What I did on my summer vacation.

Hello students!

Welcome to Applied Communications and Alice's Restaurant. I trust you had a fantastic summer. These last three months have seemed to evaporate overnight.

My summer started with a vacation to New England. My wife who is from New Hampshire and I combined visiting her family with doing some touristy stuff. We went whale watching and saw some awesome displays of humpback whale behavior. We went to Salem, Massachusetts and
toured the Salem Witch Museum. If you had me for Junior English, you know all about the witch hunts from reading The Crucible last year. Traveling through the Green Mountains of the Appalachian Range looking for moose produced no results, but we did see some gorgeous scenery.

We reached the Vermont/New York border and decided to travel the 120 miles into upstate New York to see the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. You can spend a week there and not see everything.

Sometimes those trips to see relatives, especially in-laws can be tedious visits, but that was hardly the case for me. My wife's brother lives on the edge of Lake Winnepesaukee in the heart of the White Mountains in N.H. I fished, jet skied, and

ate all the lobster I could eat while we were there . I wrote a poem in my journal about the lake. It is truly hard to complain about the country I live in when I look at the picture of me fishing below the U.S. flag.

One of the highlights of my trip came when we were visiting my sister-in-law at Hampton Beach, N.H. She lives about two blocks away from the beach. I arose one morning at 4:15 am to take a video of the sunrise over the ocean. Armed with my camera I shot some pretty amazing video. I posted the video to the web, and if you're interested, you can watch it here:



My son and I had the opportunity to travel to Topeka for a Neuburger family reunion. It has been a long time since he and I had the opportunity travel with just the two of us. I really enjoyed the trip. My parents are in their mid 80's so I always look forward to seeing them. I never know when it might be the last time I get to see them.

My summer hasn't all been sunrises, whales, and reunions. I arrived home from New Hampshire the day before summer school. Yes, I too, had to attend summer school. I spent three weeks with other teachers of writing and learned a lot from them. This year you will be participating in all sorts of activities inspired by my summer school experience. For instance, you will be completing two multi-genre projects. What are multi-genre projects? Stay tuned for more info. I promise you will have fun creating them. In addition, you will be blogging on a regular basis here at Alice's Restaurant among other things. I will discuss today's assignment later in this post.

When I have been home during this summer I have kept myself busy taking care of vegetables and our numerous flower beds we have planted. I love to take care of everything outdoors at our house. My wife says the outside is my domain, but the inside is hers. One thing is certain, she doesn't have to worry about me doing any dishes or laundry. She does call on me to do the "heavy stuff" like take out the trash. The rest of the time I have been swimming with Chula my black lab. She loves to swim after yellow tennis balls I throw into our pool.

During my free time I have done some reading, writing, and movie watching. My favorite movie this summer was Black Snake Moan. I just finished a book titled And Now We are Enemies. It is a true account of the Battle of Bunker Hill which immediately preceded our country's declaration of independence. As far as my writing goes, I will share some of it with you as the situation calls for it in class. I took the time to seriously attempt writing some poetry and am pleased with the results.

Ok. Let's talk about Applied Communications. You are probably wondering what we will be doing. First of all, let me explain one of my primary objectives for this class. You will incorporate all of your English skills into useful and practical skills needed after you graduate. We are in a digital age, so that means there will be a lot of emphasis on technology. The first bit of technology we will deal with will be this blog. You will be posting regularly but with some restrictions. I will go over all the rules of engagement for blogging in the classroom. The first and foremost rule is to stay within academic type discourse in your posts. You have the freedom to speak as you would talk as long as you are respectful and on topic.

ASSIGNMENT

Alice's Restaurant? More will be revealed why we are using this as the title of our blog. To figure it out on your own you can do a web search and discuss how you think I came up with the name. You are each required to respond to this post. You can construct a response to my post, or guess why I chose Alice's Resaurant as a title. You may also respond to each others comments, BUT you MUST repond to THIS post. Commenting only to other posts will not fullfil the requirements of this assignment.

In addition, you may start a discussion of problems or questions relating to technical issues with the blog.

If you have any questions, ask me here, or better yet, post the question to all.

Happy Blogging!!

mr. N