self, though: take my own hoe. The one I tried to use today was too short and a bit dull. Hard on the back.
I'd almost forgotten how good gardening is for my soul. Stephen Covey, in his famous book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and all its related books and planning tools, emphasises over and over the need to take time to sharpen the saw. That's what gardening does for me in a way nothing else I know does. It sharpens my saw. I'd almost forgotten.
I am so glad I joined the CSA-CNY program, so thankful to Kelly for agreeing to share a share with me, and so happy we chose the workshare option. I've been interested in CSA since before I left Seattle, but never found one or really got connected until now. Everyone should consider joining CSA-CNY. Not only is the produce just incredible, it's just logical to support a local farmer willing to work to keep an organic farm (not easy) and provide deliveries each week by subscription. The farm is good for the community, however widely you draw that circle.
It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes a community to sustain a farm. I'm proud to be a part of it.
Posted by cageyer at 01:47 PM | Comments (1)
June 23, 2006
Mi Casa esta.....
way, way cool!
As you may know if you are a fan of GR's blog, we have a new home!
GR put together a lovely set of photos from our two visits there. The second visit included his family, so there are some great shots of Carter enjoying the toys of the current owners (we don't know if the backyard apparatus stays or not...). The link gives you all the thumbnails together. You can click on any one of them for a larger view, and then it becomes a slide show if you like.
We expect to be moving the end of July. I can't even tell you how cool this house is. And the yard... oh a happy gardener am I.
Posted by cageyer at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2006
And there was much sorrow in the land....
It was with great sadness that I read the notice this morning that La Tazza, the small, elegant and wonderful coffee house started by Mike and Susan last year that quickly became a favorite place to work, read, meet and otherwise feel comfortable, will be closing its doors on June 30.
Once again the SU Hill community has failed. Failed to support a locally owned small business. Failed to appreciate the availability of organic and fair trade items of refreshment, failed to sustain something wonderful.
And the people laid down and were very grieved.
Posted by cageyer at 12:18 PM | Comments (1)
June 19, 2006
Six Wives meme
I picked this up over at Clancy's place. A fun little meme for us English lit/history fans:
Katherine Parr spent nearly her whole life married to crotchety old men: Henry was the THIRD old fart she was forced to marry. Is it any wonder she turned to books and religion to occupy her time?
Katherine wasn't just smart, she was a tiny bit uppity, too: she almost got herself thrown in jail for arguing with His Royal Fatness about some theological issues. After Henry croaked, Katherine dropped the prim and proper act and married Thomas Seymour, a handsome, dashing pirate kind of guy who was also as dumb as a post.
Posted by cageyer at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)
June 07, 2006
AP Reading - Day 6
We lose track of what day of the week it is. We only know how far in we are, and how far we have to go. As of noon today, our room of roughly 305 readers had read 72% of the papers we have to read for the whole of the week. Yesterday, we read 54,000 essays, or 20% of the week's total in a single day. The statistics are impressive. More impressive to me is our accuracy rating: we are within hundreths of a point, the most accurate of the three rooms, as these things are measured. And we are reading on day six with the same accuracy we read on day 2, indicating that even though we are going faster, we are not sacrificing our quality.
Cool.
Tonight's outing was a visit to the next over local tourist attraction, the Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse. It's all a historic site, all a museum. I climbed to the top of the tower to get this (among other) shot(s).
In its day, the light from this lighthouse could be seen 19 nautical miles out to sea. That's a long way. It was also very near here that the Commodore sank. The Commodore, literature fans, is the gunrunner upon which Stephen Crane was a crewman. He survived the wreck, and the experience inspired his story "The Open Boat." The light they aimed for was the Ponce de Leon Inlet lighthouse. No wonder AP Readers in English travel here year after year...
This will be the last year, though. AP English is moving next year to Louisville, Kentucky. Seems we have outgrown the capacity of this resort town and need to find bigger digs. So to the home of the Derby we go. I hope I get invited back. This has been a really interesting experience, and I've learned a lot from it. More about that later.
Posted by cageyer at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)
AP Reading - Day to Day
It's been an interesting, really interesting couple of days. The first full day of reading, I noticed two of my tablemates were reading at least one and a half folders to my one. I'm not usually competitive that way, but somehow this bugged me, so I determined to increase my speed without sacrificing the quality of my reading or my judgement. I must've done okay, cuz I didn't get any additional "you might want to look at" notes from my table leader.
It's hard, though, to go too fast. Every paper is a little bit different, even though there are some common (often superficial, often just wrong) themes in the responses. I find myself having all sorts of teacher zone-out moments - those times when I see a particular kind of problem in a student response, and think "how would I teach literature, and writing, in such a way to try and address this gap?" That for me might be the biggest reward for doing this: to learn how to be a better teacher by reading the writing of students who hope not to be in my class. More on that later.
Meanwhile, a brief view of the scenery here - an arrival day picture taken before I knew I wasn't staying there...
Posted by cageyer at 07:00 AM | Comments (0)
June 02, 2006
AP Reading - Day 1
As you might expect, the first day is all about norming. What you might not expect, as I didn't, was spending the first full hour introducing ourselves (in tables of 8) while runners brought people copies of missing stuff. (Excuse me, but the room is fully set, nametags and all, and there are copies of stuff missing from various places? Score -5 for preparation).
From a very large stack of sample essays, we were asked to read sets of 3 or 4 and assign scores based on the rubric provided. Then we took a survey of the room to see how well aligned we were. I was surprised, at first, at how central the center of the distribution was. But then I recalled that many of these folks have been doing this for years, so maybe it's not so surprising.
Anyway, here's the deal: The readers for this project at mostly high school teachers who teach AP courses. Some of us are college folk, including my roommate (who reminds me sooo much of my friend Bridget that I keep forgetting her name...). All the student who take the exam answer 3 "free-response" questions. Each of us is assigned to 1 question. Mine is a selection from an Oscar Wilde play (I knew that Victorian Lit specialty would come in handy...).
As you might expect, if you know me, my scores are usually below the room majority. Not by much, but by a point usually. Sometimes I'd right on the norming mark. Sometimes I'm generous. But mostly I'm more critical. I'll have to see how that develops after I've read a few hundred of these things.
The room situation worked out okay, I guess. We're almost 3 miles from the reading site, and there's a shuttle bus on an uncertain schedule. I walked this morning, and I'll walk back again tonight. Since I can't use the fitness center I was planning on having, the walk on the beach seems a good substitute.
Stay tuned for more exciting reading details....
Posted by cageyer at 09:11 PM | Comments (0)
AP Reading - arrival
Sometimes I think my ultimate destiny is to be a meeting planner.
We arrived from Orlando in fine style. The thunderstorm had passed and there was sun over the beach when we arrived. But after standing in the predictable line for check-in, the young woman behind the counter excused hereself when I presented my name, and went to someone further down the counter, then picked up a list and walked out from behind the counter, none of which boded well. She returned to tell me that despite the little green paper in my hand, I was not, in fact, staying in the central hotel for the project, but I was staying at some hotel about 2 miles away. Hmmmmmm.
I was invited to move across the lobby to join a small but steadily growing group of people who were somewhat unsure what would happen next and were in varying degrees of unhappiness about that. I wasn't happy, but I wasn't too upset... yet.
Then the site coordinator for this event appeared. She said we needed to be patient and trust that it would work out, that she had only learned of "the problem" at 12:30 that very day and she was diligently working to get a contract cut so we could move on to the designated last minute new hotel.
hmmmm....
she didn't know about this until the day of arrival??? Our numbers were a surprise to her???? They bought us all plane tickets - so they were surprised that we showed up??
heyh?
Okay, so we wait. Some of us for three hours. Then we get on a bus to make the journey to the new hotel, who doesn't know who we are, so we have to check in one at a time (in a group of 50) with 1+ desk clerks. Hmmm.....
Then, when we want to get back to the conference site for the dinner, no one can tell us how that will happen.
Excuse me?
so later I learn that they have booked 800 rooms at the primary hotel. There at least 1400 of us here, and even with doubling up, since some folks are allowed to pay for the private room, and even though this isn't the Math AP reading, it seem obvious there was going to be a shortage. That it wasn't planned for is just unreasonable to me.
and so it goes.
We'll see what comes next.
Posted by cageyer at 08:02 AM | Comments (0)
June 01, 2006
Reader for fun (?) and profit
A couple of months ago academom told me about this opportunity for summer work: reading Advanced Placement exams for a company called ETS. So I logged in, applied, and voila, here I am in not-so-sunny Orlando for a full seven days exploring the writing skills of would be advanced placement high school students. Pretty ‘citin’ stuff!
The afternoon thunderstorm arrived just as we did. We flew through it about ten miles north, or maybe east, of the airport, and then it followed us in. When it rains, it means it. Glad I found that plastic poncho before I left this morning. So far, everything on the trip has gone well. Flights were pretty full but good, on time and short. The layover in Charlotte was just about an hour, which was fine. Charlotte is a nice airport, in what appear to be really pretty country I’d like to explore more someday. I didn’t realize there was so much wine produced in North Carolina. I visited the Biltmore Estate on my move from Washington to Syracuse four years ago, where I found some of the best wine I’ve every had. I brought two or three cases with me to New York, but it is long since gone and I can’t get more without traveling south. That’s a good reason just by itself, but it appears that there is a whole wine industry here that bears touring. So now I have one more trip to add to my list of things I want to do someday.
Headed now by bus to Daytona Beach, where I find out what’s in store for the rest of the week. Stay tuned!
Posted by cageyer at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)