Sorry to be gone so long, but I’ve got an excuse.  It’s a good one.  Really!

Every spring term, I teach a university course on communication in statistics.  Well, “every” might be a little strong.  I co-taught the class in 2009 and taught it solo in 2010.  You’d think that would have been enough to convince me to stop, but I volunteered to teach it again in spring 2011. It’s an upper-level undergraduate course involving multiple drafts of multiple written projects.  I mark and comment heavily on every draft. For the last two years, all of my students have been ESL (link).

Student feedback says my course is too hard. I got news for them – it’s even harder to teach. From early January to mid April, all I think about is perfecting my lectures, providing more illuminating homework and reading material, doing anything I can to make my students better technical writers. . .or at least to make them care. Not the best brain-fodder for blog-writing.  True, there are some amusing moments in and around the classroom, but most of them involve students. I don’t feel quite right about posting such stories.  At least, not while class is still in session.

So my blog has languished, its abandonment adding one more* stratum to the mountain-sized guilt that built up over the term. But I did at least give the blog some thought.  I even started a few entries, though they fell on their noses and died premature deaths.  I simply didn’t have mental room to wanna be anything (except asleep or in Hawaii). Which made me realize. . .perhaps the whole “Wanna be” theme is a bit too restrictive. Maybe I should let it evolve.

Hmmm.  Think, think, think.

*Other strata include daily growling at the children (I think they nicknamed me Fifi, in keeping with my poodle-esque hair), feeding my family McDonalds at least twice a week (or worse – letting Tom cook things like sausage-pineapple-rutabaga-macaroni-blue cheese-and-sauerkraut casserole), not cleaning the master bathroom since Christmas (call it a cultural experiment), allowing refuse to pile up around me until my house looks like a hoarder’s dream castle, and doing no fiction writing whatsoever.