Going Wilds

After a busy two weeks during which I had to go up to my small college on the hill on seven of the past 12 days, today we decided to take it "off" and we went to The Wilds in Cumberland, Ohio. We've been meaning to go since we moved to Ohio in 2001 but we never managed to make it, until today.

It's only about an hour and 30 minutes away from our old house in our small city, and the trip is easy and through some beautiful country. The preserve has 10,000 acres, donated by American Electric Power, and they're used for conserving some of the world's most endangered animals. This include the Asian rhino above, and the beautiful Cheetah below.

We learned a lot during out day trip and it felt great to do something other than sit in front of this computer to either work on class preparations, tenure-review materials, or my book project. I might just decide that Fridays will be the "play hooky" day when I go to the movies or do something away from my desk and fight the ever present temptation to do one more work-related thing.

Classes began yesterday and I have two full classes, 15 (or maybe one or two more) for the first-year writing-intensive seminar and 20 for the Intro to Trans-American Literature. On Monday, I teach the Honors Seminar for the first time so I'll be busy working this weekend to prepare for that three-hour class. Right now, I have 14 students doing Honors, which is a lot.

I am happy to be back in the classroom, and I was glad to see my advisees and to welcome my new first-years. Once the materials gathering process of the tenure review is over by Sept. 15, things will be a lot more mellow and I can return to the book project. The plan is to revise, revise, revise before I have to meet my extended deadline in December. I also will be glad to be done with that all-consuming project.

Today felt particularly good precisely because nothing was required of me, except to sit back and take in the experience of seeing, up close and personal, many dangerously endangered species, grazing happily (except for the Cheetah, of course). I am conflicted about zoos but I can see the important work in conservation that a place like this does. Sadly, because there is no worse scourge on the Earth than humans, places like this may just be the only future for wild endangered species.