Earth Day 2007: The Magic of Place

Amazingly, 8:56 a.m. found me not only out of bed but walking three blocks to listen to the Unitarian's current ministerial candidate. He would be their first male minister in 22 years. Today's Earth Day service was thoughtful and lyrical, with passages from John Muir, a poem ("The Wild Geese") by Mary Oliver, and a hymn attributed to Hildegard of Bingen. The sermon topic was "The Magic of Place," or topophilia, focusing on the minister's boyhood explorations of Grampian Hill in Pennsylvania and his love of Middle Earth. (He's apparently very fond of fantasy lit: At his current post, he gave three sermons in a row on Harry Potter.)

I discovered that I can't input my student surveys until I have human subjects approval (which will take another week or so), and the web surveys I was going to adapt are so elaborately coded that it really could be worth my while to relearn enough Perl to do it myself. That task being unthinkably large for now, I'm sort of off the hook for a day or two - I only need to prep for this week's classes and work on my FYP presentation.