A little update

I guess the first good piece of news is that I survived the first week of classes. I am actually quite pleased with my four classes. I have two sections of French 1 - which seem quite nice, the first section (meeting at 10:00 on MWF) is a bit more alert than the other, which meets at 11:00, also on MWF, but both are fine, really. The French 3 class is made up of kids who are super nice - their language skills are a bit uneven, but they will manage, and I have a freshman French major in there whose French kicks butt - he must have had excellent training in high school. The Advanced French Grammar and Composition class, which is also the ITV class, is going fine. It is really not that difficult to have to deal with all that technology - I actually have a work-study student who handles of the "tech" stuff. It takes just a tad more effort to engage the students at the distance site, but I think that I have done OK so far. Students in that class have to turn in their first semi-"substantial" paragraph on Tuesday, and I'll get then a good idea of the students' respective language skills. Those kids are also all very nice, by the way.

I have been basically focusing on my work all week long, preparing my classes, setting up and keeping up with the Blackboard sites, sending e-mails to the students in the distance education class, etc. My ITV class had to be recorded yesterday, for a student who will have to miss class every Thursday due to a scheduling conflict. I brought in my videocamera and set it on my department's tripod, and I was lucky enough to have a communications major in my class, who sort of monitored the recording. It came out very well.

I had dinner at my friend Mary-Jo's on Wednesday night - she made an absolutely kick-ass vegan chili and a scrumptious salad. We had a fun-filled couple of hours, caught up with our respective summers some more, and talked about all kinds of stuff, both related and unrelated to the university.

I had not seen Marty (except briefly, for breakfast this past Sunday morning) for basically close to two weeks, because he has been so busy with his project. He was working a lot in Pittsburgh this past week (pretty much all week long), and ran into a number of annoying technical problems, but Wednesday, Thursday and Friday went well, and the rough cut is practically done (I saw the opening of the program, which is quite powerful, and that was with no soundtrack.) Marty came over last night, we barbecued country ribs and corn and made a nice salad, and just hung out. After dinner, he could not wait to give me my birthday presents (my birthday is not until Monday), so he gave them to me - he had taken a two hour or so break to go to the Robinson Mall to do his birthday shopping. I got some very good stuff, including:
- The Right Spectacle - The Very Best of Elvis Costello - The Videos (and we watched most of it last night.)
- The Last Waltz DVD. I have never seen this concert film, which is allegedly the best one ever made.
- Pink Floyd, London 1966/1967 DVD. I am a fan of very early Pink Floyd, of the Syd Barrett era. This should be quite cool, it also has a bonus audio CD (featuring "Interstellar Overdrive", and "Nick's Boogie.")
- A five DVD Film Noir collection, which includes The Asphalt Jungle which I have never seen and am dying to watch. There is a bit of an inside joke to this present. The first time I ever met Marty, he had come to "sit in" my French film class (he had actually come to check my wares), and I asked the class if they knew what film noir was, and no one seemed to know, so Marty raised his hand and answered, correctly, of course. We have joked many times about this since.
- A CD of French contemporary music which is part of the Putumayo World Music series. The mix is quite good.
- A new, and very nice watch.

We will hang out again tonight (we both have to work all day, unfortunately), and most likely tomorrow night - I think we'll probably go out to dinner for my birthday.

The weather is miserable here today, I guess it's the tail end of Ernesto - can't complain, we were not pummelled like North Carolina was. And, if you want to know what happened on SRP's street and in her backyard, down in Virginia, go read her blog entry for today. What we are having here is peanuts compared to that.

Well, that's about it for today.