Hodgepodge

I haven't done a "What's New" post in a while, not that there's all that much newness springing forth from the corn oven, but there are few pieces of flotsam and jetsam that seem somewhat blogworthy.

• I underwent my official third year review during 07-08 academic calendar. Having met with the tenure committee and the dean, I finally received my official review letter. Excellent marks across the board. In fact, the Dean commented that my teaching evaluations were "quite remarkable" and among the best he'd ever seen. What this means is that if I continue doing what I'm doing, tenure proper will not be a problem.
• The summer has been relatively school free. I committed to teaching a summer session but enrollment has been abysmal across the college and the course didn't receive the necessary students to justify having the course. In fact, I had zero students registered. While the money would have been nice, a commitment free summer has been even nicer.
• I'm working on a couple academic pieces. One is a collaborative rhetorical criticism of Barack Obama's epideictic rhetoric. More specifically, we're arguing that Obama's rhetoric is an excellent example the performative nature of "We the People." Or something like that. We're spending the early part of this week nailing down the theory. Once that's finished, we'll move on to the rhetorical criticism proper. The second piece is a potential book chapter proposal regarding Lost. My idea for this piece is to examine The Island as ethical community. I have the basic idea for the proposal mapped out in my head. As the proposal is due July 31, I need to decide whether I want to submit this proposal or focus on projects I already have in the works.
  
• This summer continues to be the summer of home improvements. Inspired by Big Damn Roof project, we took on the Big Damn Drainage project. When we bought the house a couple years back, we noticed that in one area the yard sloped back toward the house. Negative slope + rain = water in the basement. We have a stone foundation so water in the basement should be expected, but we thought we'd see what we could do to minimize the amount (we never had more than a 1/2" puddle in two separate parts of the basement--nothing major compared to what others deal with in this area). So, with some help from my ultra-knowledgeable father, a man I swear was some kind of construction engineer in another life, we planned and installed an exterior drainage trench/French drain over the course of two days. The worst part of constructing something like this is all the damn shoveling. The rest isn't all that time consuming or difficult. Positive slope + drainage trench + rain = dry basement.
• I ran the local 15 yesterday and improved my time from previous years. Two years ago I ran the race in 1:12, last year in 1:07, and this year in 1:05. That's an average of a 7 minute mile--not bad for a 40 year old. Other than a blister or two, my body is holding up exceptionally well this running season. I backed off on the actual running miles and increased cross training, especially the exercise bike. Three days a week I run for an hour + and three days a week I do most of my mileage on the bike. Since I'm feeling so well, I'm targeting a half marathon at the end of August. If that race goes well, I may shoot for a marathon at the end of October. We'll see how the body holds up.

And that's all the exciting news from the corn furnace. Life is pretty darn quiet around here.