Hey TICs

Hello, Tech Integration Classmates (and Prof. Shorter) and welcome to my page.

If you are at all self-effacing, reticent, or shy, writing an intro. can be kind of painful. I'm all of these but also a secret ham who enjoys sharing a good joke or story better than just about anything. As you can tell by the photo (great success!), I like to fly-fish--almost to the exclusion of everything else, which makes winter the worst time of year and me kind of grumpy. I'm just beginning the English MAT program and MSU is a whole new world to me, just like blogging is. If I'm honest, I probably wouldn't be here at all if I hadn't gotten laid off from my job in book publishing, but it's just as well since the whole experience was like a "lost" weekend--generally fun but with large gaps when you can't remember what you were doing or why. I'm hoping teaching will be a lot more rewarding and energizing than pushing paper around. Despite just bad-mouthing my former career, it was great to be around books and smart people. There was always something good to read or talk about and the free coffee wasn't bad either. That brings me to another passion: reading. It usually takes me only a few pages to know if an author's got the goods to convince me into going along for the ride. And when you find a new writer who delivers, it's incredible. Consider the closing paragraph from The Road. Something like this could be framed and hung in a museum, if you ask me.

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

Here's a scattered mishmash of biographical trivia.

Originally from Philadelphia and before that Colombia. Olé!
Still play soccer but haven't been getting faster or better with age, I've noticed
Will never root for New York teams and think unprintable things about the Dallas Cowboys
Big music fan and like to make mixes for friends. Steve Jobs could die now and ascend straight to heaven for coming out with the iPod.

Maybe you will see me in class. I'll be in the unforgiving molded plastic chair right next to yours.

--Fernando

P.S. The title of my blog is something you hear a lot if you fish--As in "OMG, it was epic. How stupid of you for missing the best day/week/hatch of the year. Etc, etc." Sometimes, very rarely, I'm the one dishing it out...