My Photo
Name:
Location: Osterville, Massachusetts, United States

I am a professor at Cape Cod Community College and and a member of a Buddhist order. After a 30-year career as a newspaper reporter and editor I became a full-time professor in 2001. I am the author of the textbooks "The Elements of News Writing" and "The Elements of Academic Writing." I enjoy running, hiking and camping. I have two grown sons and two grandchildren.

Friday, June 16, 2006

Exhausting Friday

All I had on my schedule today was a very pleasant lunch with two of my colleagues who are among the founders of a group we started called SNACCIM -- Student Newspaper Advisers at Community Colleges in Massachusetts.

The Internet Communication connection was that my colleague Rose Sergi, who teaches at Middlesex Community College, is also offering a summer course this summer through Northeastern University. It is a hybrid course, and she was commenting that the on-line portion is a great deal of extra work for the instructor. I was able to agree that that was my experience exactly. We also talked about blogs. Our colleague Amy Callahan form Northern Essex was particularly interested in blogging, since she will be teaching an Introduction to Mass Communication class in the fall. I promised to send her the link to this blog, where she will see her own name! I hope she doesn't mind.

We met at a great restaurant called Scupper Jack's in Acton. (http://www.scupperjacks.com/) If you click the link, you can see that there is an outdoor deck overlooking the lake, and that's where we ate. The only bad part is that I hit a terrible traffic jam on the way up. It should have taken two hours, but I allowed two and a half to be safe. Ii was still 20 minutes late. They were kind and waited for me. For the last few miles of the trip my brakes acted funny. When I left the restaurant after a wonderful lunch, the brakes sounded and felt terrible. I crawled at 20 mph to a nearby Midas Muffler Shop. One brake shoe had become detached and crumbled, damaging the drum. So I sat in the Midas Shop for more than an hour while they repaired it. Another customer sat across form me typing away on his laptop. I said I wish I had brought mine! We had a nice chat about that. Then the drive home was in rush hour, and Route 495 was even worse than in the morning. That trip took three and a half hours. So my little lunch ended up taking me from 9:30 a.m. until 7:30 p.m. Whew! I'm glad I got the key lime pie for desert!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home