Spring break, woohoo!

Today I started a whole week of beer, babes and beaches!

That's if by "beaches" you mean the icy banks of the Ohio and Erie Canal, by "babes" you mean the silent Vietnamese woman who stopped eating pistachios just long enough to sell me $2.60 worth of snow peas, and by "beer" you mean, well, beer.

But it's all good. One yet another bright sunny day I decided to run along the Canal rather than go to Edgewater Park. I parked on Harvard Avenue and started running at the 5 mile marker. The sun was warm and the trail uncrowded.

I decided to aim for the 8 mile post so that I'd have a six mile round trip. Seemed like a good idea at first, but at the turnaround I was really dragging. On the way back this 6 mile post was a very welcome sight.

I thought I might walk the last mile, but decided to slog on ahead. Slow but sure. The slight hills of the Canalway Trail aren't much, but clearly slowed my pace compared to the absolutely flat Edgewater route.

Still, a good run and nice change of scenery.

Oh yea, the sabbatical

Looks messy, but believe it or not, helped me clarify things It's been more than a year since I hopped on the Amtrak Lake Shore Limited and headed off on my sabbatical tour of schools from New Mexico to Milwaukee.

I had a pretty good idea at the start what I'd be talking about, but it turns out that the most interesting questions were ones that cropped up along the way.

What I thought would be a straight-forward summary of things I learned about teaching design became a jumble of competing ideas.

Sort of like this "mind map" that I made today, a first step in writing that dang report that was due nine months ago. My plan for Spring Break is to work on this every day, step by step progress that started with this attempt to get everything on paper and explore connections between/among them.

Believe it or not, this messy exercise really did help clarify things. (Mouse over image above to see full map)

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