Hi, James!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

AH>  I've been swimming in Howe Sound... that's cold enough
AH>  for me!  What I had in mind there, though, was that salt
AH>  water is more buoyant....  :-)

JB>  I knew that was what you were going for, but I thought
JB>  I'd spin the temperature issue. Maybe English *is* fun
JB>  after all. 


          Y'know... sometimes you remind me of a couple of students I had
in a byegone era.  I couldn't get angry with them because they made me
laugh, but I made them think when I mimicked the robots who ate
"chicken embryos"....  :-))



AH>  That's what makes it a new experience... I'd never thought
AH>  of myself as a herd animal, but it's obvious there.

JB>  I wasn't comparing you guys to ruminant.


          I knew that.  I guess I'm so accustomed to being a divergent thinker
... and a klutz... I never expected to fit in with a sports-minded crowd. 
I'm currently gaining further insight into their reasoning style,
however....  ;-)



JB>  I did want to emphasize how Dallas and you are akin to
JB>  trying yourselves with unfamiliar circumstances. You
JB>  both rose to the occasion, perhaps swayed by Nora's
JB>  glee. Good on all o' ya all!


          Thankyou....  :-)



JB>  That's what separates you from eternal pessimists.
JB>  "...Mutual willingness to learn by doing... and
JB>  nothing else matters." Sounds like a Metallica song
JB>  to me! 


          You're the song-writer in residence.  Go for it... [chuckle].



AH>  A changing table can double as a grab bar... or it
AH>  can occupy space the wheelchair user desperately needs.

JB>  Right you are, plus more attune to restriction and
JB>  barriers.


          Uh-huh.  Mothers of little tykes in strollers have a lot of the
same problems as mothers of adult-sized offspring in wheelchairs.  I can
see by the way they interact with Nora & me that they recognize this
intuitively....  :-)



JB>  I believe we have a curve developing, starting at the
JB>  apathetic, going to the whiner, moving to the manipulator,
JB>  then to a coper, educator, and then an engineer. Am I
JB>  missing something?


          Sounds like quite a thorough analysis to me!  I think you've
covered the taxonomy very well, just as I'd expect of a schoolteacher's
son... [grin]. I'm not sure about the order of the last two items, however.
 We have a friend who's an "engineer".  We tell him, for example,
that we'd like Nora to be able to control the brakes on both wheels of a
manual chair with one hand... and he invents something which will do the
job.  He enjoys such projects, but doesn't know what needs to be done until
an "educator" has explained it to him.  I may be interpreting the
term "engineer" differently from the way you would.  I see two
different skill sets in which one complements the other.  What I'd tend to
do engineeringwise is limited to modifying ideas originated by others.... 
:-)




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+