Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2004 > Mid-October 2004 Edition
I still have not quite gotten over the fact that Caitlin Clarke is no longer with us. And, after reading all the e-mails I got from her friends and students and relatives, I am bitter with myself for not having paid her a visit at her hometown of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, while she was yet alive.
A memorial service for her was held by her kith and kin on September 30th in Sewickley's Edgeworth Club, where she performed in her first play when she was a teenager. Another memorial for her by her colleagues was held on October 18th at the Flea Theater off Broadway in New York.
The late summer brought the blooming of the goldenrods along the county roads and at places where fences intersect. They are so lovely with their brilliant gold. I would appreciate them more if the ragweed did not spew its pollen at the same time.
That's all gone now, and the trees have changed their colors from green to those warm colors of yellow and orange and red and brown that we associate with fall.
The weather was warm and dry almost all the way to last week. That gave farmers plenty of time to harvest their corn and soybeans. The weather was the best this past summer if you were a corn stalk or a soya bush. Farmers started harvesting the first week of September — the earliest in memory. Now that the cold rain of later autumn has come, the harvest is almost complete.
This past week has been fog and rain all morning, and most cloudy days all afternoon. I don't mind the weather so much, though.
Last Sunday was the open house for the J.P. Winslow House on Washington Street a couple of blocks east of the Museum. Practically half the town — including Madre, Tina and myself — came to tour the house.
The place was built in 1861, and it shows: Fireplaces in practically every room, a very narrow staircase, closets shoehorned into bedrooms, and a brick hearth where a stove now stands.
I go into the tour in detail in a special J.P. Winslow House page.
The accounting class is doing okay so far. I am getting good grades out of it. Of course, I took the mid-term last week, and I do not yet know how I fared.
Until I started auditing that accounting class, I had forgotten what a nuisance it was reading textbooks, taking classes and doing homework.
The accounting book looks like it was written by an MTV public relations flunkey, or someone who writes crappy Web pages for a living. It takes many pages and a lot of graphics and colored fonts to spell out a little information.
The classes aren't much better, because most of what we do is follow the professor as she makes her way through PowerPig slides. The professor is a nice person and all; but there is nothing like a PowerPig presentation to bore you to tears.
As for the homework, there is a set amount of time for each problem. That time is usually 20-40 minutes each. I have enough of a problem remembering, let alone setting aside time, for my accounting homework. And I'm just auditing this one class. Students are taking this class for credit, take at least three others and have to do who knows what else.
And the professor wonders why her students are having trouble keeping up with the course.
Taking this course makes me realize that there is no way I could have handled a full load of classes at Ivy Tech. It was a good thing I dropped out of the fall semester when I did.
Speaking of Ivy Tech, I will have to get a copy of the spring 2005 Ivy Tech catalog and plan my Cisco classes. I am ditching any idea of getting an associate's degree and will try instead for the Cisco CCNA and Microsoft CNA certifications.