Retribution

The arctic cold now sweeping through Smack In the Middle is retribution for my having spent those three weeks in San Diego.  I very imprudently might have bragged -- just a little -- about being able to wear t-shirts all day while my friends back here were in the middle of the recent Deep Freeze.  Therefore, I have to now suffer through below-zero temperatures with an added wind chill.  Luckily, my school schedule is such that I can stay home today.  It will warm up into the 40s tomorrow, when I have to be there at 9:00 in the morning to teach.

Although I haven't stirred outside my door since Friday afternoon, I have been busy.  Today is the first actual day of school, so I had to have my online class ready for students.  That's what I'd planned to do over the break, before my dad had his fall, and even then I took my laptop with me to work on it while I was in San Diego.  However, my brain just wasn't in it.  As a result, I spent the past four days with my nose in the computer playing catch-up, and got enough of the course built that I could allow students to begin work on time.  Luckily, the first week is an "orientation" week in which they're supposed to set up their email, get their books, and so on.  The rest of the course is planned and all that remains is typing things up and making them into documents.  That's what today is going to be about.  The reason that there's so much work to do is that I changed textbooks completely from when I built the original master course three years ago.  It's a better course now although I'm not thrilled with having to do it in such a rush.

My latest sock project went with me to San Diego, but even though I carted it around everywhere I went, I managed to not make a single stitch on it.  Not a single stitch.

One smart thing I did was to remember to take a few pictures.  My aunt S-- has my grandmother's emerald ring, and I asked her if I could take pictures of it so I could someday have one made like it.

 
The ring has been promised to another great-grandchild, a perfectly lovely young woman with a May birthday, and that's okay with me; I don't have children myself and the ring will stay in the family longer if it goes to her. She knew Grandma and can appreciate it.  But I would like to have a Grandma Tribute Ring of my own.  That's a real emerald, and over the eighty or so years that Grandma wore it the stone was worn down.  My aunt had it cleaned and polished, but they couldn't re-cut it without destroying the stone.  The story that my grandmother told me about it was that when she graduated from business college, her parents gave it to her.  That would have made it sometime in the late 19-teens, about a hundred years ago. Today, I won't use a real emerald for my ring because they're too expensive -- a gem the size of the one Grandma wore would cost thousands of dollars -- but I could use something like peridot (my own birthstone) or Helenite, a man-made emerald forged out of the ashes of Mt. St. Helen in Washington.  That would be appropriate because she grew up near the mountain and loved living in Washington.

That's a project I'll keep on the back burner for now.