Ode to Looby

The following is a poem written as part of a workshop lesson taught by one of my excellent teachers. She asked us to push our comfort levels and explore using poetry in ways that would not feel forced and would in fact allow students to see how poetry is truly integrated into our educational studies.

For the assignment, we were given few parameters. She simply said "Use love and friendship as your inspiration."  What came out for me was a short poem about my old basset hound.  Named after a local martini bar/restaurant with exotic menu options, Clyde is a friendly old man whose eyesight and hearing are failing him.  He has a special diet and takes 10 pills per day. He rarely bounds around the way he once did, and his walks are now shorter because he gets tired quickly. He keeps asking for Salisbury steak and decaf coffee, but to this point, I've declined that request. He has two little lunatics who have come into his life and made it crazy, but he has always been gentle with them and treated them as something between quiet indifference and mild amusement. In his life, he has lived in a vibrant city, main street of a small town, and now he's moved out to the burbs with quiet, tree-lined streets.

This poem is for him.

Ode to Looby:

floppy ears for smelling

martinis chilled

venison steaks and ostrich 3 ways

mayor of a small town

always looked down upon

never condescended

smell the baby

knows to be gentle

wouldn't lick ketchup off his face

floppy ears now smelly

can't get down stairs

the up is too difficult

(Image credit: Debi LeBrun)

Nerd Projects

I recently stumbled across the Space Knights of Nerd (created by William Chamberlain @wmchamberlain and Krissy Venosdale - @venspired). On the official site, this: "According to Dictionary.com definition 2, a nerd is an intelligent but single-minded person obsessed with a nonsocial hobby or pursuit."


It made me realize I never actually considered the meaning of nerd beyond Ogre's interpretation in 1984's Revenge of the Nerds. You know - nerd as person who was set upon the perceived beautiful people who had determined the "others" to be irreconcilably different. It got me thinking about the things I enjoy and how I spend my time.

Over the course of the last few months, I have been working on a world in Minecraft Pocket Edition on my IPad. I had a special world that my boys were not allowed to enter. I was building a world for my son's birthday.  Here's a bulleted list of some of the main points of emphasis with my method.

• It was survival mode. I needed to have some level of challenge as I was building. 
• I carefully sculpted the landscape to ensure that I had the maximum surface area on which to build. I wanted to make sure that the main building area was on top of a hill, so he could see the real surprise that I had in store (more on that in a bit).
• In the meantime, I had to make sure that I had various mines for:
• Cobblestone (creating enough stone bricks to make impressive castles)
• Iron (Weapons, armor, and - most importantly - the train tracks that would take him throughout his world with ease)
• Gold (weapons, armor, powered tracks)
• Diamonds (rare but enough to fully outfit armor and weapons)
• I needed beds in multiple areas to be able to work in the daylight.
• I planted groves of every type of tree in order to be able to have three different types of wood with which to work.
• When coal became hard to find in the mines, I realized I could use my trees to make all the charcoal I could ever need.
• I created a farm with sheep and cows to have a constant supply of wool, food, and milk.
• On the farm there is a wheat harvesting area (again to ensure food and the ability to reproduce livestock).
• Using sketches to understand how best to make letters out of blocks.

Finally, I had to understand that he would want to add to this world in ways I couldn't foresee. To that end, in one of the rooms I created I put 8 giant chests and filled them with any and all materials he might need. Extra of everything I had used. I don't know if he's going to use the world I made for him, but I saw his face when he took his first train ride through his world, and it made me feel good.

Ultimately, I don't know that he's going to do anything with the world that was created for him. He doesn't understand how much planning went into building it. He doesn't see how much I cared about the little details (making the "B" in birthday was a 3 day project with which I'm still not happy, and the location of the birch tree grove had to be built up using mined dirt). He may or may not figure out that I couldn't find a carrot or potato or beet root to get the pigs to follow me, and that's why they're not in the farm. 

Despite all this, I think that the Minecraft world created for him is not unlike the real world. I don't think I want my boys to look at their world and be satisfied with what has been placed here for them. I want them to take a pickaxe to all of it and shape into what they see as perfection, and I hope that they allow and encourage their children to do the same.

So am I a nerd? By definition, I'd say so. I like it. And after seeing the smile on my son's face, I am super proud of it, because let's face it. That world was as much for me as it was for him.