BLOGS/WEBLOGS

At dinner last night, one of my relatives was wondering how you find other blogs. (What, mine isn't enough for you???)

Good question, since I hadn't really ever looked for a blog directory before, just typed in blog URLs I had seen in newspapers or magazines.

Well, it appears there are already quite a few blog directories on the Web now. The good ones divvy them all up by focus (political, religious) and bent (left, right, etc.).

I'll just list Google's lits of blog directories so you can find one that matches your interests/personality:

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/Directories/

In case you want to start your own (free) blog, you can try BLOGGER.COM (run by Google), which is what "The Perils of Paul" is created on.

http://www.blogger.com/start

Just click on the "CREATE YOUR BLOG NOW" link in the orange arrow icon.

MICHIGAN PERILS (2nd publication)

May 18 I left Urbana to drive up to East Lansing, Michigan, for a conference at Michigan State U. Every year there's a CALICO conference (Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium) somewhere in the US. This time it was in Michigan, where a lot of relatives have ended up.

Friday, May 20 was my paper - basically a mini version of my dissertation experiment. It was sparsely attended (maybe 20 people), but real research presentations usually are. (Attendees seem to prefer bells and whistle presentations that are more demos of computer techniques, programs, etc.) Real research with real results tends to be more boring at computer conferences. In any case, it gave me a fresh entry for my CV in time for job hunt season. My last presentation was June 2001. (Both parents' illnesses and the final dissertation crunch kind of ate up the years in between.)

It was nice to be back at CALICO. I had attended faithfully every year since 1994, but had missed the last two conferences. A lot of the same people tend to show up year after year, so it's kind of a home-coming in my discipline.

After the conference, I began my Michigan travels, first visiting cousin Julie and daughter Beth in the Detroit suburbs (Northville), then Dad's cousin Alice Buhse and her husband in Trenton (a southern suburb), where I managed to scan a bunch of Alice's old family photos from the 30s and 40s, including some rare ones of a visit by Alice's father (the brother my grandmother came over to Ellis Island with in 1907) to relatives in southern Sweden just before WWII started (summer 1939). A quiet idyll before all hell broke loose.

In between I visited Ann Arbor, where the U. of Michigan is located to check out the Arabic textbooks in their bookstore (UM is famous for its Arabic dept.), and checked out the Henry Ford Musuem in Dearborn, a western part of greater Detroit and Ford headquarters. My favorite exhibit was an original fan letter by Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde fame) to Henry Ford praising the "dandy" Ford he had stolen. Dearborn is also home to the largest Arab-American community in the US, so I had to check out the restaurants for lunch! As usual, the portions were enough for a small family.

Yesterday, May 19, I drove west to the Kalamazoo area, where cousin Alison and her husband Mike live. They have two small kids Ashley and Dustin. I met the three (minus Mike) again this morning at the Paw-Paw library, where we browsed the kids section of the library before a gourmet lunch at Burger King. (The Star Wars action figure of the day was Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, not one of my favorites. Oh, by the way, I had taken the opportunity one evening earlier in the week to see the new Star Wars film, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.)

Today, I successfully arrived in Western Michigan. Holland is where my uncle Mark and Aunt Chris moved less than a year ago from Kalamazoo (Alison's parents). My mother's uncle Dick and Aunt Jean have lived here for years, too. And their kids and grandkids are still mainly in the area, too. Jean has held court every Saturday afternoon at her house for any family member to come for coffee, so tomorrow will be an unsually well-attended one. Chris has invited everyone back to their condo (a few houses away in the same development) afterwards for dinner.

After 11 years being bound to my graduate program and the University of Illinois, this is the free-est I've felt in a long time. No schedule. No deadlines. No incomplete requirements. I'm even planning to drive up north to the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan afterwards before heading south into Wisconsin again. I've never crossed the Strait of Macinac before, and since I'm that far, I might as well head a bit farther north to Sault St. Marie, Canada just to say I've done it. But this is just speculation still, not real events to be described, so stay tuned ...

GRADUATED!

May 15 (Sunday 10 am) was the College of Education convocation at which I got my PhD in Education.

My sister Ann and her husband Cam Johnston flew out to Chicago the day before and were picked up by a Chicago friend who had lived in LA, Alicia Ziemlo. They drove down and met up with Jack and Joan and me, who had driven down from Joe Walvoord's wedding up in Wisconsin the Friday before. Mom and Dad would have been sure to be there, so it was good to have family cheering me on on the "big day".

I'm traveling in my car (Dad's old Infiniti) at the moment, so I had to leave California quite a ways in advance - Monday May 9, in fact. I was visiting up in Santa Barbara just before, so it made the drive even longer. The day before I was to drive through the Plains, I checked the Weather Channel and found that both interstate 70 through Kansas and 80 through Nebraska were in the red zone - "severe" weather: thunderstorms, flood watches and tornadoes. I gambled by picking Nebraska and got right into the middle of the most severe weather. In fact, I had to give up crossing any of Nebraska after getting into Ogallalah from Colorado. I had been fleeing a particularly nasty patch of weather with golf-ball sized hail and blinding rain since Colorado and found out that it would be cutting me off if I traveled any further along interstate 80 (not to mention all the counties ahead with tornado warnings, etc.), so I just gave up for the day and got into a motel for the evening.

That also meant the next day I had to cover over 900 miles to get to Joe's wedding in Wisconsin. I woke up at 5:00 the next morning and was on the road by 6:30. Didn't get to Elkhart Lake until about 9:30 that evening. The weather was fortunately pretty mild all day, but it was about 5 hours longer than I normally prefer to travel in a day.

PhD candidates (usually a small bunch) instead of just getting diplomas are "hooded" and can pick some significant faculty member or other person to be their "hooder" to place their colored hood (not covering the head) over their head and draped behind their black robe. I had chosen two: my dissertation director Bob Hart (since 1998!) and my committee chair Gary Cziko. Only one showed up - Gary. (Bob, I learned later, had to rush up to northern Illinois to take care of a family estate emergency: the building housing the parents' antique business had collapsed, crushing many of the antiques and damaging a nearby building.) In hindsight, I was glad I had selected TWO hooders. At the moment I was to bend down to aid my hooder in placing the hood over me I went into autopilot and knelt down on one knee. As we walked off the podium afterwards, Gary whispered "it's not supposed to be a knighting!"

That evening I had a big graduation party (over 50 guests) out in the country at the home of some old Urbana friends now also in the PhD program in Education, Ray and Heidi Meredith. I hired a local Brazilian band, Desafinado, to play, most of whom I knew from elsewhere, so it was more like inviting friends than nameless band members. They played for two hours in the living room - bossa nova mainly. It was a potluck, but the Sundberg's took responsibility for all the drinks: soft drinks, beer, champaign (thanks to Ann and Cam) and "caipirinha", the national drink of Brazil: freshly squeezed limes, rum, ice and sugar all mixed in a big cooking pot (it was very popular). The guests included friends from the past 11 years in Urbana: fellow teachers from the Intensive English Institute, friends from Parkland (community) College, WEFT radio station, my church (New Covenant Fellowship), and my programs at the U of I. After dark, Ray made a big bonfire in the yard outside, and people stood around warming themselves (it was unseasonably cold and windy -- but not rainy, fortunately). Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, including the kids. Ann, Cam and Alicia mixed very comfortably with everyone and had a good time, too, they said.

The past couple of days I've been hanging around Urbana getting ready for my next -- and final -- deadline, my conference presentation at the CALICO conference at Michigan State University this Friday. (And I've been visiting friends, as well, I need to admit.) I'm taking off in a few hours to drive up to East Lansing but I thought you all deserved a blog update after the big day!