I did leave myself a little wiggle room. I didn't actually quit smoking until the fourth time I tried. Maybe the temperature will cool in here will cool down a little when the climate out there cools down..aiming for the mid 90s today.

I know for sure you'll see me wandering around in the comments, I read you regularly, and even when I keep my mouth shut I'm nodding and saying well done.

Thanks DD. You always give me an emotional workout, sometimes tears, sometimes storming the barricades, sometimes laughing so hard I scare the cats.

If the kids are lucky, I'm equally lucky. I thank them at the end of the semester for giving me a chance to do what I like, and I think they can tell I'm not going through the motions.

I have stories galore...but I think I'll start with one on myself.

When I took my job I accepted so late that by the time I gave my 30 days notice I arrived on campus literally with the freshmen. The university (then college) promised to find me a place to live--I would have no time to look. So I arrived on Labor Day, and found out that my place was in the dorms. Hey, it wound up free--including meals in the cafeteria.

Scenario: It's dinner, maybe 200-300 students devouring the plat du jour and yours truly among them. I went to the milk machine (milk, another of my addictions) poured myself two glasses and commenced to walk to back to my table. About half way there my heel landed on a lemon slice which had migrated from someone's iced tea to the floor. I sat down precisely like a toddler learning to walk sits down, plop!--legs out in front of me--upright from the waist. Obeying the laws of physics, as my butt went down the arms holding two full glasses of milk went up, leaving me sitting in the middle of the cafeteria floor, holding two empty glasses, and drenched in skim milk from the top of my head downwards.

First--dead silence. The the students broke into applause. What could I do? Stand up and take a bow, of course.

Thanks again for your ever kind words. If I can with anything just let me know.

The thing I worried about is that my voice was going away while I was hanging around. I have to write from within myself if the amike you see is the amike you get. So if I find my self coarsening myself to compete, or out of pique, or for whatever reason, or if I choose my topic by the flavor of the day it's time to put the brakes on.

TPM is, as far as I know, unique in that it provides an umbrella for reader's blogs and a mechanism by which we can cross-pollinate each other. The current model must be a coupe of years old now. It needs revisiting and tweaking so that there is room for my kind of post and the kind of post with which it competes for membership attention.

Anyhow, I'm not going very far, and I expect you'll see my name in the comments section on your blog more often than not. I like reading it and the experience gives me something to keep my brain active.

The luck runs both ways, LisB. I know what people want to hear when they ask me what I teach, so I answer with my disciplines, American Studies and History. But what I'd really like to do is to morph what into who and respond I teach students. It's much more fun to teach people than to teach stuff. Students are funny, questing, eager, aiming for a sophistication jusst beyond their reach, and strangely fragile and vulnerable. Who wouldn't find working with such a crew jolly good fun?

Ain't no trouble with your vocabulary, Saladin. It's yours, and you and your readers are at their happiest when you're writing yourself. I've loved TPM for exactly the same reasons mention. Everytime I see a person write with conviction out of a deep sense of who they are, I cheer.

I've been reading student papers for 37 years, how many in total I couldn't be able to tell you except to say the total is "lots", with more to come. With all that practice I become pretty adept at detecting the difference between writing out of conviction and writing for effect, not to mention writing to bamboozle the reader by confining one's self to writing what the reader wants to hear rather than what the reader might need to hear.

You never do that, which is why I love to read your stuff.

Thanks, Thera. You actually gave me the inspiration to take this step. I left myself some wiggle room so when I can't help myself I'll post something: hopefully I'll remind myself to post what I want to post in the voice in which I want to post it.

I'm glad to see your grace note around. Grace notes are wonderful things. I warble them on occasion.

I do love the Durante, don't you? I don't plan on being transient in the sense that I'm heading to Las Vegas to shoot craps for awhile or something. I'm just cutting way back on the blogging unless and until the speed at which I work (slow) becomes more in synch with the speed that popularity of topics changes--which in the last week or two has left me breathless. I'm reminded of the old joke. A guy stands very relaxed, hands casually at his sides. "Want to see the fastest draw in the west?" "Want to see it again?"

I suspect I'll be whopping out rather large comments on occasion--if there's anything I have to add to the subject under discussion. And once in awhile I'll toss a clay pigeon into the air for others to take aim at. :-)

I'm not going too far away. Thanks for the good words. The benefit of confining myself to the comments section for the time being is that I can work them up in 10-15 minutes. I don't have to treat them like quite so much the way my academic genes want me to treat the formal posts.