My first college

Last weekend I stopped in at the first college I attended after high school. This is a picture through my windshield of what I guess is still the main building of the Black Hawk East Campus just south of Kewanee, Illinois. It is a much larger campus now with several additional buildings, including some on-site student housing that wasn't there in my day.

I only attended for one semester. I believe I had a track scholarship, but I never did run track. At the time, Jane was attending ICC in East Peoria and my intent was to transfer to nearby Eureka College to compete in track. Somehow I ended up just transferring to ICC, and that ended my college track career (before it ever started). I rented an apartment in Washington, IL for one semester, then Jane and I ended up just living together in her apartment in Washington the following year. I wonder how different my/our life would have been had I went to Eureka and ran track (Ronald Reagan's alma mater, btw)...

Anyway, I don't have a lot of memories of my time at BHE other than living in an apartment in downtown Kewanee. At the time it was above 'Tina's Shape Shop' and was not a very nice building. Drunks used to sleep on the crooked stairs leading up to my second floor room. I shared the apartment with my high school friend Brian G., and this is where I proposed marriage to the lovely Lady Jane. I lived there until someone broke in and stole Brian's stereo. I don't really remember how it happened that I/we didn't live there anymore. It's all kind of a blur now.

BHE was also the first place where I made friends with black people. Greg and Johnnie. Not that we were real good friends, but we smoked cigarettes together. I didn't realize it at the time, but the athletic director - who also taught my Intro to Psychology class - didn't think too highly of me because I smoked while on an athletic scholarship. Greg told me about this later. He was on the basketball team, as was my roommate.

So, that's about all I can remember about my brief time there. Coming back from my aunt's funeral last Saturday, I simply drove up between the buildings and turned around in the parking lot. I could barely recall having ever been there. Kind of sad, I suppose.

Coffee

Trying to live green in a black and white world. That’s how I feel sometimes.

I generally start my day with a giant travel mug full of green tea with one spoon of raw unfiltered organic honey, which I make at home and take to work. It will last until around 8 or 9 am (I make it at 4 am).

I eat breakfast around the time my tea runs out. Then I have a cup or four of black coffee in these 8 ounce styrofoam cups. After that it’s water the rest of the day - with an occasional afternoon cup of lemon-ginger tea and my nightly “sleepytime” tea before... sleepy time.

I am not a fan of these cups though. Not only is styrofoam supposed to be bad for us as humans, and terrible for the environment (they say this stuff takes up as much as 30% of the space in landfills, and can last for 500 years), I mostly dislike these cups because they are only 8 ounces! Much too small.

My boss is not a coffee drinker (strictly diet coke - all day every day), so he would probably rather not even have a coffee pot. We had 12 oz cups for awhile and he threw a fit. He thought it was too wasteful.

Anyway, I sometimes feel bad using just one of these styrofoam cups per day. I would prefer to leave less of a footprint on the planet. Though, to be honest, most of the time I would prefer to be a lot less conscientious. I suppose it's a blessing and a curse. Sort of a small cup of suck...

Sometimes it's the smallest of things that can trip us up though, isn't it? It's just a cup of coffee... it's only 8 ounces... such a small sin... Surely it won't hurt anything, right?

Words can be small yet powerful. As can thoughts. The teeniest of habits can snowball into a mountainous mess.

Black coffee in a styrofoam cup. You, and me. Today. Right now.

What are you doing?

**Photo from my perch at the Y, looking out onto Harrison Street.

New direction

So... I've been thinking about taking the blog in a new direction. Maybe even starting a whole new blog. I don't know. I'm still merely in the 'thinking' stage (which, you know, can last forever).

It started awhile ago - when I said I wanted to be a writer. I didn't necessarily mean a writer of books. It could be as a copy writer, or technical writer, columnist in some free newspaper or blog or something.

I think a good place to start, though, is to write right HERE. In a more serious sense.

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The other day - I don't even know what I was doing - but I had the sudden urge to take a picture of something and just write my thoughts about it. It was scenery alongside the road. Nothing spectacular, but it was sort of just a... moment in time.

That gave me an idea: moments.

Originally I thought of trying to take one picture a day and, maybe post it to Instagram. I never use Instagram. Of course, I also have hardly any followers.

Then I thought about maybe starting a whole new blog. Post one thing a day; one picture a day... something like that. But something with more of a purpose. Maybe post a picture of one living thing each day. Or one static thing each day. One dead thing each day? I don't know...

However... I do already have THIS blog. "Every day with dan." What if I simply transformed this blog into an 'everyday moments with dan'? Rather than so many 'random thoughts,' or ideas, or personal items (or whatever it is this blog actually is)... I would be more focused on daily snapshots - actual photos that I took myself - that captured 'moments' from everyday life...

Hmm. So, I'm still trying to process it. But I kind of like it.

We will see...

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**Thinking later... The real problem with blogging is the sluggishness. Taking pics, converting them in a way I can put them on the computer so I can put them in a blog post, etc. This is why social media apps like Facebook and Instagram became so popular. But I am growing out of love with social media like that. In fact, I've already GROWN out of love. I want to remain committed to blogging. If for no other reason than because I'm an old curmudgeon who is set in his ways. So, I am investigating things like BlogTouch for Blogger. Something to make it easier to get pics from my phone to here. If anyone has any ideas... please do share.

***Even later still... Today I am in a rotten stinking mood and don't feel like going in ANY direction. So it's a good thing I wrote the above several days ago. What I really want is to be home right now looking at my coffee cup beside my computer while gazing out the window (instead of at this job I hate).