Spring break is here and the only thing I’ve done so far is play about 5 hours of Fallout 76 before getting ready to go out to eat at one of my favorite spots before hitting a bar to wish a friend happy birthday.

There is a productive hope for spring break including:

• Finishing my NCA paper for this year on Myles Horton’s pedagogy and the artificial wall between discussion, dialogue and debate.

• Taking my 1694-ish rhetoric textbook to the bookbinder for much needed repair.

• FInishing reading all the books I’ve checked out from the library on Roman education

• Grading all of the podcasts and videos from my online public speaking course

• Getting a jump start on two big essays due in April/May.

So that’s a full week I think but without any other demands on my time such as getting decent, walking to the campus, sitting in the office, and such it can really free up a lot of time. This is why I hope very soon to be teaching mostly online if not entirely online.

I’ve been looking forward to spring break ever since I fell behind on my semester plan about a week and a half ago. Things happen and it’s okay. I am just glad that I have some time to catch up a bit.

The other big thing that has happened is my mega-computer, the one I built and rebuilt a couple of times, has just started giving me blue screens all the time now. I shut it off and put it aside, but that meant I had to rearrange my home workspace. Now I’m typing this on an Asus Chromebit, and my second monitor I brought up to the university to plug into my old desktop computer I had up there for debate. Since I don’t do debate anymore, I no longer needed that computer for that project so I just moved it into my office to use it for work. So far so good, but on compressing audio (WAV to MP3) it is very, very slow compared to the mega computer. Not very happy about that, but maybe if I decrease the quality of the recordings I’ll have better results. I’ll work on fixing the big computer in May/June, once the term is over.

So we’ll see how the week ends as next Sunday I’ll most likely post “The End of Spring Break!”