Jake's Baptism

(Jake with my parents)

(Jake with the Kaddi's sister Traci and her family)

(Jake with Kaddi's parents)

(Us)

Interception

Jake's has found his new favorite sport this fall while playing flag-football. Given his height advantage the coaches generally try to use him as a wide-receiver, since he can reach up and catch the ball over the other kids. The only problem is that no one else on his team can throw it accurately.

This means that half of Jake's catches this year have been interceptions.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Life's Better in Montana

"I like can I touch"

Here's some highlight clips from our family vacation in Whitefish, Montana. Most of the footage comes from a day at Tally Lake.

The vacation was not without controversy. The third clip of me throwing a football into the lake APPEARS to show my dad making an impressive catch. He holds the ball out of the water before he re-surfaces in order to sell it to the referees. However, when you stop the tape, you can clearly see the ball resting for a brief moment on the surface of the water.

I don't want to accuse anyone of Ratchmistruck-ing a pass and then pretending he caught it, but the footage doesn't lie.

I'll let you decide.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

The internet is our campus

Summer semester is finally over and now the grading begins. I went to lunch with a friend from the department who told me a great story.

Last semester in his World History course he assigned a final paper analyzing the novel 'Gulliver's Travels' as a historical source. When he began grading the papers, he noticed that three separate students submitted the exact same paper, word for word.

So he goes into class the next day and announces, without providing any specific details, that he has caught several students cheating. He offers a amnesty period for any student who comes to his office and confesses their crimes. They will still be penalized, but can avoid failing the course or being referred to the Ministry of Character Development.

Two interesting things happened...

First, instead of three students, he had over a dozen people (from a class of 150) come to his office to talk about their papers. This included people who admitted plagiarism, other worried they hadn't properly cited their work, and a variety of other concerns.

Second, the Gang of Three did put in an appearance. My friend interrogated each of them, certain that one person had actually written the paper and then shared it with his two buddies.

He was surprised to learn that the three students had not collaborated with each other. In fact, they had never met before.

But they did have one thing in common - they each decided individually to purchase a paper on Gulliver's Travels from the internet.

Gulliver's Travels is a very common book for this type of assignment, and there are probably hundreds of papers you can buy from various websites. These three bobbleheads just typed the title into google, then bought their paper from the very first website that popped up.

Let this be a lesson to all of you. If you're going to cheat on a term paper, at least take the time to re-type it using your own words.

You can't spell vacation without CA

This summer Kaddi spent three weeks out in California visiting her family. Since I was locked into teaching Summer term I spent my days at the office and my nights alone, curled up in the fetal position chanting "Find a Happy Place, Find a Happy Place..."

Apparently all I missed was a lot of sitting on the stairs.

"Uh, did I say you could sit next to me?"

Is that in the syllabus?

When I was first hired as a professor, the department told me to plan on teaching a 2-2-1 schedule. Two classes in fall, two in winter, and one during the spring/summer terms. I planned out my year accordingly.

Then towards the middle of winter semester, the dept. secretary told me they'd made a mistake, and that I was required to teach an extra course during spring/summer, making it a 2-2-2. Panic-stricken, I looked through my graduate school notes and tried to figure out how to invent a new course in a few weeks.

One of my fields for the preliminary exams at Wisconsin was 'Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia." So, I took many of those reading selections and slammed them into a seminar style course. Hoping to boost enrollment I even gave it what I thought to be a sexy title, "Dictatorship and Genocide in Southeast Asia." Six students found the morbid topic interesting enough to sign up, and this was more than enough to carry the class.

Because I didn't have the time or the knowledge to write thirty-five hours worth of lectures, I made the course discussion-based. As part of their grade, each of the students are responsible for presenting one set of readings and leading the discussion. We explore theoretical conceptions of power in Asia, the vulnerabilities of democracy, US foreign policy, and the natures of genocide, among other topics. For Friday's class we were exploring the book, "To Destroy You is No Loss," a fascinating first-person account of life under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Unfortunately, the student leading the discussion did not have the strongest presentation skills. He's uncomfortable in group situations, doesn't articulate well, and hates to have attention focused solely on himself. It's a lot like having Piglet in class. Everytime I ask him a direct question he begins with..."Oh, d-d-d-dear me...." He's so awkward it's almost charming.

As part of his introduction I asked him to generate a discussion explaining the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. The students were using the terms interchangeably, even though they're quite different. Even though I had prepped him the day before, poor Piglet still managed to botch it.

He went up to the white board in front of the class, shaking like a young sapling on a blustery day, and drew two interlocking circles. I can only guess he meant to show how the two systems of government were similar, yet distinct simultaneously. Then he proceeded to label them, but because he was so nervous he didn't want to risk spelling one or both terms wrong. So, he abbreviated, writing only the first word for each system above the circles.

The he turned to the class with his voice quivering and stammered, "Okay...let's begin today by talking about T&A...."

I'm laughing through the tears

Simpsons on Grad School @ Yahoo! Video

Where's the Easter Beagle?

On Saturday I was paroled from my dissertation writing long enough to go home and colour easter eggs with the kids. We all created designs based on things that we adore. Here's a breakdown of what was written on our eggs:

J-dog - I (heart) Audis
Meg - I (heart) Chocolate Cake
Luke - I (heart) being a bad baby
Kaddi - I (heart) Huckabees
Shane - I (heart) Zac Efron

The highlight of the evening was Jake taking the blue foil wrapper from his chocolate bunny and fashioning himself a 'grill'.

That's how he rolls.

Beets, Bears, Battlestar Galatica

On April 1st I showed up at work to find the following photo plastered all over the history department break room and all down the hallway. It appears to be me and another professor (whose identity I have protected) frolicking along the beach on a sunny day. Right away my powers of deductive reasoning spotted it as a fraud.

Clue #1: I don't wear my glasses at the beach.

Clue #2: I appear to be holding hands with someone taller than me. I don't know very many people taller than me, except my brother-in-law. And we don't hold hands.

Clue #3. The person in the photo is wearing a swim diaper. I usually wear board shorts.



I need to give the department secretaries a lot more photocopying. Clearly they have nothing to do all day.

Toppins a bag

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Climbing the why

My dad travelled down this weekend to spend time with the family - and by 'spend time', I mean - sit in front of the TV and watch the NCAA tournament.

Anyway, my dad is a son of the soil. His greatest joy is to be at one with the land. He's constantly outdoors exploring, biking, and camping. This morning he introduced me to a new activity that all the kids are into now. I think he called it 'hiking' (pronounced hyke-ing). Apparently...you just walk up the side of a mountain until you get tired, and then walk back down again.

The activity turned out to be expensive for Morg. Not knowing that Jake will do anything for money, he jokingly offered the boy twenty dollars to see it he had the stamina to go all the way to the top of the 'Y'. Jake was halfway there before my dad even realized he was gone.

Spinderella

Luke gets a little carried away with the spinning chair routine.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Finding Fulfillment

I came into work late this morning. As I stopped into the history department office to pick up any mail, a colleague shared some good news. Mike, a student in his senior thesis class, had won a department prize for his paper discussing US involvement in Laos during the Vietnam war. As the department's Southeast Asianist, I had spent some time consulting on the paper. It was a strange new feeling to think I might have contributed in a postive way to a student's progression (instead of just intimidating them and destroying their self-confidence, which apparently is my usual contribution.)

Two minutes later I opened my office door and found the following note on the ground:

"Dear Professor,

My name is ________. I am in your history 201 class. I am stupid. I forgot the test ended at noon and wanted to beg you to let me take the test. (I was there @ 3 PM)."


*sigh*

I now pronounce thee Ratch and Rach

Ahhh...my beloved blog.

It's been while since I've documented the random activities that are my life. I wish I could say it was due to spending more time on my dissertation, but other factors have played a role. Illness has been factor, we've been traveling and hosting visitors, and the kids activities never seem to end. Also, I now spend all my free time trying to develop hip-hop abs.

Last Thursday we spent fourteen hours in the car traveling to Alberta for my sister Rachel's wedding. I was sick with what I'm pretty sure was bronchitis. Kaddi was contracting my bronchitis. Jake spent the entire trip passed out on the back seat with some sort of viral infection. We have no idea what was wrong with Luke, but he would growl like a wounded bear cub for thirty minutes at a time. Somehow he made it all the way to Magrath, despite my repeated efforts to leave him at McDonald play-places in Idaho Falls and Helena.

(Meg was perfectly healthy.)

We arrived at the ranch shortly after someone detonated some type of bridal bomb, because the house was practically buried in wedding-related shrapnel. There was an altar covered with white lace in the front room, miniature trees with crystal hanging from metal branches on the table, and centerpieces everywhere else. All of it had to be loaded up into the trailer and transported to the wedding site. I started feeling less resentful of my fourteen hour drive when I realized that the rest of the family had been working on the wedding for months.

My assignment was to act as the Master of Ceremonies for the wedding reception. A simple task, really. Tell a few jokes, introduce the people at the head table, and allow my natural charm to shine through. As part of the festivities, I also wanted to present my my sister with the first of what would be many wedding presents. I spent weeks thinking of an appropriate gift. It needed to be something that symbolized the union of two families, and the beginning of a new era where bride and groom would place each other's needs before their own. Only one gift could accomplish all that and place the new couple on the path to marital bliss - an autographed photo of myself.

The actualy ceremony was a beautiful event. The hall of the Galt Museum in Lethbridge had been articulately decorated to resemble a winter wonderland. Through the enormous windows you could look down on the snow-covered banks of the Old Man River. As flower-girl, Meg preceded the bride and threw rose petals along the path. Rachel was radiant in her wedding dress as she walked to meet Paul at the altar, happier than I have ever seen her.

-------------------------

When I was in Alberta for Christmas I forgot my camera USB cord. I returned for the wedding in February and meant to retrieve it, but grabbed my parent's cord instead. Now neither of us can upload photos.

Here's a photo montage I lifted from my sister Angela's blog.

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

A day of disappointment

One thing I enjoy about working at a university is a good luncheon. Although adjunct faculty like myself are not always invited, we usually go anyway. If the gathering is large enough, no one knows we're not supposed to be there. These types of social events are extremely important opportunities for someone like myself, someone just starting their career. They are an opportunity to eat for free.

So you can imagine my glee when I checked my box one day and found an invitation to a Christmas luncheon for all college faculty. For the next two weeks I kept the invitation in my drawer. Periodically I would take it out and stare at it, imagining the day when my lunch wouldn't involve microwaved tomato soup or boxed Asian noodles from Wal-Mart.

At last the blessed day arrived. Knowing I would probably forget the location, I stuffed the invitation in my pocket and skipped merrily down the hallway to pick up my friend Mike. He was just as excited. It was like pretzel day at Dunder Mifflin.

As we walked across campus towards the conference center, I noticed there didn't seem to be many other professors headed the same direction. After all, there are several hundred faculty in our college. I checked the flyer to make sure we had the right building. Perhaps most people were just coming fashionably late.

Arriving at the banquet room, I immediately recognized it was much too small for a faculty gathering (I'm extremely perceptive about such things). "This can't be right," I said to Mike, "It must be another room."

"No, this is it," he insisted. "It's one of those luncheons where not everyone is here at the same time. People just filter in and out for a couple hours."

And with that remark, Mike officially became partially reponsible for what happened next.

So we went in and wandered around. I didn't recognize anyone for the first few minutes (I rarely do at these things) but began to relax when I saw another professor from my department talking with the Dean. We sat down at a table. Each place setting also had a gift-wrapped bag of what appeared to be Bridge Mixture. Oh, sweet chocolatey delight! This was going to be the greatest afternoon in the history of forever.

Mike and I were talking about our classes when someone stepped to the podium and began welcoming everyone. Although I wasn't paying close attention, I was certain I heard her say this was an "administration and staff" gathering. When I looked around the room, I noticed it had a distinctly feminine flavour. I didn't recognize any professors, but I did see all our department secretaries sitting at a table across the room.

Panicked, I pulled the invitation out of my pocket. The faculty luncheon was actually next Friday

Quickly, I whispered to Mike, "Let's get out of here - this is a staff luncheon." His face blanched.

But it was already too late. The blessing on the food had begun. We couldn't walk out in the middle of a prayer, and so we sat there in silent agony.

Unfortunately, this wasn't really a prayer. It was a commencement address offered with folded arms. I'm sure you have all witnessed something similar. The person giving the prayer knows they have a captive audience, and there's no way they're sitting down until they've discharged their mind on all matters great and small. Lincoln could have given multiple Gettysburg addresses in the time it took this woman to bless a few chafing dishes.

When she finally ran out of breath, we picked up our coats and started to get up. Another person began to speak. This time it was the Dean of the College. The Head Man Himself. The Lord over all Creation. Now, I am not the most politically astute of individuals, but even I know that walking out of a small gathering during the Dean's address is not the kind of facetime a young faculty member seeks. Not only is it impolite, but it was also an admission that we were too dumb to show up at the right luncheon.

We stayed in our seats thinking the Dean would simply wish everyone a Merry Christmas, thank them for a productive year, and close. Not so. This was apparently a vital opportunity to elucidate on the challenges facing the university, the college, and the departments, in that order. Budget expectations, counseling services, charitable activities...

And as we sat continued to sit there I noticed a small crowd forming at the door. People were walking through looking for a place to sit, and I became acutely aware that there were two less empty chairs than there should have been. I started to feel dozens of stares pressing down on me. Perhaps the college staff were a tight-knit group who immediately recognized me as an interloper trying to score a free meal. The room started to feel stuffy.

I kept telling myself to hold steady. Our survival lay in our anonymity. The speech would soon end, and we could merge into the traffice of people headed to the buffet and exit stage left. Just don't get flustered. If we took flight now we'd end up stuffed and mounted, two panicky pheasants brought down by the hunter's rifle.

But the speech didn't end. One topic led into another, as if this were a devotional and not a chance to get free food. With every stale anecdote the room got hotter, the stares felt heavier, and Bridge Mixture seemed to recede from my grasp.

Finally I cracked. We stood up and headed for the door, announcing our uninvited presence to everyone. I didn't care. The cool breeze on my face felt like sweet freedom. As we walked down the street I could the see the banquet hall through an outside window. The Dean was still talking.

I learned later that the professor I recognized was in attendance because she is now an Associate Dean. That was information I could have used a day sooner.

The rest of the day was long and dreary. Instead of ham and scalloped potatoes, I had a frozen burrito for lunch. Instead of celebrating the holiday season in my office, enjoying the companionship of a bag of Bridge Mixture (Mmmmm...so many flavours), I stood awkwardly in the break room while the secretaries laughed at my absent-mindedness.

Worst luncheon ever.

Snowtime

Kaddi's sister Traci and her family came out to visit and pick up their son at BYU. Taylor just received his mission call to Brazil, and will be leaving for the Brazillian MTC in March. Meanwhile, Merissa and Kelsey got to spend time playing with Meg and Jake in the snow.

Meg with Kelsey

Jake, Taylor, and Merissa

Can I get 500mg of common sense?

I have to admit that sometimes I get tired of being a stereotype. Kaddi is constantly bewildered as to how I can remember infinite numbers of names, dates, and events from history, but can't remember that ten minutes ago I left the tv remote next to the microwave. It is a serious problem, but one that I control using medication. Every so often, however, I experience a flare-up. Sometimes it occurs a rather public, and therefore embarassing, manner.

A few years ago one of these incidents occurred at Halloween. When we lived in Madison our ward used to organize a trunk-or-treat at the church. One year Halloween fell on a Sunday, so the member decided to hold the activity on the previous Friday instead. Everyone gathered in the parking lot to admire the children’s costumes (barely visible underneath their winter jackets) and exchange candy from the back of our vans. Since only a few families have young children, the entire operation takes about twenty minutes.

It’s difficult even now for me to explain what happened next. Perhaps I was feeling particularly festive. Maybe I was disappointed with the chocolate to crap-candy ratio in the kids treat bags. Whatever the reason, I decided twenty minutes of Halloween simply wasn’t enough. We’d invested in the costumes, the kids were already dressed up, why not knock on a few doors in the neighborhood?

The truly perplexing part of this tale is that those who should have been looking out for me allowed me to continue with my plan. I told Kaddi that I was taking the kids to do a little trick-or-treating and that we’d be back in a few minutes. She simply gave me a quizzical look and said, “You are? Well…okay.” I also remember telling Nivea-for-Tom to bring his young one along. He looked at me like I was an idiot before declining my offer. But did I let that bother me? Mine was the revelry of the blissfully unaware.

I’ll never forget the reaction of the lady at the first house on our route. When she opened the door to find two little kids on her porch asking for candy, her response embodied the civility and decency of the Midwest. “Oh,” she said, “Well…okay…I think I have some candy you can have.” Off she went into her cupboard, producing some Hershey’s kisses and dumping them into the kid’s sacks. No doubt she was taken with their overwhelmingly cute costumes and probably also felt pity because their father must have a severe disability.

We received the same puzzled but courteous greeting at the second house, but somehow still left laden with candy. It wasn’t until we were walking down the steps of the third house that my thoughts began to coalesce around a rather obvious conclusion:

“Hmmm…people sure seem surprised to see us out tonight. Huh, I wonder why there are no other kids outside. Well, it is pretty cold out here. Although it seems odd that no one else from church is knocking doors. Wait a minute..."

And then the little hamster started running in the wheel again.

"Oh...right. Halloween isn’t for…two more days.”

Immediately I had that same sickly feeling you get when you wake up at 9 AM and suddenly realize your final exam began at eight. Meanwhile, Meg and Jake, who were enjoying themselves immensely, were already half way down the block. I quickly called to tell them that we needed to head home because… mom wasn’t feeling well. Then I began the long walk of shame back to the church building, where I would face the ridicule of wife and friends alike.

I wish I could say that was the last such occurence. Sadly, I experienced another flare-up last week. Thankfully, my kids were not involved this time...

Because Need Knows No Season

Christmas is a time to turn our thoughts to those less fortunate than us. Particularly the children whose parents can't afford to purchase them Video game consoles or new clothes, or sports equipment. This week I captured footage of a poor little boy who was kicking around a milk cartoon because his family couldn't raise the funds for a soccer ball.

Please watch the video and give generously.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Preserve Us From the Wrath of the Marmot King

In my world civilization classes I've consistently tried to stay on the cutting edge of instruction. Most history courses, for instance, focus solely on human interaction as an explanation for turning points in history. But avant-garde historians like myself recognize that animals can also be important actors on the stage of history.

For example:

You may not know that it was marmots who are partially responsible for the Black Death, which decimated the populations of China, Europe, and the Near East. Fleas spread the bacterium throughout the Central Asian marmot population, and some unfortunate Mongol hunter probably skinned and ate an infected marmot, thereby unleashing the whirlwind of pandemic. This much is widely accepted.

But here's what you won't read in your 'traditional' textbook:

At the end of the twelfth century an army of marmots, under the leadership of the legendary Marmot King, devastated Central Asia. They swept the peoples of the Golden Horde before them like a tidal wave. As they moved westward, the marmots cleverly formed alliances among other rodent populations, signing treaties with the porcupines and making vassals out of the Richardon's ground squirrels.

Once the rodents of Asia were united under the sovereignty of the Marmot King, they launched their attack of the great civilizations of Europe and the Islamic world.


In 1347, an army of marmots surrounded the Genoese port city of Kaffa, on the Black Sea. During the resulting siege, thousands of marmots died from the plague. The Marmot King then ordered their corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hopes of infecting and terrorizing its inhabitants.

Marmot military tactics devastated their opponents. When the armies of the Marmot king faced the forces of Kwarizm near the Sea of Azov, marmot sappers went out to the battlefied the night before and dug thousands of holes in the field. During the next day's battle, when the Sultan's cavalary charged the field, the horses caught their feet in the burrows and came crashing down. The marmot infantry quickly fell upon the Persian cavalrymen and ate their livers.

The attrocities of the Marmot King were unspeakable. In Baghdad, marmot soldiers gnawed the eyeballs from the sockets of eight-hundred Muslim clerics after they refused to bow before the invaders. After their conquest of Kiev, the marmots forced the Russian princes to run continuously inside specially-constructed stationary wheels until they dropped dead of exhaustion. In Krakow, the Marmot king tried to blackmail a local newspaper into firing an editor, threatened to pull funding for a children's hospital, and requested bribes for appointing potential candidates to a vacant Senate seat.

In their search for a scapegoat, Europeans blamed their own rodent populations for conspiring to help the marmots conquer all of Christendom. They organized massive rodent pogroms, massacring the mice populations and burning thousands of rats at the stake. It was a dark time for Europe.

Just when all seemed lost, the great marmot hordes disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared. Historians are at a loss to explain why. My own research speculates that the Marmot King was poisoned by one of his captured concubines. Without his leadership, the alliances disintegrated and the rodent world was plunged into civil war. Europe was saved.

Perhaps I'll make this the subject of my next book project.