getting ready for Orientation

Even though Little Traverse Bay is a beautiful place to live (and a good spot for early morning smooth kayaking), I have one major frustration about being out there: no broadband. Every day I get frustrated by trying to get work done that I cannot on dialup... and so I make the *long* drive into town, which makes Bill at the Motherlode happy, I'm sure... but it's also meant that I feel a little scattered about getting ready. When we live in town -- where the house is wireless and has a cable modem -- I can get done what I need, anytime. If I wake up at 6am because I have an idea about something I need to do, then, bloop, I can just go sit in my happy downstairs chair and do what I need to: update the schedule, create a handout where I need something off the web, get my email done. (Out at the lake there is the frustration of having to use Huskymail . How I hate the kludge that is Huskymail.) But out at the lake, I must keep long to-do lists, and hold of my desires to get something done immediately.

But that is all a wind-up to saying how surprising it is to me when Karen and Christy and I sit down and go over the schedule and materials. Everything is coming together so smoothly and pleasantly. Our planning conversations -- from when we started back in May, before Dennis and I went to Italy (and I've inserted the Italy comment because I don't want to forget that we went, since it all now seems a dream) -- have been focused and productive. Because of everyone's past experiences and beliefs about teaching, we've easily visualized how we wanted the workshop to go and what people ought to produce during the workshop so that they can easily step into the semester teaching what for most will be an odd class...

So now, three weeks before the workshop starts (and two days before I leave for 10 days to give some technology and new media workshops out in California) we've got almost all that we need in place.

This is not the usual way the Procrastinator Wysocki works.... but I have been so looking forward to and thinking about Orientation and Revisions for so long (and I knew what a crazy summer this would be) that the planning and preparation has been delightful. And, also, importantly, thank you, Karen and Christy, for being so smart about all this, and so focused, and so productive.

I am looking forward to this year, big time.