Well-Swept Yard

What is wrong with this picture At our (university) faculty meeting today we were given permission to skip teaching our classes tomorrow so that we can catch up with paperwork.

I just want to wake up dead That is what my father always said about dying. A gentle, uneventful passing.  This is what happened. He awoke on the fateful day, got up, ate his usual cholesterol-rich breakfast, and then returned to bed for a nap.  He was in his mid-nineties.  At some point somebody noticed that he did not look quite right. A check at the bedside revealed that he had died during his nap. As I see it, things turned out better than he had hoped for. He woke up, had a good breakfast, fell asleep and died.  I'm glad he had the breakfast.  

The Special Needs Of Old Cats Caring For Your Elderly Feline  I am guilty of not remembering the name of a special cat of my childhood. The older I become the more I love cats and forget things such as names. Well, Cat lived outdoors and would sneak in the house from time to time. My mother did not want animals in the house (well, other than we three sons). The attitude was rooted in an incident from my mother's childhood on the farm, on a day when a goat got in the house at a time when my grandmother was any-day-due with a child. Not pleasant. Not for the people and not for the goat. The goat returned to the outdoors and my grandmother soon gave birth to a healthy little girl. But I digress. Cat visited the back door of our house every day signally meal time. This was in the 50s and we fed the cat from a can of what I suspect was the cheapest cat food at the grocery store. Can and large spoon in hand, I walked to the back of the yard where a long unused chicken coop sat. The

Cultural Institutions & Wikipedia: A Mutually Beneficial Relationship Webcast (Library of Congress)  This is good news. Acceptance of the Wikipedia as a serious and useful should be bolstered. And by the way, I found an objectionable phrase in the Wikipedia this morning and before a note reached the editors the phrase had been removed. Here is what the Library of Congress says about the video cast (or transcript download) TITLE: Cultural Institutions & Wikipedia: A Mutually Beneficial Relationship SPEAKER: Dominic McDevitt-Parks, Kristin Anderson EVENT DATE: 08/13/2012 FORMAT: Video + Captions RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes TRANSCRIPT: View Transcript (link will open in a new window) DESCRIPTION: Over the past few years, cultural institutions have formed partnerships with Wikipedia in order to increase their visibility on the web and connect with a vibrant community of online volunteers. As a purpose-driven, non-profit educational project, Wikipedi