About the Author: Part Five -- Eureka!

To each his suff'rings; all are men,
Condemn'd alike to groan,—
The tender for another's pain,
Th' unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate,
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies?
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'T is folly to be wise.

Thomas Gray, On a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1742)

Part Five: Eureka!

September 2, 1998
I ended my stint at Vance-Granville Community College in May 1998 and then began the long hot summer! My daughter and son went off to YMCA camp during the mornings so I had a load of free time to finish reformatting, editing and relinking The History Guide. As I write this sequel, I am nearly finished with a task I began in January! Maintaining a site of over 200 pages is not that easy although Front Page does take some of the monotony out of the job.

In June I responded to a message in one of my listservs about becoming a subject specialist for the Annenberg/CPB Project. The job involved creating the content for an interactive web site on the Industrial Revolution. Well, I thought about it for a moment and completed the application without giving it a second thought. I asked myself why the Project would hire an unemployed historian but figured I'd just give it my best shot. In early July I was contacted by Annenberg/CPB and learned that I had been selected to create the site! I flew to Washington in early August and met with the other subject specialists and had an interesting day with the folks at the Project. The Industrial Revolution site will premier in September 1999. If you are interested, take a moment or two to check out the exhibits already completed at http://www.learner.org/exhbits/. (N.B. nothing ever came of this assignment. Although Annenberg/CPB paid for my trip to D.C., their consultant never contacted me again and as far as I've been able to gather, they have added no new exhibits since the end of 1998.)

In July I finally got rid of my dinosaur of a 486 and purchased a 400mhz, 128mb RAM dream machine. I ran Windows98 for a few days but couldn't get my modem to stay connected so I decided to make the move and now I have WindowsNT 4.0 workstation on board. I'm glad I made that decision. I'm running Office 97, FrontPage 98, my Internet apps and Naturally Speaking, a voice recognition software application. I also picked up a Mustek scanner (a real dog as it turned out!) as well as TextBridge Pro 98 OCR software. My productivity increased 300%.

Meanwhile, my son had to go to the hospital for a tonsillectomy. My wife and I couldn't help notice just how much Scott was snoring the past several months. And loud, too! We took a look at his throat and were amazed the kid could even swallow. On August 21, a week shy of his third birthday, we took him to the hospital for his surgery. His sister Amy gave him a Thomas the Tank Engine toy and he was all smiles. Four hours later we brought him home (a miracle of modern medicine) and he seemed okay enough. Of course, when his pain medication wore off he felt pretty bad. But, trooper that he is, he weathered the pain for a week and is now back to his normal, happy self. He didn't talk for three or four days and every time I looked at him all I could think of was Harpo Marx. Honk! Honk! Scott's voice changed as well -- at times he sounds like Andy Kaufman in Taxi.

The big news, however, is that I found a part time teaching job at Meredith College, a private, four year women's college here in Raleigh! Starting January 1999, I will be teaching three sections of Western Civilization. Finally! Back in the saddle again! Last November I called and spoke to the chairman of the History and Politics Department at Meredith and bluntly said that I was a Ph.D. in European history and ready to work. No beating around the bush here. Anyway, I interviewed in June and was told that something would come my way -- in fact, what he said was, "You will work at Meredith!" Fall semester was already tied up so I waited. The wait ended this morning!

Of course, now that I have nearly forty lectures in European history online, I've decided to add another twenty lectures to cover the period from the ancient Sumerians to A.D.1400. So, it's back to the drawing board! Four months should be just enough time.

Part Six: A Death and a Life

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