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Good enough for me

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A response to the Day 3 Writing Prompt Boot Camp, because I’m sitting in Writing Group not writing and I should just pick something. Even if I don’t think I write fiction. 3 years ago, I thought I didn’t write poetry and I was wrong about that, so…

Bob O’Connell dropped his bag on one of the four-legged grey chairs in his office, and himself into his black desk chair. He tapped the keyboard 3 times to wake his laptop. He was greeted by his own face and a password box, and that’s when he noticed that the white “Property Of WJA Data Analytics” label on his laptop was obscured by a little black cookie.

Bob looked around his office. Nothing looked to be disturbed, though as he scanned piles of paper and notebooks on his desk, he gave a half-smile and thought “but how could anyone tell.” More importantly, it didn’t seem that anything else had been added. Just one cookie.

He snapped the cookie in half to reveal the black cookie under its chocolate icing. The scent confirmed it… a Girl Scout Thin Mint. And impulsively, he popped a half in his mouth before he really started wondering where it came from. Chewed, swallowed, started to wonder who’d have a key to his door but not leave a note, decided he wasn’t poisoned, and ate the other half.

The next day, he returned from lunch to find another Thin Mint on his laptop. He called to the next office.

“Hey Megan? Is this cookie from you?”

“What cookie?”

A short blonde woman poked her head in Bob’s office. “I didn’t get a cookie.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“No, but I’ve been in meetings all morning. Ooh, Thin Mints! And well past Girl Scout cookie season too.”

“You want it?”

Megan squinted her eyes at the little disk. “No no, that’s your mysterious gift. I couldn’t possibly.” Her computer chimed and she went back to her office for the next meeting.

Bob studied the dark icing for a moment, and ate the cookie.

Next day, no cookie.

No cookies at home over the weekend.

Monday morning, 4 cookies. Bob tore a page out of a notebook and wrote “Thanks, whoever you are.”

Tuesday, after he went for an afternoon cup of coffee, one cookie, and a note. “No problem” in thick strokes of green fountain pen ink.

It was in his own handwriting.

No cookie the next day.

The following day, the opulent ring of a Samoa, chocolate, coconut, and caramel mounded high. And another note.

“We were out of Thin Mints.”

This story brought to you by the letters N, O, T, I, and S. In one of my first library jobs, I had a dumb terminal connected to a NOTIS mainframe, and I swear it worked better when I offered it a Thin Mint cookie. Truth is, I proceeded to eat those cookies myself, not wanting to leave food on my desk in the library. But I liked the idea of them disappearing in the past and reappearing somehow in the future.

Featured image: “Girl Scout Cookies – Thin Mints & Samoas” by brian, CC-BY-SA at https://flic.kr/p/bA8bVk

40DaysOfGoodShit, Biographical, Text

Stars and bacon

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(Lent is over but I can keep looking for #40DaysOfGoodShit. So this is Day 9. There’s probably a blog post in the idea that one might “honor Lent in my heart and try to keep it all the year”.)

So here’s the good thing, which needless to say I watched first thing in the morning…

And in the comments, someone talked about the fact that their morning routine is to put a vinyl record on while they drink their coffee. A long time ago, I tried something similar (except with cassettes), so I took that specific comment as my motivation.

Lemme be clear: I hate it. I liked waking up in a warm bath made of content. I liked my brain slowly coming up to speed as I play games on my phone or scroll a feed of “content”, snug and sleepy under the covers.

But consciously choosing not to be on my phone first thing is making me aware of how much the phone makes me time-blind. And I do not like the “oh shit!” moment when I realize that the morning is getting away from me, when I’m late and everything has to be rushed, when the first thing I really feel in the morning is guilt.

I rather like feeling that I’ve been conscious all morning, that I know what time it is, that I’ve made meaningful choices before I even get to work.

I like choosing to walk the dog, instead of remembering that I have to.

I like the fact that this is reminding me that I don’t do my best listening early in the morning. (Heck, I can’t even pick a new album some mornings… it’s been The Allman Brothers 3 times in a row and I’m proud that I managed to flip the record once.) But at least that has motivated me to do some intentional listening in the evenings.

I swear my coffee even tastes better when there’s no Facebook in it. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that now, my coffee tastes.

40DaysOfGoodShit, Text

Easter Lily

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It’s late on Good Friday and I’m walking the dog and I remember a new U2 EP just dropped.

Completely unpredictable that this would be an album about longing and remembrance and the afterlife.

It’s a solid mid-tier U2 album, jangly and muscular, big ideas and big melodies. And walking in the dark, looking up at the sky, the opening tracks acknowledge grief and absolutely refuse to let it drive out joy. Anthemic tributes to connections that last.

I look to my right, toward the mountains where I feel my father. The moon is coming up, but it’s edges are obscured by trees. A pyre of blazing orange, a beacon in the east.

Featured image is “Lilies” by Bart Everson, CC-BY-2.0 at https://flic.kr/p/eya8TY

40DaysOfGoodShit, Text

I’d rather just call him The Man

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My father passed away two and a half weeks ago.

There’s more to say. So much more to say. But in an attempt to rejuvenate my #40daysofgoodshit practice, here’s Day 4.

My brother did an amazing job on my dad’s obituary. He asked me for editing assistance, most of which he didn’t need, but I’m honored to have been part and I did add a detail that felt important. My other brother and mother also contributed.

And then it occurred to me that it was drafted in Google Docs and posted on an obituary site that we don’t control or even know how long it will stay up. And I’m also doing a lot of thinking and feeling about self-archiving and digital hoarding and backups and “lots of copies keeps stuff safe“.

This website still lives on a server I don’t control, but at least I do have the keys. And so here it is. I’m achingly, desperately proud of both my brother’s writing and my father’s life.

Joseph Aloysius Murphy

September 2, 1938 – March 3, 2026

Joseph Aloysius Murphy, 87, of Rockville, Maryland, died peacefully on March 3, 2026, following a long illness.

He was born in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, to Joseph and Sophia Murphy, and was raised in Ashley, PA.

A lifelong devout Catholic, Joe attended St. Leo’s high school in Ashley before studying chemical engineering at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., making him the first member of his family to have ever attended college. It was here that he met his beloved Anne Reilly and began a love story for the ages.

It was also at Catholic University where Joe tried his hand at boxing. It was not a successful venture.

Despite this setback, Joe went on to an accomplished vocation as a nuclear engineer. He dedicated his entire career to working for the federal government at the Atomic Energy Commission (later known as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission). His employment frequently took him overseas, unlocking a lifelong passion for international travel. His career included frequent work in Taipei, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Paris; together with Anne, he also traveled to Ireland, England, Italy, and Russia, among many other destinations. Each trip aroused his lifelong curiosity, filling him with stories of amusing local customs, breathtaking museums, and, most of all, exotic local cuisine.

Travel was but one of Joe’s passions. He was a voracious reader, most often studying Irish history and reading Irish authors and poets, but also inhaling any spy novel in arm’s reach. He was a dedicated member of the Knights of Columbus, where he served as Grand Knight of the Rock Creek Council, and held numerous chairmanships for the Maryland State Council. He loved baseball; boxing; dogs; jazz, folk, and country music; photography; wine; Guinness; and restaurants, where he would often hold court in the company of his family.

He was a master storyteller who passed along his love of humor to his children. His stories might end in a pitched fit of laughter, or a cocked eyebrow for a more subtle ending. It was a true joy for his family to hear him laugh – a high pitched, oscillating howl that was in every way discordant with his steady, baritone voice.

At work, in the Knights of Columbus, and at home, Joe was known as a generous mentor. He recognized talent in others and offered time, space, and advice to help it grow.

He is survived by his wife of 56 years, Anne; his “three turkeys,” Joseph (Alison), Thomas (Jennifer), and Kevin (Colleen); and his nine grandchildren: Molly, Bridget, Lilly, Jude, Jack, Katie, Fiona, Calvin, and Lina. He is preceded in death by his parents and six of the most loyal and charming Irish Wolfhounds God ever gifted to mankind: Finbarr, Aulin, Shannon, Jupiter, Siobahn, and Rebel. He was steadfastly devoted to them all, even the humans.

Joe died surrounded by family who were alternately singing, praying, and sharing their memories in his final hours. He slipped away while they were distracted and laughing at old family stories, making his a true Irish Goodbye.

A public wake will take place on Sunday, March 8, from noon to 4:00 PM at Devol Funeral Home, 10 E Deer Park Dr, Gaithersburg, MD. A full funeral mass will be on Monday, March 9 at 10:00 AM, at St. Mary’s Church, 520 Viers Mill Rd, Rockville, MD, where he had been a faithful parishioner for 56 years.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Rock Creek Knights of Columbus or to the Catholic University School of Engineering.

40DaysOfGoodShit, Daily Create, DS106, Images, Text

Stand in the place where you work

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Daily Create #5162 asks where we sit while we do our Open Education work. So here’s a picture of the new office.

Pictures on the wall

In part, I’m just glad that I got those pictures on the wall reasonably straight and spaced without actually measuring. (My home walls have not fared quite so well.) And they tell a little story – the panorama is Cal Ripken’s last at bat, a nod to growing up an O’s fan and paying more attention to baseball in the 1990s than I do now. I picked up “Artist vs Star” at a campus art sale at Kenyon because I liked it and it struck me as edupunky/DS106-y. The Hot Licks Blues Fest poster of Taj Mahal is for my musical side. And the framed poem was a going-away gift from my friend and colleague Chris Gillen, biology professor and poet. It’s titled “How we got through Covid-19 and the times before and after” and it is up there to remind me that I’m actually pretty good at this pedagogy support thing.

Which is nice, because it turns out this is also bell hooks’ first office at Berea. And that reset my impostor syndrome real good. I mean I’m not filling her chair in any literal or metaphorical sense but… see earlier comment, I don’t not-believe in signs.

Anyway it’s neat to imagine Dr. hooks also enjoying this exact view. (Photo taken in December).

Berea College in the snow out my office window
40DaysOfGoodShit, Text

That I should rise

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#40DaysofGoodShit, #1

The hospice where my father is staying has a full-time music therapist on staff.

A ruddy young man with a neat reddish beard. He asked my father what he’d like to hear and Dad said “anything Irish.” He said he knew “Joe Murray” would have some Irish in him, took his guitar case off his back, and hit the ceiling fan with it.

He played us The Wild Rover and When Irish Eyes are Smiling and Danny Boy and something about St. Patrick’s Day in New York City and one more I can’t remember. And then he sang one we’d never heard before and he said he’d only heard once, about “where’ve you been, Bridey Flynn.”

Dad smiled and tapped his foot the whole time.

And the music therapist went to pack up and tapped the ceiling fan with the head of his guitar again.

The photo “Guitar Scales” is by Alan Levine, CC0 at https://flic.kr/p/RDaeis

Daily Create, DS106, Text

It’s a little bit funny

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Today’s Daily Create asks us to sketch “what it’s like to be you” and to focus on the fun part of this moment, this perspective.

Sketching asks a lot of me; I have a belief that I “can’t draw” which goes back to not being as good as others in elementary school art class.

But then Randall Munroe has shown you can do a lot with stick figures, so there goes that excuse.

But “in my subjectivity, here and now,” I don’t feel like drawing. So here are some character sketches in words. I don’t know if they’re all actually from my perspective, but what you might see looking in.

A grey-haired man in a blue shirt is at a conference table. Around the table are 4 women and himself, evenly spaced out, each working quietly on their own projects on their own laptops. From time to time he looks around, proud to have brought Writing Group to his new place.

A grey-haired man in a blue shirt is hunched over his laptop at a conference table. He fidgets in his chair. He crosses and uncrosses his legs. Sometimes his fingers fly on the keyboard, sometime they are still. His cup of tea (4th caffeinated beverage of the day and it’s not noon yet) is empty.

A grey-haired man in a blue shirt stares out the window at bare branches dusted with white. He wonders if driving through a low snowbank was a smart choice to get a close parking place. His stomach rumbles and he wonders what’s for lunch. He strokes his goatee and realizes his skin feels drier on the inside than out.

A grey-haired man in a blue shirt finishes his blog post, hits publish, and closes his laptop. He digs a green notebook out of his bag and a cheap purple fountain pen from his pocket. He puts pen to paper and watches to see what happens next.

Featured image: “pen” by Russell Wall, CC-BY-NC at https://flic.kr/p/361DHa

Text

Just to feel free and be someone

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with thanks to Gregory Pardlo and Pádraig Ó Tuama

The sky is clear, immaculate, and the Big Dipper is as big as I’ve ever seen it.

And it’s not your hand I’m holding. We can’t hold hands anymore anyway.

But the dog holds my hand, her yellow nylon leash taut, as she pulls me on with her snuffling love of scents, with her bounding joy for the running neither of us could do a month ago.

She drags me on, barking at those white-tailed bastards mocking her in the dark.

And I squeeze your hand back, and make a wish for us.

Text, Thoughts and Ideas

Enterprising men quote ’em

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I was joking around on Twitter with Michael Berman, about vendor tweets appearing in a conference stream. You can see the thread, but the point is, he called me a chatbot.

https://twitter.com/amichaelberman/status/1056944712756514816

And that sounded a bit like a challenge.

Specifically, it sounded like a challenge to find something that spit out the buzzwords of educational technology, like I was doing with Michael. And then the Imp of the Perverse whispered in my ear that maybe what I should do is mashup famous quotes with those buzzwords.

And so @EdtechEpigrams was conceived.

I have a memory that Networked Narratives includes a “make a Twitter bot” activity, so thanks to Alan Levine and Mia Zamora for leaving me that breadcrumb. It took a couple of swings at Google to find something I could quickly make use of, but Katherine Marzinsky’s post about her @nounjective bot fit the bill.

That got me the pointer to Zach Whalen’s SSBot, which is basically a tool for generating random tweets based on a Google Spreadsheet and a provided script. I worked helpdesk long enough to know that I should be skeptical about running code I can’t read… but I went ahead and ran it anyway. It’s a pretty slick tool and configuring it wasn’t too hard. (Except for the part where I got columns and rows confused and generated a whole bunch of gibberish… but I fixed that by just cut-and-pasting the data into the right tab on the spreadsheet.)

Honestly, the complicated part is playing with syntax and grammar. My bot is following a very standard formula of

(witty saying) (ending with a buzzword).

but I was kind of surprised to see what a restraint that is. For starters, it means I have to stick to quotes ending in nouns (or noun forms). It also means that definitions are mostly out, since those would be funniest as

(buzzword) (followed by a witty saying).

Which is kind of a pity, because Bryan Alexander’s Devil’s Dictionary was another inspiration for this project.

(I notice that a later release of SSBot now supports regular expressions. Theoretically, it seems like this ought to allow me to figure out a variable for “put buzzword here”… but this is just a quick cheap laugh and I wasn’t motivated to do it. Maybe someday. )

I’ve currently got enough quotes and enough buzzwords for 1000+ unique tweets. At a tweet every 4 hours… that’s plenty of time for the industry to come up with some more.

 

Biographical, Images, Text

Boychik

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Middle Path crocus patch

I wish it were winter.

I wish it were cold and the wind were biting our cheeks. I’d fix my son’s scarf around his neck and bundle up his coat and tell him that sometimes the rules are stupid, but we follow them anyway. And sometimes the rules are stupid and it’s not that hard to just go around them. We’d sit together at the coffee bar and drink hot chocolate.

But the crocuses are coming up, and our shirtsleeves are poor protection from the wind.

Boy pulling a sled

This little monologue or illustrated poem or whatever it is entered my head last night as I was trying to get to sleep, and it was still there this morning.

 

Both photos are mine, CC-BY-NC, taken on my iPhone and saturation and brightness tweaked in Flickr. The crocus shot was taken just two days ago; I stopped the car to get the shot just before a rainstorm rolled in. The sled shot is from two winters ago.