Friday, July 14, 2017



Ate breakfast and watched “Parks and Rec”.
Leslie Knope is an inspiration. Even when she goes rogue, as she did when she was recalled as a city councilwoman, she does good. In this instance, she leveraged the power of social media to help improve her hometown’s dental health.

Posted an Instagram story about yesterday’s trip to the library.
Because it was special! The remodeled Tulsa Central Library is beautiful! Libraries aren’t what they once were, but yesterday’s trip had my old favorites…you know, the books, as well as a Starbucks in which to meet with a former student and talk writing.



Bonus: author Rilla Askew was there to launch her latest book, Most American: Notes From a Wounded Place, a collection of short pieces that she said “tread the border between essay and memoir”.

Put dishes in the dishwasher and cleaned the kitchen counters.
Anyone else use their dishwasher as an extra cabinet, so you have to empty it out before you can do another load of dishes? No? Just me?


Created a gif to respond to a tweet in the #clmooc.



Four years ago I would not have understood that sentence. The #clmooc is a collection of people interested in the principles of connected learning which comes together in digital space each summer. In the five years I have been a part of the mooc, I have built a professional learning network, opened up my students to more choice in demonstrating their understanding,  created stop-action videos, sketches, memes, gifs, maps, digital museums, postcards, digital posters, poetry of various types, and connections with other educators.

Created rough drafts for two future blog posts.
Neither of which is this one.

Tried to sound salty about the deficits of auto-correct on FB and then realized I was spelling “y’all” incorrectly.

Credit: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/15-things-that-are-better-in-the-south

Wrote this post.
Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh advises, “Wash dishes just to wash the dishes.” But one of my favorite authors, Crescent Dragonwagon, counters that with the saying that heads her blog, “Nothing is wasted on the writer”.  While I was rinsing dishes, putting them in the sink, boiling water for a pasta salad, washing down the counters, and getting trash ready to go out, I was thinking about sitting down to write.  

Was I better off composing in my head than I would have been focusing on the dishes and being in that moment?
I don’t think I was multi-tasking to avoid the job. Instead, I was succumbing to the siren call of the keyboard.  Maybe trying out ideas in my head while I’m engaged in other work is another way of dodging writer’s block. Once I opened up  this file and started writing, I had plenty to put down on the page.

How do you avoid doing what every writer must do? 


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