Blogging on the Powwow

On Monday night I made my last trip home from Bridgewater State University. Oh, sure. I assume that I’ll be back at some point. But, this was my final drive home as a member of the faculty. And now, I’m a former member of the faculty. The name comes off the mailboxes. It was about this time of year in 2006 that Neil and I rented a U-Haul and drove my belongings down to Bridgewater, where I started as a new assistant professor on the tenure-track. Since we still lived in southern Maine, 120 miles from Bridgewater, I had rented a cottage in the area so that I would have somewhere to stay overnight near campus. Thus, the U-Haul had my office belongings, as well as items for the garage-converted cottage. It was incredibly hot that day, as I recall – about 100°. My step-daughter, Dorothy, was a teenager and she was home sick from her job at Funtown , with a fever. This was in the days before we had cell phones, so we didn’t know she was sick until we arrived home late that night. ...

Massachusetts has a new law: if your wipers are on, your head and taillights also need to be on. It's a safety issue. I like it. I hear that some Massachusetts lawmakers want to repeal it . But, I digress, as I often do when blogging. It's a new law in Massachusetts, but Maine has had this law since 1997. I know, because I did a research project on this law during my first semester of graduate school. That was fall of 1997. I completed an assignment for a research class on this new law. I was interested in how people know if a new law has been passed. This was before widespread use of the Internet and unlike now, there were no electronic signs along the highways. How would people learn about this law? I conducted a project in which I assessed the extent to which Mainers were compliant with the law. On five or six days when it rained, I parked on several different roads in Saco and Biddeford and among cars with Maine plates, when the wipers were engaged, I recorded wheth...