Pay Day!

Yes, it's a red letter day, and not just because it's Saint Valentine's.

I just deposited a Portland State University (PSU) check made out to me (taxes withheld), a Fuller Schooler, for my work with Saturday Academy as an adjunct faculty member. I teach at the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI), using a classroom belonging to Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU).

On Saturday, I used our projector to eye our classroom from further out, using Microsoft's Terraserver. We also played with new Elastic Interval Geometry applets, and went over some entry level group and number theory using Python, a nifty computer language.

Last week, I completed an intro to Fuller's concentric hierarchy of polyhedra, embedded within its CCP context (if you're thinking CCCP instead, don't worry about it -- wires cross sometimes).

Although the amperage is low (this was a token sum), the point is: a switch has been thrown and a current is flowing. This is a "go live" milestone along our critical path. A cool new circuit for our Motherboard Earth has commenced operations.

Followup:

So it turned out over dinner (we ate out as a family) that Dawn had been reading about Hildegard of Bingen. Without having read this blog entry, she brought up the importance of the color green in Hildegard's writings, and connected this to her own query "where's the green?" in a recent empowerment circle -- for her, an uncharacteristic use of slang (she was asking about travel money).

I told her later how satisfying it was to hear all this green talk, having just written a blog entry that was thematically red -- including a subtle Biblical allusion that most wouldn't see. The juxtaposition of red and green, and of sacred and profane imagery, made for some interesting paper-into-gold alchemy.

And speaking of checks, of course the Catholics have been paying me for years, through Saint Dominic Academy and later Saint Vincent Hospital. The breakthrough celebrated above was not the brute fact of getting paid, but rather the new set of university affiliates connecting up with the Fuller School to promulgate a new, higher quality curriculum.