Chain Home

Took a day off from pretty much everything: teaching, exercise, and good eating. About the only "normal" thing I did today was go to work, which is not stressful and challenging, but the big boss at my day job announced today she was taking the position of Chief of Information Technology at the State Legislature in a couple of weeks. There be changes coming.

I cancelled class tonight because the books for the class haven't gotten to the prison yet, so we'd be spending time looking at each other and me trying to think of things for them to do. The secondary reason is I did something stupid last night that frustrated the COs and could have gotten a student tossed in the "administrative segregation" (the hole).

It's prison policy that students must come to, and leave, the education building as a class. When spring is turning into summer, however, the yard is open late, so things are a little looser. Towards the end of spring semester, if a student told me they were done for the night, I let them go back to their unit alone.

For some dumb reason, I assumed the prison was on the same schedule, which was dumb, dumb, dumb, because it's dark enough now to close the yard just after class starts. Despite this, I was sending students back to their units across a closed yard, which means Control had to account for them and the Towers had to track them. If an inmate was slow or decided to play games, then he could end up in the hole or worse. On top of all this, NNCC is the prison that had the recent escape and all of the officers are walking on eggshells. The watch sergeant tore me a new one, as he should have. I took my medicine and apologized and got out of there.

Now I'm probably exaggerating the situation, but the incident really shook my mojo because it was a dumb mistake and I know the rules, and students always pay for the teacher's mistakes. I'll do better next time.

So I spent the night reading a good book about Navy boot camp. And finishing The Winds of War, which I've only read about twenty times now. Also finished in the last month: Moneyball, three books of the Harry Potter series, and Shogun (read that about 50 times now). I got a couple of books queued up next, including Jeff Shaara'a book about the First World War. His dad wrote one of my favorite books about the Civil War (not that there's a lot of competition).

To be perfectly honest, I can't get enough of reputable historical fiction, which means to me that the author did scholarly research to support an interesting story. (Please don't talk to me about Forrest Gump: entertaining movie, crap book.) My favorite HF novel is required reading at West Point. To me, it is a precious book and I've only read it twice; I have to be in the proper frame of mind. And yes, I prefer military historical fiction, although some eras leave me cold (American Revolution).

What got me started? Gone With The Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird...the movies. I saw them when I was a kid and got to wondering what I was missing in print. It turns out the answer was, "A whole lot." Now the world stops when I find some good, reputable historical fiction.

If I had to pick a few books to take to a desert island:
Absolutely anything written by Robert Anson Heinlein, God rest his soul...
The aforementioned GWTW, TKaM, Shogun, TWOW, War and Remembrance, and Once an Eagle.
AWB Mike or Jeff Shaara
AWB Stephen Donaldson or Orson Scott Card
The original Dune trilogy by Maestro Herbert
The Gunslinger series and It by that guy from Maine
AWB Anne McCaffrey
Almost anything by Stephen Ambrose (non-fiction category)

If I needed to start a fire on a desert island, I'd bring James Patterson books, but I'd use them for kindling after I read them.
:-)