Spring semester grades are in!

Yours truly hanging 'round the office at home today after tallying and submitting final grades with some classic jazz numbers playing on the ol' computer. Ain't YouTube a great thing?

Final grades for the spring semester are in, and I'm enjoying that delightful lazy feeling that arrives shortly afterwards at the close of yet another university term. Being able to do all of this online (instead of with the old-fashioned paper final grade forms) certainly helps.

The attire in today's photograph is pretty typical around here between the end of April and the end of August. The weather needs to be warmer before I break out the Madras shirts though. The Land's End cotton knit shirt dates from the spring of 1998 when I was still attending grad school in Madison, Wisconsin. It has actually made a few different visits to Norway with me through the intervening years now that I think about it. The shorts and dock-siders are more recent vintage though.

These are the kinds of items that the men in my extended family have worn during the evenings, weekends, and vacations each late spring and summer for many decades, and, to some extent, they still do. . . unless mowing the grass or working in the vegetable garden. Even my Welsh professor stepfather has climbed aboard and lives in these sorts of clothes at my parents' home in the Yucatan (Mexico) whenever they are there. It's simply too warm and humid much of the year for anything else unless you happen to be in the swimming pool, in an air-conditioned bedroom, or an El Norte blows in cooler, dryer air.

While clothes like these, strangely, have their detractors, they are nevertheless relaxed, comfortable gear that looks equally presentable at home, for a quick trip to the nearby corner convenience store for that forgotten container of milk, or for strolling along the beach on the Outer Banks of North Carolina during a breezy summer's evening. If you are looking to take your casual warm weather style to another level, I urge you to give this kind of attire a try.

-- Heinz-Ulrich

Mid-June Thursday Style. . .

A nother pretty typical variation on the theme for late spring, summer, and very early fall. I'm a huge fan of Madras and have several such shirts in the seasonal rotation. Lightweight, exceedingly comfortable, and even dressy when pressed and tucked in, which is the usual way of things here at Totleigh in the Wold. Now, if I had my druthers, I'd still rather be skiing the trails in the upper half of "The Mitten" (of Michigan), in the Upper Peninsula, or Ontario. But summers ain't so bad either, and I'd look pretty funny walking around in cross-country ski attire during June. -- Heinz-Ulrich

The Power of Ideas. . .

T he end is nigh! The autumn semester/term approaches. And while we still have almost two months of summer left according to the calendar, "Summer is over and gone," as the crickets sang in Charlotte's Web . At least for those of us who head back to the classroom in less than a month. In advance of a meeting with my program director late Monday morning, I spent about 40 minutes total during the weekend to jot down several ideas about planned workshops and related activities for the coming 2024-2025 academic year. At an opportune moment, I mentioned "I have a few ideas," and opened my leather portfolio. My director was highly receptive to almost everything I suggested, and we had a very productive planning session for just over 90 minutes. Just about everything I sketched out on Sunday aligns with his own ideas. It's nice when meetings go that well, and two related things occur to me in hindsight. One, it pays to exercise...

A Lazy Saturday at the End of June. . .

A sleepy first half of the weekend here at Totleigh. Warmer and quite humid ahead of an approaching cool front here in Mid-Michigan. Perfect for yet another pair of chino shorts an a seersucker shirt -- tucked in of course -- with the usual leather deck shoes and ribbon belt. Otherwise, not much accomplished beyond a page or so of writing and monkeying around with audio settings for an upcoming podcast episode. However, I was not completely useless yesterday! I made a huge fruit salad for dinner, which the Grand Duchess and I enjoyed a short while later at the table on the back porch. The Young Master, as is his wont on Saturday evenings, took his dinner on a tray in the TV room upstairs where he whiled away a couple of hours on Flight Simulator, flying some sort of commercial airliner to some destination across the Atlantic or Pacific. I would have loved that sort of technology at about nine or 10 way back during the late 19...

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