Good Idea, Bad Idea

Who remembers the little cartoons on the Animaniacs and occasionally on other cartoon shows with the "Good Idea, Bad Idea" characters? For this post I'll try it out as a format.

Good Idea: Spend time at the local college teaching.

Bad Idea: Doing it for three full mornings of a single week.

I had the opportunity to teach a formal class (3 hours) at Lakeland last week. My previous engagements were more Q&A sessions, but this was an actual item in the syllabus with a chapter of the text to go over. Appropriately enough, I taught the chapter "Leader as Politician". I enjoyed it and I think the class found it at least interesting. As a good prof will do, I used the structure from the text, but applied a lot of information from my library as well as personal experiences and real-world examples to illustrate the points. Just teaching this session would not have been a bad idea, it was the subsequent return a few days later to review student presentations and then the next day to help grade their finals (an outline and oral presentation). The thing that makes it "bad" was that I certainly had other projects I could have worked on in that time. Oh well.

Good Idea: Hiking the Parnell Tower trail.

Bad Idea: Hiking it on the first 90 degree day of the year at high speed.

Yes, I was stupid enough to consider it a good idea to go power hiking on the hottest day of the year thus far. The trail is all of 3.5 miles long, but is rather hilly and I covered it in just over an hour. Funny, I felt icky at the end of the trail, especially after ascending the 60 foot tower at the end. I decided to go see X-Men 3 to cool down (it's okay, but not as good as the first two). I noticed that the ticket seller looked at me with a little concern and realized when I went to the restroom that I was beet red. Hmmm. Heat exhaustion, fun. Whatever, I felt much better after a 40 some ounce slushy. I actually hiked all three days of the weekend and did nothing work related. Sweet.

Good Idea: Re-arrange my living room.

Bad Idea: Decide that I need an ottoman now.

I woke up Saturday with the conviction that the living room needed to be rearranged. There are certain limitations to this, notably the very heavy TV and associated sockets. I left that part be, but moved everything else so that now the couch is in the prime TV viewing position. This makes more sense since it is all but brand new and much more expensive than the decade-old recliners that previously were there and are now in good fire-viewing position. The difficulty is that I need a footrest for the couch and the coffee table just isn't very comfortable for that. Must now visit WG&R to see what they have that matches.

That concludes "Good Idea, Bad Idea".

Coming soon: My first multi-part rambling and position statement on democracy, government and short-sighted citizens. It will be worth reading and probably be a little suprising to some. Until then.