Creek Jots ~ Monday Mid-November

â–¶ We’re putting the finishing touches on the slide show we hope to offer both for the Wendell Berry events this week and as a permanent item on the Blue Mountain High School Website or Blog. The students have been choosing images from Flickr Creative Commons to enhance the Wendell Berry quotation they have selected either from their reading of Jayber Crow and other printed works, or from the web resources like Goodreads.

I have used Keynote to put the images and texts together, and will port that into Fotomagico to create a nice animated slide show that, if we decide today is of sufficient quality, will loop somewhere along the periphery at the Floyd High School Friday night event.

â–¶ I will be meeting with two Appalachian Studies classes at Virginia Tech in early December, by invitation of a faculty member, to tell my story as a life-long “biology watcher.” For the first time, I’m venturing into Prezi as a tool to create a visual narrative of five chapters: The First Earth Day; the Great Acceleration; The Broken Story; The Anthropocene; and A Personal Ecology. I’m on part one at the long tail of the learning curve.

â–¶ Medi-CrapShoot: We’re meeting with a guy this afternoon to try to make sense of Medicare Supplemental Insurance (also called MediGouge)–which, it turns out, is way more expensive than I had imagined. (Imagine!) We’re leaning towards AARP and the F or N plan. We would sort of like to have some Social “Security” money left over at the end of any month that we’re still above the ground. That may not be possible.

â–¶ After a terrible, awful pretty bad Friday in and around Malfunction Junction in the Blacks-and-ChristiansBurgian Nexus plagued by traffic and human incompetence and Murphy’s Law in general, I came home with both a new iPhone 5S and my former 4S that I thought had been bricked by the nice guy that attempted to help me trade in a jailbroken phone. In the sanity of my own home, I was able to restore the 4S to Factory Defaults and will be selling phone, wall charger, car charger and Otterbox case. Mint Condition. Anyone? Is eBay the way to go to sell this puppy?

â–¶ I will be field-testing the camera on the new phone. I may be gaining or moving to a new blog format soon, and hopefully, images will be both larger on the front page and easier to access in galleries. Stay Looney–Tuned.

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fred
fred

Fred First holds masters degrees in Vertebrate Zoology and physical therapy, and has been a biology teacher and physical therapist by profession. He moved to southwest Virginia in 1975 and to Floyd County in 1997. He maintains a daily photo-blog, broadcasts essays on the Roanoke NPR station, and contributes regular columns for the Floyd Press and Roanoke's Star Sentinel. His two non-fiction books, Slow Road Home and his recent What We Hold in Our Hands, celebrate the riches that we possess in our families and communities, our natural bounty, social capital and Appalachian cultures old and new. He has served on the Jacksonville Center Board of Directors and is newly active in the Sustain Floyd organization. He lives in northeastern Floyd County on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

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