Solar Clipper Diary

I’ve been meaning to put up a new post for weeks. A fan’s email this morning pushed me into the “omg, this is embarassing” mode so here’s a status report.

Cape Grace is still the next work in progress. I really want to fill that slot in before I go to Captain’s Share. My ideas on Cape Grace are working in my mind, and I really hope I can pry myself out of “Day Job” for a few weeks here sometime soon.

The “Day Job” — as some of you may know from reading the comments on the last thread — is in survival mode. It depends on earmark money and grants for continued support. If you’ve seen any of the financial news lately, you’ll understand why things are so desperate. The Feds are pulling the plug on all earmarks, grant agencies are only writing grants to the largest and most prestigious institutions, and foundations are suffering from the economic meltdown. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for a small, specialized organization that’s working to help teachers for kids who are blind, deaf, or have significant support needs. It’s not all bad news. We have several initiatives underway that are potentially game changing, but they’re requiring a lot of work on my part to make sure that — if the “Day Job” folds, it won’t be because we didn’t do everything humanly possible to try to make a difference. I won’t bore you with the details, but we’ve developed new tools to teach science which are on the cutting edge at the intersection of instructional design and technology. You can probably imagine how much effort is going into these. On the upside, if I lose my job, I’ll have more time to write. On the downside, I’ll lose my job.

My teaching load has been doubled since last fall. I used to teach only one course a semester, and now I’m doing two. This semester is a “new teach” – which means I need to do a lot of work to get the course established and I made the mistake of not doing enough ahead of time. It’s sucking up a lot of the time that would normally go to writing.

So, the bottom line is that I’m still here. I’m still planning to write more. I miss the production process, the writing and reading maybe even more than you all miss getting new content.

Thanks for being out there, and thanks for all the support you’ve shown me.