Friday, May 05, 2006

Zoo Tycoon.

It's nearly the end of the Fifth of May.

I decided today I'd eat at Cinqo de Mayo Restaurant at the Travel Lodge along Sixth Street. I pass it most days when I drive to campus to work at my office, and I figured it was a good day to try it out. I ordered from the lunch menu the Cinqo de Mayo burrito. It was big, and pretty good. In fact, it was so big I hardly needed to eat any dinner.

It might have helped that I also had a couple bowls of ice cream at our celebation of service award at UIS. We created a "leg-of-the-stool" award for service. The UIS says that faculty are supposed to have a balanced mix of scholarship, teaching, and service, and the university is kept steady by a balance among these activities like the legs of a stool. Well, the service leg isn't as strong as the teaching and scholarship legs, and this celebration was an attempt to start changing that.

I got home and I was exhausted. I was up late trying to help a student who is close to failing a course I'm teaching. I edited their paper and wrote more comments and suggestions than I think they had written in their own paper. This was a paper that should have been turned in a couple weeks ago, but I only saw it for the first time yesterday. So when i got home I was sleepy and took a nap.

Waking up, I went into the basement and tried the new computer game my sons have been raving about this week. I gave them Zoo Tycoon (with all the expansion packs) for the 12th Day of Ridvan, and they've been playing it an awful lot. I thought I would give it a try and see what it was like. That was about 8:00, when I went downstairs. At about 11:00 Jeri came down and reminded us that it was far past our bedtime. Wow, I didn't have those three hours to waste. I should have been giving feedback to students.

I guess that is what I'll do now.

Hey, it's working again.

Well, I had tried to post to this blog several times in late December and January and "Blotspot" (Blogspot) kept forgetting my password and username. It was strange, and then the semester began, and I didn't have time to post here.

It's nice to see this is up and running. I'll need to start posting here.

One thing I've learned this past semester, never teach three on-line courses in one semester. They are far too time-consuming.