Over the last two days I’ve found myself return­ing to the past. Or, in the first case, more accu­rately, the past vis­ited me. Yes­ter­day the door of my office opened and my former pro­fes­sor Marie Freck­le­ton walked through it. I haven’t seen Marie in a decade. And she revealed that she was at RIT to meet my mentor Archie Provan. Those from my time and before at the School of Print remem­ber Archie as the can­tan­ker­ous Scot­tish type pro­fes­sor. He was the man who taught me every­thing I know about type, and quite a bit about life. In addi­tion to being my pro­fes­sor, I also worked as his lab assis­tant for nearly my entire time at RIT. And he also ran the Queen Eliz­a­beth 2 Co-​op, which I took part in. And he helped foster my love of puns, bad jokes (Horse walks into a bar. Bar­tender asks “Why the long face?”), and fruit gums (a bizarre Eng­lish candy that is nei­ther fruity or gummy… in fact they are kinda hard and hurt your teeth). I’m also pretty sure he tipped me off to DeBella’s before most people knew about them.

Sure enough a few hours later, I spot­ted Archie coming down the halls. Like Marie, I hadn’t seen him in a decade. And like Marie, he hasn’t changed. He even remem­bered me as “little grasshopper” (a ref­er­ence to Caine on TV’s Kung Fu). We didn’t get to talk for too long. He had lots of ques­tions for me (like “What the hell are you doing here?!”). And I men­tioned to him that I’m plan­ning to use a couple of his assign­ments in a class next year. His response was “Well it’s good to know they’re hiring people who know what they’re doing.” We didn’t get to talk for as long as I’d like. But I’ve already gotten a com­mit­ment out of him to guest lec­ture in my class this fall.

In other news, I’ve begun the process of migrat­ing all of my old blog­ger posts across to Word­press. It’s an inter­est­ing process and forc­ing me to become more famil­iar with SQL. I now have a much better under­stand­ing the poten­tial lim­i­ta­tions of the WP con­tent man­age­ment system. I’m also more keenly aware of issues pre­sented by tran­si­tion­ing data from one repos­i­tory type to another.

Beyond the tech­ni­cal stuff, the migra­tion also is an oppor­tu­nity to revisit my past. I’ve reread a lot of blog posts that I had for­got­ten about. For as much as it’s inter­est­ing to revisit the entries regard­ing major events (from Sep­tem­ber 11th to learn­ing I got into Chicago), return­ing to the small posts, the every­day, has been the most inter­est­ing for me. Beyond noting that I’ve writ­ten the phrase “sorry for not post­ing, things have been crazy” more times than I can count, the expe­ri­ence has reminded me how impor­tant this blog has been in help­ing me pre­serve a per­sonal his­tory. And while I’ve main­tained jour­nals through­out these years, the blog has been my most con­sis­tent doc­u­ment­ing of my day to day life. I feel really lucky to have it.

A little levity from last week. Free single scoop ice cream cones were handed out for Ben and Jerry’s cus­tomer appre­ci­a­tion day.

These pic­tures were taken with my cell phone. The mix of ice cream and acad­e­mia brought back fond mem­o­ries of $1 shakes at the U of C.

It’s been a lot of move­ment as of late. Last week I was all over God’s green earth lec­tur­ing: Tues­day was Cor­nell, Wednes­day I spoke at a con­fer­ence here at RIT, Friday brought me to the sub­urbs of Cleve­land. Yes­ter­day, I had a late night drive to Buf­falo to pick Dre up from the air­port after her flight to Rochester was can­celled (she had been vis­it­ing a friend in the DC area).

All that hustle and bustle has left me a little burned out. Get­ting back into doing all the real impor­tant teach­ing tasks (lesson prep, grad­ing) was giving me some prob­lems. But a brief exchange with a stu­dent just changed all that.

Walk­ing out of Java Wally’s, our on campus coffee shop, I ran into a stu­dent whose taking my Prin­ci­ples of Print­ing course this quar­ter. She had just gotten back from a week­end, out of town, job inter­view. Just before she left, I rec­om­mended some “tactical readings” to help prep her for questioning.

Not only did the inter­view go really well, the read­ings, and my class in gen­eral really helped her pre­pare for it. She went out of her way to thank me for help­ing her pre­pare and told me about how she was able use what she had learned in class dis­cus­sions to ask good questions.

I don’t think stu­dents appre­ci­ate how impor­tant those moments are for us (teach­ers). I left Java’s com­pletely recharged and ready to tackle the pile of grad­ing wait­ing for me in my office.

Blog­ging has ground to a halt for me. Right now there doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day. Dre went back in the hos­pi­tal last week (vol­un­tar­ily this time), and was there until Sunday. In addi­tion to teach­ing at RIT, I attended an open house for prospec­tive Cor­nell Anthro PhD stu­dents, and took part in one day of a mar­tial arts con­fer­ence. This week is rel­a­tively calm. Next week I have three lec­tures to give. So I don’t fore­see any break in the blog-​silence for a bit.