Blogroll

When I'm not here, you may find me wandering the pages below. (If I'm a regular visitor to your site and I've left your link off or mislinked to you, please let me know! And likewise, if you've blogrolled me, please check that my link is updated: thisroamanticlife.blogspot.com. The extra (a) makes all the difference!)

Archives

For posts sorted by date or label, see the links below.

For posts on frequently referenced topics, click the buttons to the right.

To search this blog, type in the field at the top left of the page and hit enter.

Body: in sickness and in health

I won't lie; this body and I have had our issues with each other for many years. Body image -- sure. Physical and mental overextension -- comes with being a Type A kind of girl. I still struggle with these things, so they show up from time to time in my writing.

More recently, illness, pure but not simple, has added itself to the mix in a multi-system sort of way. And the challenges in figuring out exactly what's gone wrong are many. As problems have revealed themselves in the last few years, beginning with reactive hypoglycemia in late 2008, I've documented them here, partly to gain a little clarity on managing complex conditions but mostly to give voice to vulnerabilities I feel but don't normally share with anyone face to face. Better out than in, they say, right? (Oh yes, humor is one way I deal.)

The links below cover the different angles I've examined (and from which I've been examined) within that experience.

Travel: neither here nor there

When the person you're married to lives two time zones away, you log a fair number of frequent flier miles. And if you blog about commuter relationships, you log quite a few posts en route too.

Since we're no longer in separate places, I blog less often from airports. But we do travel -- together now! -- which is much more fun to write about. So in addition to thoughts on our years of commuting, the links below cover the places we've been as a pair and, in some cases, the adventures that have happened on the way.

Writing: the long and short of it

Why do I do it? Good question. Maybe it's not so much that I like to write but that I have to write, even when the words refuse to stick to the page. Believe me, I've tried doing other things like majoring in biochemistry (freshman fall, many semesters ago). Within a year, I'd switched to English with a concentration in creative writing and wasn't looking back.

After graduating, I taught English for a few years and then worked as an editor, which I still do freelance. In 2007, I applied and got into an MFA program at a place I like to call Little U. on the Prairie. I finished my degree in 2011 and have been balancing tutoring and writing on my own ever since.

The following links cover the writing I've done about writing: process, content, obstacles, you name it. It's not always pretty. But some part of me loves it, even when it's hard. And this is the result.

Heart: family and friends

I'd have a hard time explaining who I am without being able to talk about the family I grew up in as well as the people I've met beyond its bounds. But even with such context, it's not easy! In the simplest terms, I'm a first-generation Asian-American who has spent most of this life caught between cultures. That, of course, doesn't even begin to describe what I mean to, but there's my first stab at the heart of it all.

That's what this group of posts is reserved for -- heart. The essential parts of my life whose influences I carry with me, for better or worse. The links below cover what I've written as I've learned how these forces work within me, for me, against me, in spite of me. They anchor me even as they change me, and they keep life interesting.

Recommended reading

What do I do when there's too much on my mind and my words won't stick to the page? I escape into someone else's thoughts. Below is a collection of books and articles that have been sources of information, inspiration, and occasional insight for my own work.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

An unexpected detour

So we were supposed to leave D's parents' place last Friday to visit my family in the Texas panhandle. Unfortunately, our travel plans were thwarted again (are we beginning to notice a pattern here?). What follows is an account of an odyssey that still boggles my mind. Normally, I wouldn't provide such a ridiculous blow-by-blow, but for the sake of illustrating how absurd the whole experience was, here's the tale. Feel free to skip down to the photo if you'd rather not hear about the journey.

Weather was the primary culprit this time -- not on our day of departure in question but in the days preceding it. Because of ice and fog, lots of planes were grounded, and the one that was intended to take us to Chicago for our connections to Dallas and then the panhandle never made it to our city. About an hour before we planned to head to the airport, American Airlines' automated system called us with the news that our 1 p.m. flight was a no-go.

Given D's success with the bus on his way down, we decided to cancel the tickets for the Chicago flight and hop the charter coach again to get back to O'Hare -- a four-hour ride, but one that would get us there in time to take a later flight to Dallas, with some hustling through security. We also got ourselves rebooked on Saturday's first flight out to the panhandle (the last plane for Friday evening that we were originally going to take would be long gone). Sounds good, right? At least, better than the new itinerary we were given by AA's automated system, which would get us to my parents' place late the next night.

Well, about two hours into our bus ride, the driver announced that our arrival at O'Hare would be delayed by 45 minutes. Normally, the bus line splits its passengers at a halfway point, transferring everyone going to Midway (Chicago's other major airport) to another coach. But because of the unusually high volume of passengers from all the canceled flights, the company was short on buses and ours would have to be rerouted to Midway and O'Hare -- which meant that we wouldn't be able to make our new flight to Dallas.

A quick call to AA revealed that there were no seats available on future Dallas flights until Saturday evening, which would mean getting to the panhandle another day late. But then, at the last minute, two slots opened up on an early morning flight, so we grabbed them and then found ourselves a hotel near the airport. Once we finally reached O'Hare, we got ourselves a good dinner, set our cell phone alarms, and promptly conked out.

One hour later: D's cell phone rings. Yep, our new new Dallas flight was canceled.

At this point, we realized that our chances of getting out of Chicago in time to spend any part of our vacation with my family were looking bad -- the AA agent D got connected to spent nearly an hour and a half searching for flights that would get us to the panhandle by Saturday, but the best he could come up with was a flight leaving Sunday for Indianapolis, connecting to a flight to Dallas, and finally getting us to my parents' place that evening. A quick peek at the weather forecast revealed an ice storm on its way to the Midwest for Sunday as well. Time to consider a new form of transportation? We thought so.

The pickings were slim, but we did find a car rental company with vehicles left (at a premium price, of course). So at 1:30 a.m., we made our reservation and finally had a guaranteed way to Texas. Because of the cost, it meant deciding to make the 1,050-mile drive all in one day, but it was a good thing we jumped on the option when we did. By 7 a.m., there was nothing available to rent within a five-mile radius of O'Hare.

Saturday was long, but we made good time, despite a tornado warning as we passed through St. Louis and torrential rains further south in Missouri. Here's a view of the Gateway Arch as we crossed the state line out of Illinois:


We reached my parents' place around midnight after 16 hours in a little red Prius we named Pepe. I don't think we really believed that we had made it until after the first full day of our stay -- what does it say about the state of the airline industry when you can drive a thousand miles in less time than you can fly the same distance?

The clincher: the flight we were booked on out of Indianapolis to Dallas ended up being delayed 11 hours, which would have forced us to miss our Sunday flight to the panhandle. I think we can say for certain now that the road trip was justified -- I just hope we won't be driving back to Seattle after this weekend!!! I'm fresh out of extended-travel stamina.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Chipping in

I have discovered a new skill I never knew I possessed.

Some backstory: As I wrote earlier, there was some serious precipitation heading our way when I checked the weather the night before the final I was supposed to give. So I wasn't sure when I would be leaving for D's parents' house. The skies were clear, though, on Friday morning, and the roads looked decent -- just some slush on the local streets and even bare concrete on the highway through town. So as soon as I got back from turning in my grades on campus that afternoon, I chucked everything I needed into my little suitcase and decided to head out in the last hour of daylight.

And then I discovered that my car was entombed in ice.

Yep, that wintry mix did fall Thursday evening, and it left at least half an inch of frozen stuff from hood to trunk on my poor little Honda. When I opened the door to the driver's seat, shards the size of dinner plates cracked off and clattered to the ground.

I decided in that instant that there was no way I was going to spend another night in my apartment, even if it meant having to take a sledgehammer to the mess in front of me, so I pulled out my scraper and started whacking away. While the defrosters were warming up the front and rear windshields, I took some good swings at the ice on the side windows. Anyone walking by would have seen a crazed-looking woman apparently hell-bent on beating her car to death -- that's how hard I had to hit the ice to make any progress. But once I got going, I was quite effective, if I say so myself. Total excavation time: 45 minutes.

The sun was completely gone by the time I got done, and I hate driving in the dark (not fun with an astigmatism). But because of the reflective snow along the sides of the interstate, it was actually much easier to see the road. The fringe benefits of winter weather! Who knew ...

I got to D's parents' house with no trouble. It was a good thing I left when I did too -- the next day, the snowstorm we were expecting arrived and the weather's been dicey ever since. We came prepared with warm clothing, so we were able to provide extra manpower for chipping ice off the front walk before the holiday party D's parents hosted last night (if you thought half an inch on one car was difficult, try more than two inches of hard-packed glaze over hundreds of square feet of cement). Quite the workout!

Today promises to be warmer (a good ten degrees above freezing, if you can believe it), so the winter wonderland we've been living in will melt quickly in the next few hours. Fortunately, D braved the sub-zero temperatures a few days ago to get some shots of the iced-over backyard and its wildlife with his dad's telephoto lens. Here are the results -- pretty magical, especially if you've never seen what an ice storm can do:








It is nearly time for lunch, and D is about to assemble a gingerbread cathedral, so I'm off to help. Pictures of that to come soon! Until then, safe travels and a lovely holiday to everyone.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Be careful what you wish for

About a week ago, D was commenting about how he missed snow and wanted some to make it feel more like Christmas was on its way (Seattle proper doesn't get much of the white stuff, if any, in the winter). Well, this morning, he kind of got his wish.

Actually, last weekend, he had a little taste of it -- just enough to give the trees a pretty dusting:


Fast-forward, though, to Wednesday night. A rather large weather system was predicted to dump about 10 inches of snow on the city by Thursday morning. Sweet, D thought, except for the fact that he was supposed to fly out Thursday afternoon. Hmmm.

So we hatched a plan. He'd get a ride to the airport in time for the first flight out to Chicago and try to go stand-by. His friend, who also had a flight scheduled for the afternoon, agreed to drive him. "You should just stick around and try to get out early," D told him. But his friend wasn't keen on the idea and went back home to sleep some more after dropping D off. D says the stars were still out, the sky perfectly clear, without a hint of any approaching weather.

A few hours later, his friend woke up to 6 inches of snow on the ground with more coming down without any sign of stopping. And the highways were closed.

Pan over on your imaginary map to the Midwest. At the moment, we're getting that fun phenomenon known as "wintry mix" -- sleet, snow, freezing rain -- which will glaze most of the area over the next 12 hours and make driving a big no-no. Flying too. D's connecting flight was already canceled hours before it was supposed to take off this evening. Fortunately, he managed to get a bus ticket to his final destination before the slippery stuff started accumulating, so he's safely at his parents' house now. Imagine, though, if he hadn't hopped that early flight ...

So the weather system that blanketed Washington and brought the first snowfall in 30 years to Las Vegas is scheduled to roll through the Midwest on Saturday. I'm now stuck deciding whether to brave iced-over roads tomorrow afternoon, once I turn in my grades, or to wait till Saturday to venture out in snow showers. Neither sounds good. Sunday has potential (still snowy, though less so), and Monday looks best (clear). But Monday's a loooooooooooooong way from this weekend.

I suppose more reading is in order ...

Sunday, December 14, 2008

A fish out of water


Let's see. Graded all papers? Check. Finished writing final exam? Double check. Acquired test booklets for students? Check, check, check. What's left?

Absolutely nothing until Thursday, the day of the exam. I'm out of things to do -- for the next four days.

Okay, it's not really that bad. I have Christmas cards to write, packages to mail, friends to catch up with, books to devour, and, oh, a little thing called a thesis prospectus to consider working on, but even with all of this, my eyes are constantly roaming toward the clock. I can't wait to see D again. CANNOT WAIT. And the feeling is mutual -- it's been such a long semester of spreading visits out as much as we can that even as we've been talking on the phone in the last few days, we've been running out of things to say beyond, "Can next Saturday get here any sooner???"

Teaching was a really nice responsibility for the last three and a half months, and now that I'm no longer forced to keep my mind completely focused on the job, I have a four-year-old's attention span. Nothing is compelling enough to keep me occupied. I can't even pack yet because the majority of the things I plan to take with me have to be used. Well, I suppose I can put the last few Christmas gifts I've acquired with the stash in my closet so they'll be ready to go. The little cloisonné fish in the photo above is one of the items I brought back after Thanksgiving and will go to D's parents. We got one for ourselves as well -- each Christmas, we buy one new ornament for our tree to mark the year. The fish caught our eye because each row of scales is a separate piece, allowing it to flex as if it were actually swimming. Lots of fun.

All right, that's with the rest of the presents now. What next? D, stop laughing (I know you are). It's the Type A in me coming out again just like it did at the beginning of the summer. "Just enjoy the vacation," D kept telling me, "and stop trying to find things to do."

He's right. Even the books I've been reading have been books that I'm considering for my thesis bibliography. Time to find something completely unrelated. Yes.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Wine and tattoos

Yes, it's nearing the end of the semester at last, and we're all going a little stir-crazy here at Little U. on the Prairie. No, I didn't invest in a new form of self-expression while inebriated. But there is an explanation for the title above -- hey, where are you going? Hang on and hang in there! Man, I can tell some of you are as impatient as I am.

So, shortly before Thanksgiving, D told me that he'd dreamed that I'd gotten a tattoo. A strange dream, for sure, as I'm too chicken as it is to get my ears pierced, much less endure the pain of a tattoo needle. But we all have random dreams now and then, and I assumed this was just one of them for D.

Well, it turns out that D liked what he saw. When I asked him what I'd chosen for a tattoo, he couldn't quite explain it. "It's those things on the front of a violin," he said. "You had one on each side above each hip."

Ahhhh -- I was pretty sure I knew what he was talking about but I didn't know the specific name for what he was picturing either. So I consulted one of my sisters, who plays the violin. "They're called f-holes," she said. For illustrative purposes, she and her boyfriend took pictures of the ones on her instrument. The results were quite pretty (see above).

Now I'm thoroughly curious about what planted this idea in D's head, even if it was subliminal. Dreams are supposed to be a kind of playback for things your brain stores up over the course of the day -- at least, that's one theory I've heard a few times.

I'm also curious about why I have crazily intense dreams whenever I've had red wine. They started a few years ago and have been pretty consistent (I can tell since I rarely drink reds). I don't always remember what I dream about, but the dreams tend to leave me feeling less than rested because my brain feels so exhausted in the morning. And no, it's not a hangover -- I drink barely enough to make a mouse tipsy.

Yesterday, I hosted a wine and cheese night at my place for a few of the girls in my program, and since they favor reds, I picked one up -- a Montecillo Crianza Rioja that looked decent but still reasonably priced for grad students on a budget. It turned out to be delicious, going nicely with smoked Gouda and baked Brie (I made another of the latter since the one at Thanksgiving was such a success). The best pairing, though, was with the blue cheese I'd chosen, especially when the cheese was eaten with dried dates.

So what did I dream about? I'm not sure. During Thanksgiving break, however, I also had a little taste of red wine with dinner, and I woke up that night to D asking me what was wrong. Apparently, he'd witnessed me pulling back my arm and then giving the mattress a solid wallop with my fist!

If I did anything violent last night, I have no proof. But I did notice that a large number of things that I'd left at the foot of the bed (socks, a magazine, and an envelope with papers I need to read) were scattered on the floor this morning. Considering that I'm known among my former college roommates as the girl who could stack library books on her mattress without disturbing them in my sleep, this suggests something out of the ordinary.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Chouette!

I woke up to a little surprise today. French Fancy, a blogger in Brittany, kindly nominated me for a blog award (see her post here). I've never received one of these before -- what an unexpected and welcome nod of encouragement.

The really fun part is that now I get to put up some nominations (that's the way these things seem to work, according to what the conditions are for said award). I'm also asked to post the rules for accepting the award, which are as follows:

  • Copy and paste these rules/instructions in your post.

  • When you post about receiving this award, include who gave you the award and link back to his/her blog.

  • Post five winners and link back to them as well.

  • Post five of your addictions.

  • Add the award image.

  • Let your winners know you gave them this award by leaving comments on their blogs.

So, without further ado, here are my nominees.

  • The Itty Bitty Kitty Committee, by Laurie Cinotto ~ One of my sisters introduced me to this darling site that covers the lives of foster kittens in Tacoma. I cannot wait to get back to Seattle for good -- D and I are hoping to adopt one (or two or three ...).

  • Purring Prophecy, by Medieval Woman ~ While doing research on commuter relationships last summer, I came across this site by sheer chance. The author is, in her own words, "a medievalist beginning her first tenure-track position, working on her book, and commuting to see her long distance husband." She's also got a wicked sense of humor and manages to hang on to it through the travails of teaching.

  • Cake Wrecks, by Jen ~ The name of this compendium says it all. A friend of mine who knew that I was doing research on footbinding for a Chinese history course last spring directed me to this blog for a look at a very relevant photo someone had sent in. Can you guess what the cake in the picture was made to resemble? I do have to say it was an excellent representation of the real thing, but whether or not it was in good taste -- sorry, I couldn't resist.

  • Caramel Cook, by Brian Sharp ~ I found this blog when I was searching for a recipe for scones last winter. The food photography is wonderful, and the commentary is great for culinary inspiration.

  • Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, by -- well, that's a little more complicated. This site was originally by the esteemed author of The Canterbury Tales, but it seems he's been ousted from his role as head scribe. There's a new order handling things at the moment, but no matter what, it's a hilarious read, especially if you like deliberate anachronisms with your Middle English.

All right. On to the addictions ...

  • Soup. Of almost any kind. It is really, really cold at Little U. on the Prairie in the winter (which sometimes lasts six months), and making a huge pot of soul-warming goodness always makes it more bearable. I got started on a soup-making kick last year thanks to a cookbook called Soup: A Way of Life by Barbara Kafka, which I picked up before moving from Texas. I also grew up savoring my mother's incredible homemade stocks, which kind of sealed my fate before I was old enough to boil water.

  • Mountains. If you followed this blog especially during the past summer, you know this already. I discovered my natural habitat -- didn't know I had one -- in the Pacific Northwest, where the pines and the peaks they decorate make me happy. I haven't yet figured out why. Maybe it's the solitude, or maybe it's the smell of the air. In any case, I've told D that we're not moving once I get back because I don't think I could bear to leave.

  • Books. This one probably goes without saying. D says I eat books, which is pretty accurate. I wouldn't feel right without some kind of personal reading in my life -- titles of my own interest, not those assigned for class (though sometimes those lead me to other books, which is totally fine). I'm currently collecting copies of my favorite children's books so that someday, I'll have a library all ready for our kids.

  • Stationery. Beautiful pens, beautiful paper, the kinds of things that give you pleasure when you write. Even as a little girl, I was obsessed with writing (both penmanship and the creative act), and the sensuous trails of colored inks gliding from beneath the perfect nib onto the creamy surface of a fresh page of a journal were like catnip to me. Now, I do most of my writing electronically (I compose better that way), but when I'm grading and commenting on student papers, I always choose a pen that feels good to write with.

  • D's hugs. This is the worst addiction because I can't get a fix on a regular basis! Now, I don't mean this in the "I can't help saying this because I'm in love with him" sense. I've had hugs from various friends, male and female, in my life, and even before D and I knew we were attracted to each other, his hugs far outranked any I'd ever experienced. Not like those airy, squeamish, not-really-touching-you hugs. His platonic hugs were warm and enveloping, gentle but firm. They were meant. His hugs now (not so platonic, obviously) are the same. Only now I get to ask for them and I don't have to let go.

I think that does it for today. Thank you again, French Fancy, for the award. This was fun.

Sunday, November 30, 2008

FEEEEEEEAAAST!!!

If you've seen this Snickers ad campaign, you know what I'm talking about.

Today, D got our photos from Thanksgiving onto a server, so I was able to download all of them in minimal time. Hooray for online storage space! The shots he took during our morning of cooking were intermittent as we had our hands quite full, but here are some highlights from our culinary adventures.

We brined and roasted our turkey according to this recipe, which we tested last year with nice results. This year's bird worked out well too -- the breast meat was juicy, and the legs and thighs were tender to the point of pulling away from the body at the joints. If prepping a turkey were less messy, I'd cook one way more often. Note the operative word if -- when I was butterflying the bird for roasting, I managed to cover the front of the dishwasher with raw meat juices (we don't have a lot of space in our kitchen, so when food messes reach the edge of the counter, as they often do, they plunge off to wreak havoc on whatever surfaces are below). I was also not tall enough to apply sufficient force to the breast bone in order to crack the turkey open, so I had to get up on a chair to put all my weight into it. Oddly reminiscent of CPR training! I think it took about five or six compressions to do the job -- and then a lot of paper towels and soap to get rid of the fluids that squirted everywhere. Yum, yum. Good thing D had us eat breakfast before going at all the cooking -- he got up early to make bran muffins and cornbread, which powered us through.

Once everything was cleaned up, we were in good shape for the rest of the food prep. I have to say that even with four cooks in our tiny kitchen, we did an incredible job of not running into one another. My best friend from college and his longtime girlfriend came up from Portland to spend Wednesday night and most of Thursday with us for the holiday, and they brought an entire cooler of ingredients for the dishes they planned to make. So wonderful to have people I love living nearby again! (They moved to Oregon a little over a year ago and are the same friends we visited in May.) The occasions for seeing such friends have been otherwise infrequent since our own move west -- most of our group from school stayed in New York and Massachusetts.

We made Brie en croûte with dried cherries, honey, pecans, and rosemary as an appetizer, served with croccantini from a local grocery, then for side dishes to accompany the turkey, we prepared cranberry relish; pan gravy; oven-roasted new potatoes with pearled onions, rosemary, and paprika; and green beans sautéed with fresh garlic. Matt and Gaby made sausage stuffing, oven-roasted apples and root vegetables (sweet potatoes, parsnips, and beets), and an Elizabethan pot pie that contained Jerusalem artichokes, hard-boiled eggs, grapes, and dates with a drizzling of heavy cream. Quite an amazing spread once we were done! Add to that the whole-wheat loaf that D baked the night before, as well as several bottles of wine, and it was a true feast. I think we were all a bit stunned that everything turned out so well. "Did we do that?" Matt said once the table was set.


We were quite full by the time we finished our main course(s), so we went for a walk around the neighborhood. Then we had a round of cards to liven us up, and D and I baked our mini molten chocolate cakes. Half of them -- the ones that were made with powdered Splenda -- turned out beautifully. The other two did not want to solidify on the outside and remained more like bread pudding. I'm guessing it's because we didn't have confectioner's sugar (we substituted the granular stuff, which didn't grind well with our mortar and pestle). In any case, the cakes still tasted fine, and they went really nicely with the loganberry dessert wine our friends brought -- Vinotaboo, which is made in Oregon. A pomegranate was a good palate cleanser that finished off the day.

After a few more rounds of cards, we decided to take Matt and Gaby to D's office, where we played foosball (another favorite activity we haven't had since college). And then we had to say our goodbyes since I had my flight at the crack of dawn and they had a three-hour drive back home so they could be at work the next day. I was sad to see them go so soon -- but there's always January. I think another reunion is very much in order.

So that, in large part, was Thanksgiving '08 chez nous! Now go eat something. I know I'm hungry again after thinking about all that food.

Friday, November 28, 2008

There and back again

So I expected that I would have MORE time to blog while in Seattle for Thanksgiving break, but it was exactly the opposite. Some of that was the product of catch-up time with D, of course, but while he was at work, there was just that much stuff to do -- Christmas shopping, prepping for dinner guests, taking advantage of the free laundry, and working on the holiday newsletter to go out with the cards to friends and family. That last item is sort of becoming a tradition. I had hoped to get it finished before leaving so I could print off the copies from our color printer, but I couldn't manage it. Oh well. I'll write the rest of it tonight, and D will print it. Hopefully his version of Word won't scramble the document like it did last year after I sent it to him! Coordinating a repair job over e-mail took some creativity, to say the least.

I wish I could have stayed in Seattle through Sunday morning, but in order to get there using mileage awards, I had to come back today. D and I will see each other in three weeks, which will also mark the beginning of winter break for me (can't wait!). This little week off was wonderful -- a taste of what we'll have over December and January. We had a dinner date on Friday after I landed, and then we had a very lazy Saturday -- lots of lounging and talking and just being in the same home with the prospect of another five days together instead of only one. D made his special waffles for breakfast and we tested a molten chocolate cake recipe (part of the menu for Thanksgiving). On Sunday, we went marketing for Christmas gift ideas and I got reacquainted with the irises. Ralph has what seems to be a bud! Silly plant -- it's not time for that yet!

Things really started picking up on Monday. While D was at work, I met up with our realtor again to look at more houses. The market has definitely changed a bit with the economy. I'm glad we didn't jump into making an offer on anything this summer as there are larger places for better prices now. We looked at seven homes, two of which felt like they had good potential (with room for us to grow so we wouldn't have to move out again for several years). Appreciation rates have slowed, so being able to stay put for longer is important to us.

Tuesday, we did the last of the pre-Thanksgiving grocery shopping and D made a delicious white bean and ground turkey chili for dinner while I was whittling away at grading and the newsletter. It sounds almost mundane, doesn't it? Trying to write about why all of this was so good is difficult -- how do you explain how extraordinary ordinariness is when you never have it?

Our guests arrived Wednesday, and their visit deserves its own post, so I'll stop here for the moment. But yes, it was lovely just to be back where I could see the mountains, even if it's dark at 3:30 now because we're so far north. My plane followed the sunset on the way out to Seattle, which was a little treat. Here's a shot of the last of it and the north star somewhere over Montana.

Monday, November 17, 2008

On loss, mostly

Today was all over the place.

Today actually started in the middle of the night -- I woke up with the sensation that something bad was about to occur. You know that feeling where your heart starts pounding because there's some imminent threat you can't identify? Pulled me out of a dead sleep. So I lay under the blankets, holding my breath, listening. Then the earth started to roll, as it did during the earthquake last April, and like last time, I froze, even though I should have gotten up to stand in a doorway. It was the strangest sensation, feeling the mattress bucking underneath me and hearing things fall elsewhere in the apartment. Then the rolling stopped, and for the rest of the time before my alarm went off, I was semiconscious, body tensed, waiting for aftershocks.

When I woke up to the radio, though, there was no mention of any tremors (unlike last April, when they were the first item on the news). That's right, I was dreaming the whole time -- a dream of being awake in the here and now when I was actually unconscious in some parallel universe. Disturbing if not plain eerie. So that was an unsettling start to the day.

Things got better once I was up -- I breakfasted, read the news online, worked out, showered, did some reading and figured out what spring classes to register for. Talked to D briefly. I've missed him more than usual in the last week (I think the three-week stretches between visits have been getting tougher since the fall semester hasn't had any big breaks before Thanksgiving). We've been planning what to do while I'm in Seattle. Maybe some house hunting just to explore the market now that the economy has changed so much. Definitely a meeting with an attorney to set up our wills. We should have done this right when we got married, but I was applying to school, and he was looking for a job, and then we were moving me and then moving him and then commuting for two semesters and then cramming five weddings into our summer and now here we are. I know, no excuses. The plan is to start the paperwork over this vacation (we have an appointment in place) and finish it during winter break. Not that we have huge amounts of property to divvy up, but we would like to make sure it goes to the people we want it to go to instead of having the state make those decisions.

It's always a little weird talking about wills and such. The idea that one of us won't always be around is a strange and familiar thing at the same time. We've been apart for so much of our relationship that we're used to functioning without the other person there. But the idea of losing that person for good is still, of course, terrible -- and feared even more, on some levels, because the life we've wanted to begin together hasn't quite begun yet either. Hence the extra urgency to get the wills in place. We've talked about where and how we want to be buried, we know each other's favorite flower. I know it sounds morbid, but it's really not. We've just had enough time apart to know that time together is never long enough, so having all this out in the open kind of gets it settled and out of the way. Which means we can get on with enjoying our lives with each other.

After talking with D, I packed up to head to class. My students had their papers due today, so I knew attendance would be fairly high (part of the reason why I scheduled my teaching observation for today). I wasn't nervous about that, but I was a little worried when only half of the class had shown up by the time we were supposed to start. Almost everyone else got there within five minutes, though, so things looked like they were going to be fine. Then one of my girls arrived but only stuck her head in the doorway as we were getting discussion moving. She beckoned with her hand, asking me to go out into the hall with her.

I knew, before I left my seat, what she was going to tell me. This was the student whose family member was in a car accident not quite three weeks ago. I knew his condition was poor (he was thrown through his windshield when a driver rear-ended him on the highway, the student told me), and I was guessing that, since he hadn't woken up within the first week of the accident, his prognosis wasn't good. But it was still a shock, like getting all the air forcefully evacuated from my lungs, when she told me he was dead. He was her twin.

She handed me her paper at this point. I must have looked bewildered -- I couldn't believe she had come all the way to class just to turn it in (my policy is that written work has to be handed to me in person unless there are extenuating circumstances). I told her I was sorry and that we could talk privately in office hours tomorrow, if she was up to it, to determine what kind of arrangements she would need for the rest of the semester. I asked her if it was okay to give her a hug, and she said yes.

And then I had to go back into my classroom and pretend that everything was fine.

I know I never knew her brother, but the complete and utterly meaningless destruction of his life is the same sort of thing I've feared most for the people in my own life, especially now that they're scattered across the country. I can't say that I know what her loss feels like, but I've imagined it a thousand times over, every time I've left D at the airport, even though I've tried not to let my mind go there. So I wanted to feel sadness for her -- to honor her loss within my physical body, to recognize its weight in the pit of my stomach. But I had to stifle myself, cut the feeling off after my initial reactions (those can't be controlled). Doing that -- even if only temporarily, for the sake of my student's privacy and for the sake of conducting a productive class for fifteen other people -- felt wrong in some way. To be able to shut down instantaneously. Not to allow some molecule of grief to hover in my consciousness. It was almost inhuman. But it was either-or.

So now I'm putting all of that here, just to feel it at last. Enough from the universe, please. Enough for now.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Speak, Mnemosyne?

Apparently this is what Nabokov had originally intended to name his memoir but "was told that 'little old ladies would not want to ask for a book whose title they could not pronounce' " (per the foreword in said work). I suppose from a marketing perspective that it was a valid criticism, but beyond that, I think Speak, Memory just falls more rhythmically on the ear and makes the idea of a writer exploring recollections of his childhood more accessible to the common reader. There's something about invoking a Greek muse that just feels more highflown. Of course, there's a place for that too, but when talking about the self? Let's not take ourselves too seriously ...

Nabokov is, as you may have guessed, the author of the week in my seminar. So far, so good, but his prose requires concentration. The end of a sentence often reaches places far from its beginnings, and any kind of distraction that draws your attention from its progress leaves you wondering a few words later, "Wait, how did we get here?"

I guess that's the underlying question in writing memoir too. "Neither in environment nor in heredity," writes Nabokov, "can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap." That pretty much describes what the last few weeks of writing have proved to me! The quest, perhaps, is to find the path the watermark traces -- the revisiting of all the pressures that have left their prints upon us, nudging us forward into the present. But how to organize all that into a coherent narrative?

I have to wonder what this man, who was an avid collector of butterflies, thought of the butterfly effect.

I'm playing around with structure as I'm writing but it's still unclear what's working best. The response to the essay on Thursday from workshop was encouraging enough that I sent the work to my thesis advisor -- we'll see what suggestions she has. Hopefully over Thanksgiving, I'll have time just to sit and think. That's partially what today is for too, but several days like this without interruption will be helpful. If holiday shopping and cooking don't take over, that is ...

Thursday, November 13, 2008

You just never know

Unpredictable -- I think that describes the general tenor of life at the moment.

D sent me an interesting e-mail this morning about some recent tech news. Midway Games, a company he interviewed with during his last job search, made some notable staff cuts this week. We had initially hoped, before the move to Seattle, that D would get a position at Midway since it's driving distance from Little U. on the Prairie. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise that he was turned down. Who knows whether the job he applied for was one of those that got hit. Apparently, the company's stock shares are also taking a beating.

I had my workshop today, which was very helpful. Very tough, though, because of what was on the table. The essay I submitted was the first in which I think I really, really put myself out there naked -- not writing in the voice or character of the person I wanted my audience to see me as, but as the person I am underneath all the carefully wrought word-armor. I realized, in some earlier attempts to pull together this piece, that my problems writing it stemmed largely from trying not to reveal parts of myself that I'd rather keep under wraps. This is not to say that what I ultimately turned in was an exercise in self-flagellation, but I did let all the embarrassing, uncomfortable awkwardness of childhood appear. And that was hard.

What really caught me off guard, though, was the sadness I felt as the workshop got at the heart of what was in the essay -- the entanglement in certain family issues (I won't get more specific than this here) that still cause powerful grief. The sadness isn't even explicit in the essay, but people began plumbing the family dynamics driving the action in the work, and then as the explanations came out, all the awfulness of the aftermath from the experience I wrote about bubbled up like acid. I was tearing up liberally by the time we finished (also much cause for embarrassment), and I couldn't do a thing about it. I think the people who noticed probably figured it was because the subject matter was painful, not because I was upset by what people were saying about the piece -- it was all very constructive -- but ouch. I think I've had enough surprises for one day. I feel bad because I was too choked up to thank everyone at the end. Maybe an e-mail? But that seems so impersonal. Perhaps a quick thanks at the beginning of next Thursday's class. That'll be better.

So now I'm wiped out (more so than usual). But at least this weekend, I have no grading, which means I can do some more writing. I haven't had that luxury in what feels like months.

A happy note to end on: our irises are still doing well out in Seattle -- D sent me update photos. The plants will winter on our apartment balcony and should bloom just in time for my arrival at the end of the spring semester. We thought up names for them a few days ago (they're pets, so why not, right?). D has chosen Ralph and Tessa for his two, which will be deep red and tawny gold, respectively. For mine, I picked Carmen (indigo) and Lolita (pale pink). Yes, yes, think what you will! But if you could have seen what their predecessors looked like at the farm we visited, you'd understand how the names just fit.

Anyway, we're hoping all the plants will keep thriving as they have been -- I think one of D's bulbs may need its own pot already.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Procrastiblogging

What, you've never heard of that before? Surely, you jest!

I'm supposed to be grading some student exercises that I should have finished this past weekend, but I was too fried to face them -- and they're short ones too. Ah, grading burnout. Fortunately, the teaching is still good. In fact, I get energy from doing it (and there's not much of that to go around these days). This week has been terrific so far, which made up a bit for the funk I was in on Sunday, missing D mainly.

I have to say that my students are a fun bunch as they're willing to entertain some of the sillier activities I have them do to warm up for class discussion. Yesterday, I introduced them to "Monday Mingling," which is an adaptation of something another teacher showed me while I was teaching junior high. We had read a short story over the weekend with some guiding questions, so to get people out of their seats and energized, I copied the questions onto individual index cards and had each person choose one. Then all the students had to "mingle," asking their questions of different people as they walked around the room. "Pretend you're at a party," I said, which got me some amused looks, but I know everyone had a good time with it. Some people even got into the act, asking their questions like pick-up lines at a bar! I also distinctly heard one student say, "I'll meet you by the fruit punch" as she was chatting up a classmate. Whatever it takes ...

After we'd mingled for about five minutes, we sat down again and shared out the answers each student had collected. Pretty effective for getting people talking.

We're going to start looking at poetry tomorrow, which will be a real change of pace. I think I'm going to have my students close their eyes and do some guided meditation just to slow their brains down before we start examining some verses -- poetry really does have its own time scale. For a little icebreaker, we'll be looking at Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, which turns conventional beauty on its ear (hopefully, students will figure that out after they try to draw what's being described). I bought crayons for the occasion -- a box of 48, although the set of 64 was tempting. That should be plenty, in addition to the markers I already have, for them to use to create some entertaining illustrations. And there's nothing like a brand-new box of crayons to inspire creativity. (If you remember this video from Sesame Street, you know what I'm talking about.)

Arrrrrrrrgh, grading calls. I'd better get to it before I start procrasticleaning or something worse. It's been known to happen.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Got a minute?

I know, I know, I'm always talking about how I don't have time to write. But I came across this site on the Blogs of Note list and thought it was a neat idea. Read the prompt; write for 60 seconds. A great place to find writing "exercises," as they call them around here, when you've got writer's block.

Lots of good reading for my classes of late. Most recently, I finished Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter. I can't say I loved the whole thing, but the frame that introduces and ends the work is lovely, poignant, and also disturbing: a daughter keeping vigil by her dying mother's bedside, holding her hand in one of hers while writing her mother's obituary on a legal pad with the other. The memoir is about a place and time that are no longer available to the writer in the present, but her attempts to look back and plumb what's contained in her memory of them are commendable. It's so hard to disentangle yourself so you can write about those things sometimes -- I think that's the problem I ran into in the last week and a half while working on my own essay. There's the problem of attachment that makes objectivity so impossible. As Hampl writes:

Nostalgia, someone will say. A sneer accompanies the word, meaning that to be fascinated by what is gone and lost is to be easily seduced by sentiment. A shameful undertaking. But nostalgia shares the shame of the other good sins, the way lust is shameful or drink or gluttony or sloth. It doesn't belong to the dessicated sins of the soul -- pride, envy. To the sweet sins of the body, add nostalgia. The sin of memory.

Nostalgia is really a kind of loyalty -- also a sin when misapplied, as it so often is. But it's the engine, not the enemy, of history. It feeds on detail, the protein of accuracy. Or maybe nostalgia is a form of longing. It aches for history. In its cloudy wistfulness, nostalgia fuels the spark of significance. My place. My people.

My essay gets workshopped on Thursday, so we'll see what people think. I sent a few drafts to D before I turned it in, and he was helpful in pointing out how to fix some things. It's nice to have a reader with fresh eyes -- not just eyes that haven't read this particular piece but eyes that haven't been looking at tons of other essays all semester and are getting a bit glazed over! (I don't blame them.)

I unwound from all the craziness of the week last night by talking to my sister, who is in the fall semester of her senior year in college (also the one involved in the Cork Incident that I mentioned last week). Talk about being nostalgic -- where has time gone? We've been scattered across the country, this sister, my other sister, and me. I miss being silly with them and finishing each other's reminiscences and speaking in the code that only we share. Perhaps another essay will come of that idea.

In the name of nostalgia for silly moments, here's one from a visit that one sister made to Seattle during our first summer there. Clearly, Midwestern girls do not see hills like this one very often. D's driving, Sis is shooting the video, and I'm in the back seat laughing.


Thursday, November 6, 2008

Hirsute pursuits

Okay, it was a hairy week. Between holding extra office hours for students for paper-writing help and having my own essay due today, I was a bit overstretched, so now I must do some catching up here.

First off, the last "husband weekend" of 2008: D had fun showing off his costume at a Halloween bash while he was in town. He was a pirate, complete with puffy shirt, bandanna, hoop earrings, and beard. I must say, he wears the facial hair well! We took some glamour shots to zoom in on the fine detailing of the whole package.













Sadly, D was unable to bring his old-fashioned toy pistol (too much of a hassle to try to get that through airport security) -- that was what was in the picture I posted here. Alas, no winning guesses as to what it was! Here's the original picture.


Next, the election: Talk about a distraction! I voted on my way home from campus and then sat on tenterhooks all evening trying to do work but utterly failing. It didn't help that it was 75 degrees out (during the first week of November!), making it rather uncomfortable indoors while I was in office hours (the heat in the building was roaring). By the time I got back to my place, I was too tired to think straight. I refused to turn on the TV (still trying to write that pesky essay) but I couldn't help flipping over to The New York Times' online electoral map to check on the returns. I finally gave up after the results were called around 10:15 here and watched the acceptance speech -- very much worth it, of course. I don't think I fully decompressed from all the built-up tension until late Wednesday.

Finally, thesis committee progress: I now have two of my three people! The second person said yes this week -- we have to meet to talk about what role she'll play as a reader, but she's very enthusiastic about the project. Yay! Hopefully I'll have the third person figured out before next Friday. It would be so nice to have this set before Thanksgiving ...

All right, it's very much time for me to consider bed after this crazy couple of days. One more till the weekend.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Let's be careful out there


My physics teacher used to say that before every lab -- with good reason. My lab partner and I actually set one apparatus on fire when we failed to release the brake on a (so-called) frictionless wheel to measure the acceleration of gravity. Who knew a dot timer could be so incendiary? Then D, who was also in my physics class (but not my lab partner), took a projectile launcher's hammer to the hand when his partner released it too soon. To top it all off -- and this one actually elicited a laugh from our usually poker-faced instructor -- my sister clocked herself in the back of the head with a cork while trying to measure its angular momentum. I wasn't there for that last incident (we're six years apart in age), but let's just say that this history of mishaps in a controlled environment has reinforced, for me, a certain wariness of the forces of nature in the real world.

All this is to say that I hope my students have their heads screwed on properly this weekend during all the Halloween hoopla.

My particular class has had what seems to be an abnormally high number of emergencies this semester -- and not from any poor decisions on their part. So far there have been three medical emergencies from chronic conditions requiring hospital attention and two family deaths. Last night, one of my students e-mailed to say that a family member had been in a car accident and that she needed to go home right away (the most recent update is that the family member had not woken up yet by lunchtime today). Then this afternoon, another student e-mailed to say that she would have to withdraw from school for the rest of the semester for health/personal reasons. Would the universe kindly lay off my people already???

I've been so busy getting my students ready for this last push before Thanksgiving break that I've had to leave my writing at a standstill in the middle of some serious work on an essay due next week. But tomorrow -- TOMORROW shall be the day I get back to it. Really.

I've been having trouble deciding what kind of structure will best serve the story I'm trying to tell, so the essay is really kind of a mess. With impeccable timing, this week's memoir reading for one of my classes offered an amusing example of how to apologize for it:

The apparently haphazard chronology of this memoir may need excuse. The excuse, I fear, is Art. It contains a number of surprises, perhaps I may call them shocks, which, as history, came to me rather bunched up towards the end of the story. Artistically shocks should never be bunched, they need spacing for maximum individual effect. To afford them this I could not tell my story straightforwardly and have therefore disregarded chronology and adopted the method of ploughing to and fro over my ... life, turning up a little more sub-soil each time as the plough turned. Looking at it with as much detachment as I can command, I think I have not seriously confused the narrative.
~ J.R. Ackerley, My Father and Myself

Well, here's hoping I have enough to turn in such that it appears to have some kind of chronology, haphazard or otherwise.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Getting into the spirit of things

Well, the packing list has been made. D will be here Friday night, and since it'll be Halloween, he's bringing his costume, along with my winter boots and foodstuffs from Trader Joe's (they don't have TJs out here, so we get the benefit of their discount dry goods by importing them in D's carry-on luggage). I'm not going to reveal what D's chosen to be yet, but the photo is a clue to his identity. Any ideas as to what's in the picture? Correct guesses (of the item and/or the alter ego) will win you celebrity mention on this blog. Sorry, no monetary awards -- we are still trying to save for a house, and the economy is nuts at the moment, as you all know. I'm refusing to look at my IRA until at least after Election Day.

Speaking of houses -- the one that D and I loved has disappeared from the market. It's been gone for a few weeks now. We weren't sure if the owners had temporarily taken it out of the pool or if it had actually sold, but we're watching to see what else catches our eye. I recently noted one place that was quite inviting in its photos online, but we haven't had the opportunity to check it out in person (and if you ask a realtor to take you to tour something, he or she won't leave you alone afterward).

On a completely different topic, my students informed me on Monday that it SNOWED over the weekend. I was inside the entire time, so I didn't actually see it happen. But gaaah. It's too soon. Didn't we just get through those endless months of weather delays?

Sunday, October 26, 2008

On long-standing relationships

I'm not someone you'd call a shoe fancier, so when I find footwear I do like, I tend to stick with it -- for a really long time. These sandals have been with me through five cities in the last eight years. They've had three sets of new heels, one set of new soles, and tons and tons of miles under them.

I'd been looking for a long time for replacements and hadn't found anything I liked (much to my mother's dismay -- "Can't you just throw those away?" she kept asking after about Year Six, when the soles had to be relined to keep them from scraping the balls of my feet). But without a successor for my wardrobe staple, I couldn't really justify tossing them. And they still did their job and were more comfortable for walking than any other sandals I had. Never mind the stitching that was coming out, the cracking leather, the fact that the straps had stretched enough for them to be a pedestrian hazard ...

Then two weeks ago, I happened upon this version of the style while I was running errands. I knew as soon as picked them up from the display table that my old pair was doomed. I took D to see them when he was visiting and he confirmed the worst: they were perfect.


These have a slightly higher heel and a dressier look, but they'll serve the same purpose. So it's time to say goodbye to my faithful friends. It's amazing how many major events in my life these shoes have witnessed: college graduation, starting my first job, starting my second job, my honeymoon, a cross-country road trip. They almost need to go into the "family museum" -- a collection of retired objects my sisters and I have saved from the garbage because of their long history in our lives. Included among these are a wooden spoon my mother used to scoop rice with (washed so many times that it was on the verge of cracking because it had gotten so thin), a white plastic one-cup measure we used to use every Sunday when making pizza (the bottom broke), and the comb my dad used on his hair every morning for at least thirty years (a gift from his mother before college -- I think it either lost too many teeth or snapped in two).

The store didn't have my size in the new sandals, so I ordered a pair. They arrived this week, so now there's really no excuse for hanging on to the old ones anymore. Eyes, look your last! Oh, silly sentiment. In honor of favorite things past their prime, check out these verses by Jack Prelutsky (wonderful children's poet). He knew what he was talking about.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Brisk days

That's what we've been having here in the last week -- weather finally cool enough to start turning the leaves and a midterm crunch so severe that somehow I've made it to Thursday again without posting and I hardly even noticed. I should be in bed right now, but I was missing the blogosphere. So here I am. I know you've been checking back faithfully for new entries too (thank you, Sitemeter and Blogpatrol), and I appreciate the encouragement. Say hello if you haven't already! I'm very curious about who's out there.

I'm managing to stay on top of my work for teaching, and it's continuing to pay off -- my students are really taking ownership of our discussion time and developing a group dynamic that makes me so proud of them. Can't say this has been good for my sleep quota, but hopefully this weekend will help me catch up.

I did procrastinate a little last Saturday between grading and planning. If you check out the sidebar, you should be able to see a new section on photography with a slideshow sampling pictures that D and I have taken, working together and on our own. The color in the Cascades is apparently gorgeous right now, so D has been taking some field trips to scout out nice panoramic shots. The rainy season is setting in, though, so his windows of opportunity are shrinking and he's had to settle for mostly close-up work (sometimes off the side of the road -- the shots above and below happened at an intersection on his way to the gym!). Anyway, it's been nice to watch the change of season on his side of the country through the images he's been sharing.

He's also shared images of his Halloween costume, which, I have to say, is going to be terrific. Stay tuned for the unveiling within the next week! I also have something in the works from high school -- it still fits but doesn't look trashy like so many of the get-ups out there. Who knew it would come in handy again a decade later? My mother will be amused (she made it for me for a themed dance). D may also bring a second option for me when he flies in on Oct. 31, something to coordinate more with his character. Now, if we could just find a Halloween party to go to -- nothing's been announced yet, but I know the creative types I hang out with aren't the kind to let the holiday go by unfeted, especially since it'll be on a Friday.

Okay, this girl is bushed. More after I get some quality Z's.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

An apple a day

... would be delicious if I could have any of the kinds we got over the weekend.

D and I went apple- picking at a local orchard about 20 minutes away from Little U. on the Prairie. It was the last warm Saturday I think we'll have till spring, so everyone seemed to be out and about among the trees. Coinci- dentally, BOTH of my sisters went apple-picking in Illinois and Ohio over the same weekend (nope, we didn't consult beforehand).

D and I did our best to pick varieties we can't normally find in the grocery store (this place claimed to have around 150!). The ones in season that we got were Keepsakes, Liberties, Horalsons, Suncrisps, Spigolds, Golden Glories, and Autumn Golds. Each of these tends to be a sweet-tart, crisp-fleshed apple -- excellent for munching fresh or using for pie.

Which is, of course, what we did.

I borrowed a recipe from Martha Stewart Living for an antique apple pie and altered it for convenience and to accommodate D's hypoglycemia. The end result: ambrosia. The apples contained enough sun-infused sweetness such that replacing the sugar in the filling with Splenda in half the required amount was perfect. We used a frozen pie crust, which worked out nicely (especially since we didn't have a lot of time and also because it had only a gram of sugar per serving in it).

We used about six apples in our pie and divided up the remaining ones so D could take some back to Seattle -- it's only fair, since he worked quite hard to get some of them! Many of the trees we wanted to pick from had been well visited, and the only fruit left was at the very top (with no ladders in sight). D boosted me up onto his shoulders to scrabble around in the higher branches, and at one point, he climbed up himself while I spotted him from below. "Am I near them yet?" he kept asking. It's hard to see where you're going when you have a face full of twigs. Both of us have the scratches to prove it ...

In the end, it was well worth the effort. The apples with the best sun exposure were at the top, and the bugs seemed to have left them alone (compared to the numerous pockmarked ones lower down).

We cleaned each of the fruits in cold water once we were home and were surprised to find out how different their skins were. Apparently, Iowa has really dirty air -- every apple was uniformly speckled with brown spots that were probably the product of dust sticking to the skins after a recent rainstorm or a humid night. Here's our harvest after a good scrub:













And here is our pie:


Mmmmmm. So good, it doesn't even need ice cream.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Hooray for husband weekend!

I'm adopting the phrase one of my colleagues recently coined, to my amusement, when he asked me if D was coming into town in the near future. There have been mumblings about having a married couples' dinner at his place (his wife is in school here, and there are at least two other grad students with spouses). Perhaps next time D visits, which will be during the first weekend in November. And then three weeks after that, I'll be going home for Thanksgiving! I'm so glad this semester is moving along.

In the meantime, I have piles of things to grade, some of which I'd really like to get rid of before D lands this evening. I've been pretty good about doing a little bit every day, but I was too drained from workshop to be very productive last night on things like papers. So I opened up some hard lemonade and dispatched a bunch of quizzes instead. Only one low grade! Everyone else did pretty well (and no, it wasn't a product of my being extra lenient with alcohol in my system -- my students earned it).

If only their papers looked as good ...

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Prosit!

It's Sunday night, and I've graded a grand total of one paper out of many more that needed attention this weekend. But that's okay, because in the last 48 hours, I planned my lessons for the week, read 300 pages out of a 400-page novel, and cleaned my shower.

Oh yes, and I drove to D's parents' house for their second annual Oktoberfest.

The lederhosen shown above are actually D's from his toddler days. His parents moved to Austria to teach right after they were married, so they knew where to get the genuine article when he arrived several years later (they had returned to the U.S. by then). Apparently, there is a picture of D in costume with a little Alpine hat on his little blond(!) head -- hard to imagine since his curls are now the color of espresso. Next time I go to his parents' place, I'll have to dig that photo up to add here.

The party itself was Saturday evening. There were, of course, sausages galore (see below), including one seasoned with curry that I'd never had before. D's mother also made some beautiful breads (also below) and desserts, one of which was called a Marmor Gugelhupf. Sounds exotic, but it's actually a simple marbled Bundt cake. New languages (German being one of them for me) always make things so much more fun ...












I had a good time meeting people (mostly D's dad's friends from work). The town where I spent a decade before college is relatively small and has a long local memory. Some of the guests there had children at my former high school -- we talked about the experiences I had in common with their kids as students, even after so many years. It's nice that there's continuity. I always feel a little sad when I go back to visit because of that overwhelming sense of time having moved on. Even though the town feels more or less the same, it's changed just enough to remind me that I'm no longer a part of it. Feeling connected to it through the people who are part of it now is comforting.

Tomorrow has much in store -- my department is holding an informational meeting on theses, which the students in my program are very glad about. The process for selecting a thesis committee isn't exactly transparent (even after you've read through the guidelines in the program handbook), so a little Q&A time will be helpful. I've already asked a professor to be my thesis director, thank goodness, so I won't have to worry about the mad rush to secure advisors that might very likely occur after this meeting. I do need to start thinking about my prospectus and secondary readers, though. Part of me is very reluctant to go forth on the topic I think I'm going to write about, but another part of me wants to do it very badly. I'm committed to it, either way.

I came across something helpful last week in a memoir by Mark Doty, which I'm reading for a class. "Why tell a story like this?" he writes as he talks about an unpleasant memory his mother tells him on her deathbed.

A writer I know says, Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what. Sometimes I think that's true; difficult experience can be redeemed by the powers of language, and words can help us to see what is graceful or human where loveliness and humanity seem to fail.

But other days I believe it's the other way round: say it beautifully, or at least precisely ... and you will make it clear. ... The older I get, the more I distrust redemption; it isn't in the power of language to repair the damages. ...

What we remember, wrote the poet who was my first teacher of the art, can be changed. What we forget we are always. ... We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us. What you don't allow yourself to know controls and determines; whatever's held to the light "can be changed" -- not the facts, of course, but how we understand them, how we live with them. Everyone will be filled by grief, distorted by sorrow .... What matters is what we learn to make of what happens to us.

And we learn to make, I think, by telling. Held to the light of common scrutiny, nothing's ever quite as unique as our shame and sorrow would have us think. But if you don't say it, you're alone with it, and the singularity of your story seems immense, intractable.
~ Mark Doty, Firebird

I won't go into any details about my topic here, but this singularity that Doty describes is what I want to be free from, being alone with "it." Amazing how he captures that idea so clearly -- hence my choice just to quote him at length instead of trying to put it in my own words. Will I be able to stand the light of common scrutiny, as he says, once the story's out there? Or will I regret it and wish I'd kept silent?

Maybe this week's reading will have answers.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Everybody Loves Furballs

If this blog were a TV show, that's what it would be called.

In actuality, the blog is known as the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee, which I've been following for a while. The IBKC takes kittens from its local Humane Society and cares for them until they're old enough to be moved to permanent homes. While waiting for the kittens to reach that point, the IBKC puts pictures of them on the blog, which is enormously effective for attracting potential parents. Now that we're determined to move me back to Seattle in May, the possibility of actually getting a little ball of fluff from this foster family is quite real -- they're located in Tacoma. The latest batch of babies will be gone before I return, but I'll be watching and waiting come spring for new ones.

There's something very delightful and relaxing about soft, furry things -- even inanimate ones. In an effort to encourage more spontaneous discussion among my students, I made my own Koosh ball out of some leftover yarn from a scarf I knit for D several years ago:


I took it to class on Monday, where we wrapped up our study of Hamlet by talking about our own questions about the play. The only rules were that whoever had the yarn ball had to contribute something to the discussion and that once you were done speaking, you had to toss the ball to someone else to keep the discussion moving. It worked amazingly well -- having something soft and fluffy flying around loosened up the atmosphere such that some of the shyer students were willing to participate more than usual, even asking for the ball voluntarily! Whoever thought of this teaching tool first was a genius (it's been around for a long time, but this was my first chance to try it out).

No other major news. D and I had a great weekend, and he'll be back in just under two weeks. My own classes are going smoothly, and I got lots of great suggestions on the piece that I workshopped last Thursday, which may be something that could become part of my thesis. I do wish I could get more motivated to write, but lesson planning conveniently fills any time I have if I let it. Must do something about that ...

Speaking of distractions, I finally finished Wendy Werris's An Alphabetical Life on Friday -- I had picked it up before moving from Texas (which seems a lifetime ago) and hadn't gotten around to cracking the cover until last week. It's a quick read. I can't say it makes the top of my list of must-read memoirs, but there's a great quote in there by Fran Lebowitz that Werris uses at the beginning of a chapter: "If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass."

This is absolutely true. Time to stop noshing on those Hershey's Nuggets after dinner! The ones with toffee bits in them are my favorite. If you look closely at all the planning debris in the picture above, you can see an incriminating wrapper hiding there ...

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

The waiting game

Three days until D's here for another weekend. Hard to believe that it's been nearly three weeks since his last visit -- keeping busy has its perks, I guess.

I'm also waiting to hear back on some bloodwork I had done two weeks ago. Either teaching is the next fad diet or I'm shrinking for other reasons. Since coming back to Little U. on the Prairie, I've lost enough weight to make at least one pair of pants too loose to go without a belt and one skirt too dangerous to wear, period (would make class too interesting if that were to fall down in the middle of discussion). If it's just the demands of teaching -- and it's possible since this happened to me in New York too, though not to this degree -- then next semester will require a wholesale wardrobe change. I'll be teaching two sections instead of one. Yikes.

But yes, some answers from my local M.D. would be much appreciated. He's the old-school sort who has practiced privately in these parts for decades and has a staff of two (nurse, receptionist). So he processes all of his patients personally -- but also more slowly.

Sigh.

In other news, D has been playing around with our camera lately, and a few experiments have produced some pretty pictures. Here's one I especially love (downtown Seattle at sunset from the top of a skyscraper on the Eastside as the city lights are just beginning to come on). The space on the blog doesn't do it justice, but if you click on it, you can see it in a larger format:


Coincidentally, while reading W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn for one of my classes this week, I came across a lovely passage that seemed written for that image. As translated from German by Michael Hulse, Sebald writes,
Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night ...
I get shivers thinking about that, the ephemerality of it all. And yet, because time is so elastic, our moment in which we sputter into existence and then back out again stretches beyond our field of vision. We are sparks in slow-motion, blinded by our own flame.

I guess it's nice that we get to have such a concept as "tomorrow."

Saturday, September 20, 2008

On growth

The weekend, at last. It was so good to sleep in and not have to rush around this morning. I took quite a schedule-beating over the last few days -- but it was worth it to get my students situated well for the next few weeks.

Office hours were very good. Everyone came in with interesting paper ideas, and helping people narrow down the things they wanted to focus on in their analyses from the get-go felt rewarding. This will hopefully prevent eleventh-hour panic and students' turning in shoddy work. People seemed appreciative too of the individual time to check in with me, and I got to have some one-on-one conversations with students who are shyer in front of the class. All in all, a good investment of time.

It is such a surprise to me how different this teaching experience has been so far at Little U. on the Prairie, compared to my last stint in New York. Of course, I'm teaching a totally different age group, but I think it's also got something to do with just having had those extra two years under my belt. It gives me some kind of reassurance that I know what I'm doing (at least, with the basics of classroom management, lesson planning, grading, etc.). And that makes a difference in how comfortable I feel in front of my students -- the end result being that I'm more relaxed and therefore more approachable when students need help.

All this is to say that I think I really want to make this some part of my career when I get done here. I never thought I would say that or know that with any amount of conviction, but I think my last year here (writing without teaching) contrasted with just these first few weeks back on campus (writing and teaching) has made it clear to me: teaching is where I'm happier using my creativity. It doesn't mean I won't keep on writing. It just means that I don't want to be on a career path that requires me to pump stuff out for the sake of having publications. I'd rather write when the desire seizes me and channel most of my energy into the classroom. I get such a high from having a class go well, watching students respond to something I've designed to help them engage with what we're studying. It's a first for me. I almost can't believe I'm saying that, after so many years of not knowing what would fulfill me, but this is it. This is what makes me happy. Or at least, it's the beginning of something toward that end.

D finally sent me a picture of our irises, which we intend to plant in the ground when we get our first house. Right now, they're thriving in their pots. Here's a shot from the week I left for school (mid-August):


And here's how tall they are now:


Ah, May. It won't be here for a while, but it's so much closer than it was last year. I can almost taste it.

Friday, September 12, 2008

This is how I feel


Well, not exactly, but the picture was too funny not to post, and I do feel like bunches of things have suddenly dropped on me in the last week. Namely deadlines, some self-imposed.

This shot was actually taken over Labor Day weekend -- D took a solo trip to the Olympic Peninsula to check out some hiking trails, and he came across these three crabs on the Dungeness Spit, which is part of a national wildlife reserve. These guys are no longer alive, but it looks like they are (at least, the ones that are still intact). Poor things, I think they're shell-shocked from the sight of their friend ... sorry, couldn't resist. But don't they look appalled?


The hike along the spit is about five miles on nothing but beach. Beautiful, but tough going on the legs, says D. At the end of the spit is a lighthouse that looks out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Quite a nice summer retreat! If you apply to be a keeper, you can apparently stay there for a week for very cheap. The high season for tourism seems to be July and August, so finding a place for D to stay wasn't easy (and at the last minute -- he called me and said he wanted to check out more of the area if a room was available for a reasonable price). After some Googling, I located a hostel not too far away while D was driving back toward the ferry to Seattle. Oh, the benefits of cell phones and the internet ...


This is going to be a heavy writing weekend, so I'd best get to it. Next week, my students will be meeting with me to discuss their plans for their first formal paper, so I'll be extra short on time. I'm really enjoying how well lessons are going -- a first after my two years of teaching middle school -- but I wish I didn't feel so completely exhausted!

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

What is this "work-life balance" you speak of?

I know, I know, I've been a little quiet over here. Chalk it up to trying to figure out how to juggle being a teacher and student at the same time. Forget being a plain old citizen of the human race ...

Things sort of picked up rather rapidly after Labor Day, and D came to visit this past weekend. Less than optimal combination. But such is life -- D and I have learned just to work around my work. Sometimes I let things slide a little on my end, as I did this time, or we just treat the days together as if they're not going to run out any time soon (and I do what I have to do while he hangs out). That takes the pressure off most of the time. We learned last year that trying to use up every waking minute doing special things isn't realistic and that having a relaxed, "normal" weekend together is rejuvenating in itself.

Okay, so I do have some work-life balance.

But in terms of getting my own work done vs. getting work done for teaching, the teaching is winning out way more often. It's paying off in the classroom -- discussions and activities have gone really well -- but my writing has been sorely neglected. And my first workshop piece is due in a little over a week ...

D and I took Saturday afternoon to take a little road trip to a local German heritage historic site, which was fun. We ate ourselves silly on Wienerschnitzel and looked at local arts and crafts. One of our stops was at the Wine, Cheese and Jelly Haus (yep, that's what was over the door), where you could find everything you needed for a picnic, including baskets. We restrained ourselves and only picked up a summer sausage and some strawberry-rhubarb jam (D's favorite).

We also stopped at a historic church that had been converted into a studio and gallery, and we got to meet the primary artist who works there. Our biggest find, however, was at another gallery. We came across some whimsical prints by an artist named Laura Lee Junge, whose style (per art critics) can be described as "surrealistic expressionism." There's definitely some Dali in there, but it's softer, I think. In any case, D and I both fell in love with the same painting, something that has never happened before since we tend to have different tastes. We took it as a sign -- now the piece is at my place, waiting to be framed. I believe we have the last one ever printed; it's marked 500/500. You like?


Well, I had hoped to post a longer update, but I'm getting pointed looks from Hamlet. More soon, I promise, as long as I don't lose more sleep -- I'm still waking up way before I'm supposed to, and I wouldn't be surprised if nightmares about Kenneth Branagh gone mad were to visit me tonight!

Posts by date

Posts by label

Air travel Airline food Allergic reactions Astoria Awards Bacteremia Bacterial overgrowth Baggage beefs Bed and breakfast Betrayal Blues Body Boston Breastfeeding British Columbia California Canada Cape Spear Clam-digging Colonoscopy Commuter marriage Cooking CT scans Delays Diagnoses Dietitians Doctor-patient relationships Doctors Eating while traveling Editing Endocrine Endoscopy ER False starts Family dynamics Feedback Food anxiety Food sensitivities Gate agent guff GI Halifax Heart Home-making House hunting Hypoglycemia In-laws Intentional happiness Iowa Journaling Kidney stones Knitting Lab tests Little U. on the Prairie Liver function tests Long Beach Making friends in new places Malabsorption Massachusetts Medical records Medication Mentorship MFA programs Miami Monterey Motivation Moving Narrative New York Newark Newfoundland Nova Scotia Olympic Peninsula Ontario Ophthalmology Oregon Oxalates Pancreatic function tests Parenting Parents Paris Pets Photography Portland Prediabetes Pregnancy Process Professors Publishing Reproductive endocrine Research Revision Rewriting Rheumatology San Francisco Scenes from a graduation series Scenes from around the table series Seattle Sisters Skiing St. John's Striped-up paisley Teaching Technological snafus Texas Thesis Toronto Travel Travel fears Traveling while sick Ultrasound Urology Vancouver Victoria Voice Washington Washington D.C. Weight When words won't stick Whidbey Island Why we write Workshops Writers on writing Writing Writing friends Writing in odd places Writing jobs Yakima

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

An unexpected detour

So we were supposed to leave D's parents' place last Friday to visit my family in the Texas panhandle. Unfortunately, our travel plans were thwarted again (are we beginning to notice a pattern here?). What follows is an account of an odyssey that still boggles my mind. Normally, I wouldn't provide such a ridiculous blow-by-blow, but for the sake of illustrating how absurd the whole experience was, here's the tale. Feel free to skip down to the photo if you'd rather not hear about the journey.

Weather was the primary culprit this time -- not on our day of departure in question but in the days preceding it. Because of ice and fog, lots of planes were grounded, and the one that was intended to take us to Chicago for our connections to Dallas and then the panhandle never made it to our city. About an hour before we planned to head to the airport, American Airlines' automated system called us with the news that our 1 p.m. flight was a no-go.

Given D's success with the bus on his way down, we decided to cancel the tickets for the Chicago flight and hop the charter coach again to get back to O'Hare -- a four-hour ride, but one that would get us there in time to take a later flight to Dallas, with some hustling through security. We also got ourselves rebooked on Saturday's first flight out to the panhandle (the last plane for Friday evening that we were originally going to take would be long gone). Sounds good, right? At least, better than the new itinerary we were given by AA's automated system, which would get us to my parents' place late the next night.

Well, about two hours into our bus ride, the driver announced that our arrival at O'Hare would be delayed by 45 minutes. Normally, the bus line splits its passengers at a halfway point, transferring everyone going to Midway (Chicago's other major airport) to another coach. But because of the unusually high volume of passengers from all the canceled flights, the company was short on buses and ours would have to be rerouted to Midway and O'Hare -- which meant that we wouldn't be able to make our new flight to Dallas.

A quick call to AA revealed that there were no seats available on future Dallas flights until Saturday evening, which would mean getting to the panhandle another day late. But then, at the last minute, two slots opened up on an early morning flight, so we grabbed them and then found ourselves a hotel near the airport. Once we finally reached O'Hare, we got ourselves a good dinner, set our cell phone alarms, and promptly conked out.

One hour later: D's cell phone rings. Yep, our new new Dallas flight was canceled.

At this point, we realized that our chances of getting out of Chicago in time to spend any part of our vacation with my family were looking bad -- the AA agent D got connected to spent nearly an hour and a half searching for flights that would get us to the panhandle by Saturday, but the best he could come up with was a flight leaving Sunday for Indianapolis, connecting to a flight to Dallas, and finally getting us to my parents' place that evening. A quick peek at the weather forecast revealed an ice storm on its way to the Midwest for Sunday as well. Time to consider a new form of transportation? We thought so.

The pickings were slim, but we did find a car rental company with vehicles left (at a premium price, of course). So at 1:30 a.m., we made our reservation and finally had a guaranteed way to Texas. Because of the cost, it meant deciding to make the 1,050-mile drive all in one day, but it was a good thing we jumped on the option when we did. By 7 a.m., there was nothing available to rent within a five-mile radius of O'Hare.

Saturday was long, but we made good time, despite a tornado warning as we passed through St. Louis and torrential rains further south in Missouri. Here's a view of the Gateway Arch as we crossed the state line out of Illinois:


We reached my parents' place around midnight after 16 hours in a little red Prius we named Pepe. I don't think we really believed that we had made it until after the first full day of our stay -- what does it say about the state of the airline industry when you can drive a thousand miles in less time than you can fly the same distance?

The clincher: the flight we were booked on out of Indianapolis to Dallas ended up being delayed 11 hours, which would have forced us to miss our Sunday flight to the panhandle. I think we can say for certain now that the road trip was justified -- I just hope we won't be driving back to Seattle after this weekend!!! I'm fresh out of extended-travel stamina.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Chipping in

I have discovered a new skill I never knew I possessed.

Some backstory: As I wrote earlier, there was some serious precipitation heading our way when I checked the weather the night before the final I was supposed to give. So I wasn't sure when I would be leaving for D's parents' house. The skies were clear, though, on Friday morning, and the roads looked decent -- just some slush on the local streets and even bare concrete on the highway through town. So as soon as I got back from turning in my grades on campus that afternoon, I chucked everything I needed into my little suitcase and decided to head out in the last hour of daylight.

And then I discovered that my car was entombed in ice.

Yep, that wintry mix did fall Thursday evening, and it left at least half an inch of frozen stuff from hood to trunk on my poor little Honda. When I opened the door to the driver's seat, shards the size of dinner plates cracked off and clattered to the ground.

I decided in that instant that there was no way I was going to spend another night in my apartment, even if it meant having to take a sledgehammer to the mess in front of me, so I pulled out my scraper and started whacking away. While the defrosters were warming up the front and rear windshields, I took some good swings at the ice on the side windows. Anyone walking by would have seen a crazed-looking woman apparently hell-bent on beating her car to death -- that's how hard I had to hit the ice to make any progress. But once I got going, I was quite effective, if I say so myself. Total excavation time: 45 minutes.

The sun was completely gone by the time I got done, and I hate driving in the dark (not fun with an astigmatism). But because of the reflective snow along the sides of the interstate, it was actually much easier to see the road. The fringe benefits of winter weather! Who knew ...

I got to D's parents' house with no trouble. It was a good thing I left when I did too -- the next day, the snowstorm we were expecting arrived and the weather's been dicey ever since. We came prepared with warm clothing, so we were able to provide extra manpower for chipping ice off the front walk before the holiday party D's parents hosted last night (if you thought half an inch on one car was difficult, try more than two inches of hard-packed glaze over hundreds of square feet of cement). Quite the workout!

Today promises to be warmer (a good ten degrees above freezing, if you can believe it), so the winter wonderland we've been living in will melt quickly in the next few hours. Fortunately, D braved the sub-zero temperatures a few days ago to get some shots of the iced-over backyard and its wildlife with his dad's telephoto lens. Here are the results -- pretty magical, especially if you've never seen what an ice storm can do:








It is nearly time for lunch, and D is about to assemble a gingerbread cathedral, so I'm off to help. Pictures of that to come soon! Until then, safe travels and a lovely holiday to everyone.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Be careful what you wish for

About a week ago, D was commenting about how he missed snow and wanted some to make it feel more like Christmas was on its way (Seattle proper doesn't get much of the white stuff, if any, in the winter). Well, this morning, he kind of got his wish.

Actually, last weekend, he had a little taste of it -- just enough to give the trees a pretty dusting:


Fast-forward, though, to Wednesday night. A rather large weather system was predicted to dump about 10 inches of snow on the city by Thursday morning. Sweet, D thought, except for the fact that he was supposed to fly out Thursday afternoon. Hmmm.

So we hatched a plan. He'd get a ride to the airport in time for the first flight out to Chicago and try to go stand-by. His friend, who also had a flight scheduled for the afternoon, agreed to drive him. "You should just stick around and try to get out early," D told him. But his friend wasn't keen on the idea and went back home to sleep some more after dropping D off. D says the stars were still out, the sky perfectly clear, without a hint of any approaching weather.

A few hours later, his friend woke up to 6 inches of snow on the ground with more coming down without any sign of stopping. And the highways were closed.

Pan over on your imaginary map to the Midwest. At the moment, we're getting that fun phenomenon known as "wintry mix" -- sleet, snow, freezing rain -- which will glaze most of the area over the next 12 hours and make driving a big no-no. Flying too. D's connecting flight was already canceled hours before it was supposed to take off this evening. Fortunately, he managed to get a bus ticket to his final destination before the slippery stuff started accumulating, so he's safely at his parents' house now. Imagine, though, if he hadn't hopped that early flight ...

So the weather system that blanketed Washington and brought the first snowfall in 30 years to Las Vegas is scheduled to roll through the Midwest on Saturday. I'm now stuck deciding whether to brave iced-over roads tomorrow afternoon, once I turn in my grades, or to wait till Saturday to venture out in snow showers. Neither sounds good. Sunday has potential (still snowy, though less so), and Monday looks best (clear). But Monday's a loooooooooooooong way from this weekend.

I suppose more reading is in order ...

Sunday, December 14, 2008

A fish out of water


Let's see. Graded all papers? Check. Finished writing final exam? Double check. Acquired test booklets for students? Check, check, check. What's left?

Absolutely nothing until Thursday, the day of the exam. I'm out of things to do -- for the next four days.

Okay, it's not really that bad. I have Christmas cards to write, packages to mail, friends to catch up with, books to devour, and, oh, a little thing called a thesis prospectus to consider working on, but even with all of this, my eyes are constantly roaming toward the clock. I can't wait to see D again. CANNOT WAIT. And the feeling is mutual -- it's been such a long semester of spreading visits out as much as we can that even as we've been talking on the phone in the last few days, we've been running out of things to say beyond, "Can next Saturday get here any sooner???"

Teaching was a really nice responsibility for the last three and a half months, and now that I'm no longer forced to keep my mind completely focused on the job, I have a four-year-old's attention span. Nothing is compelling enough to keep me occupied. I can't even pack yet because the majority of the things I plan to take with me have to be used. Well, I suppose I can put the last few Christmas gifts I've acquired with the stash in my closet so they'll be ready to go. The little cloisonné fish in the photo above is one of the items I brought back after Thanksgiving and will go to D's parents. We got one for ourselves as well -- each Christmas, we buy one new ornament for our tree to mark the year. The fish caught our eye because each row of scales is a separate piece, allowing it to flex as if it were actually swimming. Lots of fun.

All right, that's with the rest of the presents now. What next? D, stop laughing (I know you are). It's the Type A in me coming out again just like it did at the beginning of the summer. "Just enjoy the vacation," D kept telling me, "and stop trying to find things to do."

He's right. Even the books I've been reading have been books that I'm considering for my thesis bibliography. Time to find something completely unrelated. Yes.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Wine and tattoos

Yes, it's nearing the end of the semester at last, and we're all going a little stir-crazy here at Little U. on the Prairie. No, I didn't invest in a new form of self-expression while inebriated. But there is an explanation for the title above -- hey, where are you going? Hang on and hang in there! Man, I can tell some of you are as impatient as I am.

So, shortly before Thanksgiving, D told me that he'd dreamed that I'd gotten a tattoo. A strange dream, for sure, as I'm too chicken as it is to get my ears pierced, much less endure the pain of a tattoo needle. But we all have random dreams now and then, and I assumed this was just one of them for D.

Well, it turns out that D liked what he saw. When I asked him what I'd chosen for a tattoo, he couldn't quite explain it. "It's those things on the front of a violin," he said. "You had one on each side above each hip."

Ahhhh -- I was pretty sure I knew what he was talking about but I didn't know the specific name for what he was picturing either. So I consulted one of my sisters, who plays the violin. "They're called f-holes," she said. For illustrative purposes, she and her boyfriend took pictures of the ones on her instrument. The results were quite pretty (see above).

Now I'm thoroughly curious about what planted this idea in D's head, even if it was subliminal. Dreams are supposed to be a kind of playback for things your brain stores up over the course of the day -- at least, that's one theory I've heard a few times.

I'm also curious about why I have crazily intense dreams whenever I've had red wine. They started a few years ago and have been pretty consistent (I can tell since I rarely drink reds). I don't always remember what I dream about, but the dreams tend to leave me feeling less than rested because my brain feels so exhausted in the morning. And no, it's not a hangover -- I drink barely enough to make a mouse tipsy.

Yesterday, I hosted a wine and cheese night at my place for a few of the girls in my program, and since they favor reds, I picked one up -- a Montecillo Crianza Rioja that looked decent but still reasonably priced for grad students on a budget. It turned out to be delicious, going nicely with smoked Gouda and baked Brie (I made another of the latter since the one at Thanksgiving was such a success). The best pairing, though, was with the blue cheese I'd chosen, especially when the cheese was eaten with dried dates.

So what did I dream about? I'm not sure. During Thanksgiving break, however, I also had a little taste of red wine with dinner, and I woke up that night to D asking me what was wrong. Apparently, he'd witnessed me pulling back my arm and then giving the mattress a solid wallop with my fist!

If I did anything violent last night, I have no proof. But I did notice that a large number of things that I'd left at the foot of the bed (socks, a magazine, and an envelope with papers I need to read) were scattered on the floor this morning. Considering that I'm known among my former college roommates as the girl who could stack library books on her mattress without disturbing them in my sleep, this suggests something out of the ordinary.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Chouette!

I woke up to a little surprise today. French Fancy, a blogger in Brittany, kindly nominated me for a blog award (see her post here). I've never received one of these before -- what an unexpected and welcome nod of encouragement.

The really fun part is that now I get to put up some nominations (that's the way these things seem to work, according to what the conditions are for said award). I'm also asked to post the rules for accepting the award, which are as follows:

  • Copy and paste these rules/instructions in your post.

  • When you post about receiving this award, include who gave you the award and link back to his/her blog.

  • Post five winners and link back to them as well.

  • Post five of your addictions.

  • Add the award image.

  • Let your winners know you gave them this award by leaving comments on their blogs.

So, without further ado, here are my nominees.

  • The Itty Bitty Kitty Committee, by Laurie Cinotto ~ One of my sisters introduced me to this darling site that covers the lives of foster kittens in Tacoma. I cannot wait to get back to Seattle for good -- D and I are hoping to adopt one (or two or three ...).

  • Purring Prophecy, by Medieval Woman ~ While doing research on commuter relationships last summer, I came across this site by sheer chance. The author is, in her own words, "a medievalist beginning her first tenure-track position, working on her book, and commuting to see her long distance husband." She's also got a wicked sense of humor and manages to hang on to it through the travails of teaching.

  • Cake Wrecks, by Jen ~ The name of this compendium says it all. A friend of mine who knew that I was doing research on footbinding for a Chinese history course last spring directed me to this blog for a look at a very relevant photo someone had sent in. Can you guess what the cake in the picture was made to resemble? I do have to say it was an excellent representation of the real thing, but whether or not it was in good taste -- sorry, I couldn't resist.

  • Caramel Cook, by Brian Sharp ~ I found this blog when I was searching for a recipe for scones last winter. The food photography is wonderful, and the commentary is great for culinary inspiration.

  • Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, by -- well, that's a little more complicated. This site was originally by the esteemed author of The Canterbury Tales, but it seems he's been ousted from his role as head scribe. There's a new order handling things at the moment, but no matter what, it's a hilarious read, especially if you like deliberate anachronisms with your Middle English.

All right. On to the addictions ...

  • Soup. Of almost any kind. It is really, really cold at Little U. on the Prairie in the winter (which sometimes lasts six months), and making a huge pot of soul-warming goodness always makes it more bearable. I got started on a soup-making kick last year thanks to a cookbook called Soup: A Way of Life by Barbara Kafka, which I picked up before moving from Texas. I also grew up savoring my mother's incredible homemade stocks, which kind of sealed my fate before I was old enough to boil water.

  • Mountains. If you followed this blog especially during the past summer, you know this already. I discovered my natural habitat -- didn't know I had one -- in the Pacific Northwest, where the pines and the peaks they decorate make me happy. I haven't yet figured out why. Maybe it's the solitude, or maybe it's the smell of the air. In any case, I've told D that we're not moving once I get back because I don't think I could bear to leave.

  • Books. This one probably goes without saying. D says I eat books, which is pretty accurate. I wouldn't feel right without some kind of personal reading in my life -- titles of my own interest, not those assigned for class (though sometimes those lead me to other books, which is totally fine). I'm currently collecting copies of my favorite children's books so that someday, I'll have a library all ready for our kids.

  • Stationery. Beautiful pens, beautiful paper, the kinds of things that give you pleasure when you write. Even as a little girl, I was obsessed with writing (both penmanship and the creative act), and the sensuous trails of colored inks gliding from beneath the perfect nib onto the creamy surface of a fresh page of a journal were like catnip to me. Now, I do most of my writing electronically (I compose better that way), but when I'm grading and commenting on student papers, I always choose a pen that feels good to write with.

  • D's hugs. This is the worst addiction because I can't get a fix on a regular basis! Now, I don't mean this in the "I can't help saying this because I'm in love with him" sense. I've had hugs from various friends, male and female, in my life, and even before D and I knew we were attracted to each other, his hugs far outranked any I'd ever experienced. Not like those airy, squeamish, not-really-touching-you hugs. His platonic hugs were warm and enveloping, gentle but firm. They were meant. His hugs now (not so platonic, obviously) are the same. Only now I get to ask for them and I don't have to let go.

I think that does it for today. Thank you again, French Fancy, for the award. This was fun.

Sunday, November 30, 2008

FEEEEEEEAAAST!!!

If you've seen this Snickers ad campaign, you know what I'm talking about.

Today, D got our photos from Thanksgiving onto a server, so I was able to download all of them in minimal time. Hooray for online storage space! The shots he took during our morning of cooking were intermittent as we had our hands quite full, but here are some highlights from our culinary adventures.

We brined and roasted our turkey according to this recipe, which we tested last year with nice results. This year's bird worked out well too -- the breast meat was juicy, and the legs and thighs were tender to the point of pulling away from the body at the joints. If prepping a turkey were less messy, I'd cook one way more often. Note the operative word if -- when I was butterflying the bird for roasting, I managed to cover the front of the dishwasher with raw meat juices (we don't have a lot of space in our kitchen, so when food messes reach the edge of the counter, as they often do, they plunge off to wreak havoc on whatever surfaces are below). I was also not tall enough to apply sufficient force to the breast bone in order to crack the turkey open, so I had to get up on a chair to put all my weight into it. Oddly reminiscent of CPR training! I think it took about five or six compressions to do the job -- and then a lot of paper towels and soap to get rid of the fluids that squirted everywhere. Yum, yum. Good thing D had us eat breakfast before going at all the cooking -- he got up early to make bran muffins and cornbread, which powered us through.

Once everything was cleaned up, we were in good shape for the rest of the food prep. I have to say that even with four cooks in our tiny kitchen, we did an incredible job of not running into one another. My best friend from college and his longtime girlfriend came up from Portland to spend Wednesday night and most of Thursday with us for the holiday, and they brought an entire cooler of ingredients for the dishes they planned to make. So wonderful to have people I love living nearby again! (They moved to Oregon a little over a year ago and are the same friends we visited in May.) The occasions for seeing such friends have been otherwise infrequent since our own move west -- most of our group from school stayed in New York and Massachusetts.

We made Brie en croûte with dried cherries, honey, pecans, and rosemary as an appetizer, served with croccantini from a local grocery, then for side dishes to accompany the turkey, we prepared cranberry relish; pan gravy; oven-roasted new potatoes with pearled onions, rosemary, and paprika; and green beans sautéed with fresh garlic. Matt and Gaby made sausage stuffing, oven-roasted apples and root vegetables (sweet potatoes, parsnips, and beets), and an Elizabethan pot pie that contained Jerusalem artichokes, hard-boiled eggs, grapes, and dates with a drizzling of heavy cream. Quite an amazing spread once we were done! Add to that the whole-wheat loaf that D baked the night before, as well as several bottles of wine, and it was a true feast. I think we were all a bit stunned that everything turned out so well. "Did we do that?" Matt said once the table was set.


We were quite full by the time we finished our main course(s), so we went for a walk around the neighborhood. Then we had a round of cards to liven us up, and D and I baked our mini molten chocolate cakes. Half of them -- the ones that were made with powdered Splenda -- turned out beautifully. The other two did not want to solidify on the outside and remained more like bread pudding. I'm guessing it's because we didn't have confectioner's sugar (we substituted the granular stuff, which didn't grind well with our mortar and pestle). In any case, the cakes still tasted fine, and they went really nicely with the loganberry dessert wine our friends brought -- Vinotaboo, which is made in Oregon. A pomegranate was a good palate cleanser that finished off the day.

After a few more rounds of cards, we decided to take Matt and Gaby to D's office, where we played foosball (another favorite activity we haven't had since college). And then we had to say our goodbyes since I had my flight at the crack of dawn and they had a three-hour drive back home so they could be at work the next day. I was sad to see them go so soon -- but there's always January. I think another reunion is very much in order.

So that, in large part, was Thanksgiving '08 chez nous! Now go eat something. I know I'm hungry again after thinking about all that food.

Friday, November 28, 2008

There and back again

So I expected that I would have MORE time to blog while in Seattle for Thanksgiving break, but it was exactly the opposite. Some of that was the product of catch-up time with D, of course, but while he was at work, there was just that much stuff to do -- Christmas shopping, prepping for dinner guests, taking advantage of the free laundry, and working on the holiday newsletter to go out with the cards to friends and family. That last item is sort of becoming a tradition. I had hoped to get it finished before leaving so I could print off the copies from our color printer, but I couldn't manage it. Oh well. I'll write the rest of it tonight, and D will print it. Hopefully his version of Word won't scramble the document like it did last year after I sent it to him! Coordinating a repair job over e-mail took some creativity, to say the least.

I wish I could have stayed in Seattle through Sunday morning, but in order to get there using mileage awards, I had to come back today. D and I will see each other in three weeks, which will also mark the beginning of winter break for me (can't wait!). This little week off was wonderful -- a taste of what we'll have over December and January. We had a dinner date on Friday after I landed, and then we had a very lazy Saturday -- lots of lounging and talking and just being in the same home with the prospect of another five days together instead of only one. D made his special waffles for breakfast and we tested a molten chocolate cake recipe (part of the menu for Thanksgiving). On Sunday, we went marketing for Christmas gift ideas and I got reacquainted with the irises. Ralph has what seems to be a bud! Silly plant -- it's not time for that yet!

Things really started picking up on Monday. While D was at work, I met up with our realtor again to look at more houses. The market has definitely changed a bit with the economy. I'm glad we didn't jump into making an offer on anything this summer as there are larger places for better prices now. We looked at seven homes, two of which felt like they had good potential (with room for us to grow so we wouldn't have to move out again for several years). Appreciation rates have slowed, so being able to stay put for longer is important to us.

Tuesday, we did the last of the pre-Thanksgiving grocery shopping and D made a delicious white bean and ground turkey chili for dinner while I was whittling away at grading and the newsletter. It sounds almost mundane, doesn't it? Trying to write about why all of this was so good is difficult -- how do you explain how extraordinary ordinariness is when you never have it?

Our guests arrived Wednesday, and their visit deserves its own post, so I'll stop here for the moment. But yes, it was lovely just to be back where I could see the mountains, even if it's dark at 3:30 now because we're so far north. My plane followed the sunset on the way out to Seattle, which was a little treat. Here's a shot of the last of it and the north star somewhere over Montana.

Monday, November 17, 2008

On loss, mostly

Today was all over the place.

Today actually started in the middle of the night -- I woke up with the sensation that something bad was about to occur. You know that feeling where your heart starts pounding because there's some imminent threat you can't identify? Pulled me out of a dead sleep. So I lay under the blankets, holding my breath, listening. Then the earth started to roll, as it did during the earthquake last April, and like last time, I froze, even though I should have gotten up to stand in a doorway. It was the strangest sensation, feeling the mattress bucking underneath me and hearing things fall elsewhere in the apartment. Then the rolling stopped, and for the rest of the time before my alarm went off, I was semiconscious, body tensed, waiting for aftershocks.

When I woke up to the radio, though, there was no mention of any tremors (unlike last April, when they were the first item on the news). That's right, I was dreaming the whole time -- a dream of being awake in the here and now when I was actually unconscious in some parallel universe. Disturbing if not plain eerie. So that was an unsettling start to the day.

Things got better once I was up -- I breakfasted, read the news online, worked out, showered, did some reading and figured out what spring classes to register for. Talked to D briefly. I've missed him more than usual in the last week (I think the three-week stretches between visits have been getting tougher since the fall semester hasn't had any big breaks before Thanksgiving). We've been planning what to do while I'm in Seattle. Maybe some house hunting just to explore the market now that the economy has changed so much. Definitely a meeting with an attorney to set up our wills. We should have done this right when we got married, but I was applying to school, and he was looking for a job, and then we were moving me and then moving him and then commuting for two semesters and then cramming five weddings into our summer and now here we are. I know, no excuses. The plan is to start the paperwork over this vacation (we have an appointment in place) and finish it during winter break. Not that we have huge amounts of property to divvy up, but we would like to make sure it goes to the people we want it to go to instead of having the state make those decisions.

It's always a little weird talking about wills and such. The idea that one of us won't always be around is a strange and familiar thing at the same time. We've been apart for so much of our relationship that we're used to functioning without the other person there. But the idea of losing that person for good is still, of course, terrible -- and feared even more, on some levels, because the life we've wanted to begin together hasn't quite begun yet either. Hence the extra urgency to get the wills in place. We've talked about where and how we want to be buried, we know each other's favorite flower. I know it sounds morbid, but it's really not. We've just had enough time apart to know that time together is never long enough, so having all this out in the open kind of gets it settled and out of the way. Which means we can get on with enjoying our lives with each other.

After talking with D, I packed up to head to class. My students had their papers due today, so I knew attendance would be fairly high (part of the reason why I scheduled my teaching observation for today). I wasn't nervous about that, but I was a little worried when only half of the class had shown up by the time we were supposed to start. Almost everyone else got there within five minutes, though, so things looked like they were going to be fine. Then one of my girls arrived but only stuck her head in the doorway as we were getting discussion moving. She beckoned with her hand, asking me to go out into the hall with her.

I knew, before I left my seat, what she was going to tell me. This was the student whose family member was in a car accident not quite three weeks ago. I knew his condition was poor (he was thrown through his windshield when a driver rear-ended him on the highway, the student told me), and I was guessing that, since he hadn't woken up within the first week of the accident, his prognosis wasn't good. But it was still a shock, like getting all the air forcefully evacuated from my lungs, when she told me he was dead. He was her twin.

She handed me her paper at this point. I must have looked bewildered -- I couldn't believe she had come all the way to class just to turn it in (my policy is that written work has to be handed to me in person unless there are extenuating circumstances). I told her I was sorry and that we could talk privately in office hours tomorrow, if she was up to it, to determine what kind of arrangements she would need for the rest of the semester. I asked her if it was okay to give her a hug, and she said yes.

And then I had to go back into my classroom and pretend that everything was fine.

I know I never knew her brother, but the complete and utterly meaningless destruction of his life is the same sort of thing I've feared most for the people in my own life, especially now that they're scattered across the country. I can't say that I know what her loss feels like, but I've imagined it a thousand times over, every time I've left D at the airport, even though I've tried not to let my mind go there. So I wanted to feel sadness for her -- to honor her loss within my physical body, to recognize its weight in the pit of my stomach. But I had to stifle myself, cut the feeling off after my initial reactions (those can't be controlled). Doing that -- even if only temporarily, for the sake of my student's privacy and for the sake of conducting a productive class for fifteen other people -- felt wrong in some way. To be able to shut down instantaneously. Not to allow some molecule of grief to hover in my consciousness. It was almost inhuman. But it was either-or.

So now I'm putting all of that here, just to feel it at last. Enough from the universe, please. Enough for now.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Speak, Mnemosyne?

Apparently this is what Nabokov had originally intended to name his memoir but "was told that 'little old ladies would not want to ask for a book whose title they could not pronounce' " (per the foreword in said work). I suppose from a marketing perspective that it was a valid criticism, but beyond that, I think Speak, Memory just falls more rhythmically on the ear and makes the idea of a writer exploring recollections of his childhood more accessible to the common reader. There's something about invoking a Greek muse that just feels more highflown. Of course, there's a place for that too, but when talking about the self? Let's not take ourselves too seriously ...

Nabokov is, as you may have guessed, the author of the week in my seminar. So far, so good, but his prose requires concentration. The end of a sentence often reaches places far from its beginnings, and any kind of distraction that draws your attention from its progress leaves you wondering a few words later, "Wait, how did we get here?"

I guess that's the underlying question in writing memoir too. "Neither in environment nor in heredity," writes Nabokov, "can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap." That pretty much describes what the last few weeks of writing have proved to me! The quest, perhaps, is to find the path the watermark traces -- the revisiting of all the pressures that have left their prints upon us, nudging us forward into the present. But how to organize all that into a coherent narrative?

I have to wonder what this man, who was an avid collector of butterflies, thought of the butterfly effect.

I'm playing around with structure as I'm writing but it's still unclear what's working best. The response to the essay on Thursday from workshop was encouraging enough that I sent the work to my thesis advisor -- we'll see what suggestions she has. Hopefully over Thanksgiving, I'll have time just to sit and think. That's partially what today is for too, but several days like this without interruption will be helpful. If holiday shopping and cooking don't take over, that is ...

Thursday, November 13, 2008

You just never know

Unpredictable -- I think that describes the general tenor of life at the moment.

D sent me an interesting e-mail this morning about some recent tech news. Midway Games, a company he interviewed with during his last job search, made some notable staff cuts this week. We had initially hoped, before the move to Seattle, that D would get a position at Midway since it's driving distance from Little U. on the Prairie. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise that he was turned down. Who knows whether the job he applied for was one of those that got hit. Apparently, the company's stock shares are also taking a beating.

I had my workshop today, which was very helpful. Very tough, though, because of what was on the table. The essay I submitted was the first in which I think I really, really put myself out there naked -- not writing in the voice or character of the person I wanted my audience to see me as, but as the person I am underneath all the carefully wrought word-armor. I realized, in some earlier attempts to pull together this piece, that my problems writing it stemmed largely from trying not to reveal parts of myself that I'd rather keep under wraps. This is not to say that what I ultimately turned in was an exercise in self-flagellation, but I did let all the embarrassing, uncomfortable awkwardness of childhood appear. And that was hard.

What really caught me off guard, though, was the sadness I felt as the workshop got at the heart of what was in the essay -- the entanglement in certain family issues (I won't get more specific than this here) that still cause powerful grief. The sadness isn't even explicit in the essay, but people began plumbing the family dynamics driving the action in the work, and then as the explanations came out, all the awfulness of the aftermath from the experience I wrote about bubbled up like acid. I was tearing up liberally by the time we finished (also much cause for embarrassment), and I couldn't do a thing about it. I think the people who noticed probably figured it was because the subject matter was painful, not because I was upset by what people were saying about the piece -- it was all very constructive -- but ouch. I think I've had enough surprises for one day. I feel bad because I was too choked up to thank everyone at the end. Maybe an e-mail? But that seems so impersonal. Perhaps a quick thanks at the beginning of next Thursday's class. That'll be better.

So now I'm wiped out (more so than usual). But at least this weekend, I have no grading, which means I can do some more writing. I haven't had that luxury in what feels like months.

A happy note to end on: our irises are still doing well out in Seattle -- D sent me update photos. The plants will winter on our apartment balcony and should bloom just in time for my arrival at the end of the spring semester. We thought up names for them a few days ago (they're pets, so why not, right?). D has chosen Ralph and Tessa for his two, which will be deep red and tawny gold, respectively. For mine, I picked Carmen (indigo) and Lolita (pale pink). Yes, yes, think what you will! But if you could have seen what their predecessors looked like at the farm we visited, you'd understand how the names just fit.

Anyway, we're hoping all the plants will keep thriving as they have been -- I think one of D's bulbs may need its own pot already.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Procrastiblogging

What, you've never heard of that before? Surely, you jest!

I'm supposed to be grading some student exercises that I should have finished this past weekend, but I was too fried to face them -- and they're short ones too. Ah, grading burnout. Fortunately, the teaching is still good. In fact, I get energy from doing it (and there's not much of that to go around these days). This week has been terrific so far, which made up a bit for the funk I was in on Sunday, missing D mainly.

I have to say that my students are a fun bunch as they're willing to entertain some of the sillier activities I have them do to warm up for class discussion. Yesterday, I introduced them to "Monday Mingling," which is an adaptation of something another teacher showed me while I was teaching junior high. We had read a short story over the weekend with some guiding questions, so to get people out of their seats and energized, I copied the questions onto individual index cards and had each person choose one. Then all the students had to "mingle," asking their questions of different people as they walked around the room. "Pretend you're at a party," I said, which got me some amused looks, but I know everyone had a good time with it. Some people even got into the act, asking their questions like pick-up lines at a bar! I also distinctly heard one student say, "I'll meet you by the fruit punch" as she was chatting up a classmate. Whatever it takes ...

After we'd mingled for about five minutes, we sat down again and shared out the answers each student had collected. Pretty effective for getting people talking.

We're going to start looking at poetry tomorrow, which will be a real change of pace. I think I'm going to have my students close their eyes and do some guided meditation just to slow their brains down before we start examining some verses -- poetry really does have its own time scale. For a little icebreaker, we'll be looking at Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, which turns conventional beauty on its ear (hopefully, students will figure that out after they try to draw what's being described). I bought crayons for the occasion -- a box of 48, although the set of 64 was tempting. That should be plenty, in addition to the markers I already have, for them to use to create some entertaining illustrations. And there's nothing like a brand-new box of crayons to inspire creativity. (If you remember this video from Sesame Street, you know what I'm talking about.)

Arrrrrrrrgh, grading calls. I'd better get to it before I start procrasticleaning or something worse. It's been known to happen.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Got a minute?

I know, I know, I'm always talking about how I don't have time to write. But I came across this site on the Blogs of Note list and thought it was a neat idea. Read the prompt; write for 60 seconds. A great place to find writing "exercises," as they call them around here, when you've got writer's block.

Lots of good reading for my classes of late. Most recently, I finished Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter. I can't say I loved the whole thing, but the frame that introduces and ends the work is lovely, poignant, and also disturbing: a daughter keeping vigil by her dying mother's bedside, holding her hand in one of hers while writing her mother's obituary on a legal pad with the other. The memoir is about a place and time that are no longer available to the writer in the present, but her attempts to look back and plumb what's contained in her memory of them are commendable. It's so hard to disentangle yourself so you can write about those things sometimes -- I think that's the problem I ran into in the last week and a half while working on my own essay. There's the problem of attachment that makes objectivity so impossible. As Hampl writes:

Nostalgia, someone will say. A sneer accompanies the word, meaning that to be fascinated by what is gone and lost is to be easily seduced by sentiment. A shameful undertaking. But nostalgia shares the shame of the other good sins, the way lust is shameful or drink or gluttony or sloth. It doesn't belong to the dessicated sins of the soul -- pride, envy. To the sweet sins of the body, add nostalgia. The sin of memory.

Nostalgia is really a kind of loyalty -- also a sin when misapplied, as it so often is. But it's the engine, not the enemy, of history. It feeds on detail, the protein of accuracy. Or maybe nostalgia is a form of longing. It aches for history. In its cloudy wistfulness, nostalgia fuels the spark of significance. My place. My people.

My essay gets workshopped on Thursday, so we'll see what people think. I sent a few drafts to D before I turned it in, and he was helpful in pointing out how to fix some things. It's nice to have a reader with fresh eyes -- not just eyes that haven't read this particular piece but eyes that haven't been looking at tons of other essays all semester and are getting a bit glazed over! (I don't blame them.)

I unwound from all the craziness of the week last night by talking to my sister, who is in the fall semester of her senior year in college (also the one involved in the Cork Incident that I mentioned last week). Talk about being nostalgic -- where has time gone? We've been scattered across the country, this sister, my other sister, and me. I miss being silly with them and finishing each other's reminiscences and speaking in the code that only we share. Perhaps another essay will come of that idea.

In the name of nostalgia for silly moments, here's one from a visit that one sister made to Seattle during our first summer there. Clearly, Midwestern girls do not see hills like this one very often. D's driving, Sis is shooting the video, and I'm in the back seat laughing.


Thursday, November 6, 2008

Hirsute pursuits

Okay, it was a hairy week. Between holding extra office hours for students for paper-writing help and having my own essay due today, I was a bit overstretched, so now I must do some catching up here.

First off, the last "husband weekend" of 2008: D had fun showing off his costume at a Halloween bash while he was in town. He was a pirate, complete with puffy shirt, bandanna, hoop earrings, and beard. I must say, he wears the facial hair well! We took some glamour shots to zoom in on the fine detailing of the whole package.













Sadly, D was unable to bring his old-fashioned toy pistol (too much of a hassle to try to get that through airport security) -- that was what was in the picture I posted here. Alas, no winning guesses as to what it was! Here's the original picture.


Next, the election: Talk about a distraction! I voted on my way home from campus and then sat on tenterhooks all evening trying to do work but utterly failing. It didn't help that it was 75 degrees out (during the first week of November!), making it rather uncomfortable indoors while I was in office hours (the heat in the building was roaring). By the time I got back to my place, I was too tired to think straight. I refused to turn on the TV (still trying to write that pesky essay) but I couldn't help flipping over to The New York Times' online electoral map to check on the returns. I finally gave up after the results were called around 10:15 here and watched the acceptance speech -- very much worth it, of course. I don't think I fully decompressed from all the built-up tension until late Wednesday.

Finally, thesis committee progress: I now have two of my three people! The second person said yes this week -- we have to meet to talk about what role she'll play as a reader, but she's very enthusiastic about the project. Yay! Hopefully I'll have the third person figured out before next Friday. It would be so nice to have this set before Thanksgiving ...

All right, it's very much time for me to consider bed after this crazy couple of days. One more till the weekend.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Let's be careful out there


My physics teacher used to say that before every lab -- with good reason. My lab partner and I actually set one apparatus on fire when we failed to release the brake on a (so-called) frictionless wheel to measure the acceleration of gravity. Who knew a dot timer could be so incendiary? Then D, who was also in my physics class (but not my lab partner), took a projectile launcher's hammer to the hand when his partner released it too soon. To top it all off -- and this one actually elicited a laugh from our usually poker-faced instructor -- my sister clocked herself in the back of the head with a cork while trying to measure its angular momentum. I wasn't there for that last incident (we're six years apart in age), but let's just say that this history of mishaps in a controlled environment has reinforced, for me, a certain wariness of the forces of nature in the real world.

All this is to say that I hope my students have their heads screwed on properly this weekend during all the Halloween hoopla.

My particular class has had what seems to be an abnormally high number of emergencies this semester -- and not from any poor decisions on their part. So far there have been three medical emergencies from chronic conditions requiring hospital attention and two family deaths. Last night, one of my students e-mailed to say that a family member had been in a car accident and that she needed to go home right away (the most recent update is that the family member had not woken up yet by lunchtime today). Then this afternoon, another student e-mailed to say that she would have to withdraw from school for the rest of the semester for health/personal reasons. Would the universe kindly lay off my people already???

I've been so busy getting my students ready for this last push before Thanksgiving break that I've had to leave my writing at a standstill in the middle of some serious work on an essay due next week. But tomorrow -- TOMORROW shall be the day I get back to it. Really.

I've been having trouble deciding what kind of structure will best serve the story I'm trying to tell, so the essay is really kind of a mess. With impeccable timing, this week's memoir reading for one of my classes offered an amusing example of how to apologize for it:

The apparently haphazard chronology of this memoir may need excuse. The excuse, I fear, is Art. It contains a number of surprises, perhaps I may call them shocks, which, as history, came to me rather bunched up towards the end of the story. Artistically shocks should never be bunched, they need spacing for maximum individual effect. To afford them this I could not tell my story straightforwardly and have therefore disregarded chronology and adopted the method of ploughing to and fro over my ... life, turning up a little more sub-soil each time as the plough turned. Looking at it with as much detachment as I can command, I think I have not seriously confused the narrative.
~ J.R. Ackerley, My Father and Myself

Well, here's hoping I have enough to turn in such that it appears to have some kind of chronology, haphazard or otherwise.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Getting into the spirit of things

Well, the packing list has been made. D will be here Friday night, and since it'll be Halloween, he's bringing his costume, along with my winter boots and foodstuffs from Trader Joe's (they don't have TJs out here, so we get the benefit of their discount dry goods by importing them in D's carry-on luggage). I'm not going to reveal what D's chosen to be yet, but the photo is a clue to his identity. Any ideas as to what's in the picture? Correct guesses (of the item and/or the alter ego) will win you celebrity mention on this blog. Sorry, no monetary awards -- we are still trying to save for a house, and the economy is nuts at the moment, as you all know. I'm refusing to look at my IRA until at least after Election Day.

Speaking of houses -- the one that D and I loved has disappeared from the market. It's been gone for a few weeks now. We weren't sure if the owners had temporarily taken it out of the pool or if it had actually sold, but we're watching to see what else catches our eye. I recently noted one place that was quite inviting in its photos online, but we haven't had the opportunity to check it out in person (and if you ask a realtor to take you to tour something, he or she won't leave you alone afterward).

On a completely different topic, my students informed me on Monday that it SNOWED over the weekend. I was inside the entire time, so I didn't actually see it happen. But gaaah. It's too soon. Didn't we just get through those endless months of weather delays?

Sunday, October 26, 2008

On long-standing relationships

I'm not someone you'd call a shoe fancier, so when I find footwear I do like, I tend to stick with it -- for a really long time. These sandals have been with me through five cities in the last eight years. They've had three sets of new heels, one set of new soles, and tons and tons of miles under them.

I'd been looking for a long time for replacements and hadn't found anything I liked (much to my mother's dismay -- "Can't you just throw those away?" she kept asking after about Year Six, when the soles had to be relined to keep them from scraping the balls of my feet). But without a successor for my wardrobe staple, I couldn't really justify tossing them. And they still did their job and were more comfortable for walking than any other sandals I had. Never mind the stitching that was coming out, the cracking leather, the fact that the straps had stretched enough for them to be a pedestrian hazard ...

Then two weeks ago, I happened upon this version of the style while I was running errands. I knew as soon as picked them up from the display table that my old pair was doomed. I took D to see them when he was visiting and he confirmed the worst: they were perfect.


These have a slightly higher heel and a dressier look, but they'll serve the same purpose. So it's time to say goodbye to my faithful friends. It's amazing how many major events in my life these shoes have witnessed: college graduation, starting my first job, starting my second job, my honeymoon, a cross-country road trip. They almost need to go into the "family museum" -- a collection of retired objects my sisters and I have saved from the garbage because of their long history in our lives. Included among these are a wooden spoon my mother used to scoop rice with (washed so many times that it was on the verge of cracking because it had gotten so thin), a white plastic one-cup measure we used to use every Sunday when making pizza (the bottom broke), and the comb my dad used on his hair every morning for at least thirty years (a gift from his mother before college -- I think it either lost too many teeth or snapped in two).

The store didn't have my size in the new sandals, so I ordered a pair. They arrived this week, so now there's really no excuse for hanging on to the old ones anymore. Eyes, look your last! Oh, silly sentiment. In honor of favorite things past their prime, check out these verses by Jack Prelutsky (wonderful children's poet). He knew what he was talking about.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Brisk days

That's what we've been having here in the last week -- weather finally cool enough to start turning the leaves and a midterm crunch so severe that somehow I've made it to Thursday again without posting and I hardly even noticed. I should be in bed right now, but I was missing the blogosphere. So here I am. I know you've been checking back faithfully for new entries too (thank you, Sitemeter and Blogpatrol), and I appreciate the encouragement. Say hello if you haven't already! I'm very curious about who's out there.

I'm managing to stay on top of my work for teaching, and it's continuing to pay off -- my students are really taking ownership of our discussion time and developing a group dynamic that makes me so proud of them. Can't say this has been good for my sleep quota, but hopefully this weekend will help me catch up.

I did procrastinate a little last Saturday between grading and planning. If you check out the sidebar, you should be able to see a new section on photography with a slideshow sampling pictures that D and I have taken, working together and on our own. The color in the Cascades is apparently gorgeous right now, so D has been taking some field trips to scout out nice panoramic shots. The rainy season is setting in, though, so his windows of opportunity are shrinking and he's had to settle for mostly close-up work (sometimes off the side of the road -- the shots above and below happened at an intersection on his way to the gym!). Anyway, it's been nice to watch the change of season on his side of the country through the images he's been sharing.

He's also shared images of his Halloween costume, which, I have to say, is going to be terrific. Stay tuned for the unveiling within the next week! I also have something in the works from high school -- it still fits but doesn't look trashy like so many of the get-ups out there. Who knew it would come in handy again a decade later? My mother will be amused (she made it for me for a themed dance). D may also bring a second option for me when he flies in on Oct. 31, something to coordinate more with his character. Now, if we could just find a Halloween party to go to -- nothing's been announced yet, but I know the creative types I hang out with aren't the kind to let the holiday go by unfeted, especially since it'll be on a Friday.

Okay, this girl is bushed. More after I get some quality Z's.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

An apple a day

... would be delicious if I could have any of the kinds we got over the weekend.

D and I went apple- picking at a local orchard about 20 minutes away from Little U. on the Prairie. It was the last warm Saturday I think we'll have till spring, so everyone seemed to be out and about among the trees. Coinci- dentally, BOTH of my sisters went apple-picking in Illinois and Ohio over the same weekend (nope, we didn't consult beforehand).

D and I did our best to pick varieties we can't normally find in the grocery store (this place claimed to have around 150!). The ones in season that we got were Keepsakes, Liberties, Horalsons, Suncrisps, Spigolds, Golden Glories, and Autumn Golds. Each of these tends to be a sweet-tart, crisp-fleshed apple -- excellent for munching fresh or using for pie.

Which is, of course, what we did.

I borrowed a recipe from Martha Stewart Living for an antique apple pie and altered it for convenience and to accommodate D's hypoglycemia. The end result: ambrosia. The apples contained enough sun-infused sweetness such that replacing the sugar in the filling with Splenda in half the required amount was perfect. We used a frozen pie crust, which worked out nicely (especially since we didn't have a lot of time and also because it had only a gram of sugar per serving in it).

We used about six apples in our pie and divided up the remaining ones so D could take some back to Seattle -- it's only fair, since he worked quite hard to get some of them! Many of the trees we wanted to pick from had been well visited, and the only fruit left was at the very top (with no ladders in sight). D boosted me up onto his shoulders to scrabble around in the higher branches, and at one point, he climbed up himself while I spotted him from below. "Am I near them yet?" he kept asking. It's hard to see where you're going when you have a face full of twigs. Both of us have the scratches to prove it ...

In the end, it was well worth the effort. The apples with the best sun exposure were at the top, and the bugs seemed to have left them alone (compared to the numerous pockmarked ones lower down).

We cleaned each of the fruits in cold water once we were home and were surprised to find out how different their skins were. Apparently, Iowa has really dirty air -- every apple was uniformly speckled with brown spots that were probably the product of dust sticking to the skins after a recent rainstorm or a humid night. Here's our harvest after a good scrub:













And here is our pie:


Mmmmmm. So good, it doesn't even need ice cream.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Hooray for husband weekend!

I'm adopting the phrase one of my colleagues recently coined, to my amusement, when he asked me if D was coming into town in the near future. There have been mumblings about having a married couples' dinner at his place (his wife is in school here, and there are at least two other grad students with spouses). Perhaps next time D visits, which will be during the first weekend in November. And then three weeks after that, I'll be going home for Thanksgiving! I'm so glad this semester is moving along.

In the meantime, I have piles of things to grade, some of which I'd really like to get rid of before D lands this evening. I've been pretty good about doing a little bit every day, but I was too drained from workshop to be very productive last night on things like papers. So I opened up some hard lemonade and dispatched a bunch of quizzes instead. Only one low grade! Everyone else did pretty well (and no, it wasn't a product of my being extra lenient with alcohol in my system -- my students earned it).

If only their papers looked as good ...

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Prosit!

It's Sunday night, and I've graded a grand total of one paper out of many more that needed attention this weekend. But that's okay, because in the last 48 hours, I planned my lessons for the week, read 300 pages out of a 400-page novel, and cleaned my shower.

Oh yes, and I drove to D's parents' house for their second annual Oktoberfest.

The lederhosen shown above are actually D's from his toddler days. His parents moved to Austria to teach right after they were married, so they knew where to get the genuine article when he arrived several years later (they had returned to the U.S. by then). Apparently, there is a picture of D in costume with a little Alpine hat on his little blond(!) head -- hard to imagine since his curls are now the color of espresso. Next time I go to his parents' place, I'll have to dig that photo up to add here.

The party itself was Saturday evening. There were, of course, sausages galore (see below), including one seasoned with curry that I'd never had before. D's mother also made some beautiful breads (also below) and desserts, one of which was called a Marmor Gugelhupf. Sounds exotic, but it's actually a simple marbled Bundt cake. New languages (German being one of them for me) always make things so much more fun ...












I had a good time meeting people (mostly D's dad's friends from work). The town where I spent a decade before college is relatively small and has a long local memory. Some of the guests there had children at my former high school -- we talked about the experiences I had in common with their kids as students, even after so many years. It's nice that there's continuity. I always feel a little sad when I go back to visit because of that overwhelming sense of time having moved on. Even though the town feels more or less the same, it's changed just enough to remind me that I'm no longer a part of it. Feeling connected to it through the people who are part of it now is comforting.

Tomorrow has much in store -- my department is holding an informational meeting on theses, which the students in my program are very glad about. The process for selecting a thesis committee isn't exactly transparent (even after you've read through the guidelines in the program handbook), so a little Q&A time will be helpful. I've already asked a professor to be my thesis director, thank goodness, so I won't have to worry about the mad rush to secure advisors that might very likely occur after this meeting. I do need to start thinking about my prospectus and secondary readers, though. Part of me is very reluctant to go forth on the topic I think I'm going to write about, but another part of me wants to do it very badly. I'm committed to it, either way.

I came across something helpful last week in a memoir by Mark Doty, which I'm reading for a class. "Why tell a story like this?" he writes as he talks about an unpleasant memory his mother tells him on her deathbed.

A writer I know says, Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what. Sometimes I think that's true; difficult experience can be redeemed by the powers of language, and words can help us to see what is graceful or human where loveliness and humanity seem to fail.

But other days I believe it's the other way round: say it beautifully, or at least precisely ... and you will make it clear. ... The older I get, the more I distrust redemption; it isn't in the power of language to repair the damages. ...

What we remember, wrote the poet who was my first teacher of the art, can be changed. What we forget we are always. ... We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us. What you don't allow yourself to know controls and determines; whatever's held to the light "can be changed" -- not the facts, of course, but how we understand them, how we live with them. Everyone will be filled by grief, distorted by sorrow .... What matters is what we learn to make of what happens to us.

And we learn to make, I think, by telling. Held to the light of common scrutiny, nothing's ever quite as unique as our shame and sorrow would have us think. But if you don't say it, you're alone with it, and the singularity of your story seems immense, intractable.
~ Mark Doty, Firebird

I won't go into any details about my topic here, but this singularity that Doty describes is what I want to be free from, being alone with "it." Amazing how he captures that idea so clearly -- hence my choice just to quote him at length instead of trying to put it in my own words. Will I be able to stand the light of common scrutiny, as he says, once the story's out there? Or will I regret it and wish I'd kept silent?

Maybe this week's reading will have answers.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Everybody Loves Furballs

If this blog were a TV show, that's what it would be called.

In actuality, the blog is known as the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee, which I've been following for a while. The IBKC takes kittens from its local Humane Society and cares for them until they're old enough to be moved to permanent homes. While waiting for the kittens to reach that point, the IBKC puts pictures of them on the blog, which is enormously effective for attracting potential parents. Now that we're determined to move me back to Seattle in May, the possibility of actually getting a little ball of fluff from this foster family is quite real -- they're located in Tacoma. The latest batch of babies will be gone before I return, but I'll be watching and waiting come spring for new ones.

There's something very delightful and relaxing about soft, furry things -- even inanimate ones. In an effort to encourage more spontaneous discussion among my students, I made my own Koosh ball out of some leftover yarn from a scarf I knit for D several years ago:


I took it to class on Monday, where we wrapped up our study of Hamlet by talking about our own questions about the play. The only rules were that whoever had the yarn ball had to contribute something to the discussion and that once you were done speaking, you had to toss the ball to someone else to keep the discussion moving. It worked amazingly well -- having something soft and fluffy flying around loosened up the atmosphere such that some of the shyer students were willing to participate more than usual, even asking for the ball voluntarily! Whoever thought of this teaching tool first was a genius (it's been around for a long time, but this was my first chance to try it out).

No other major news. D and I had a great weekend, and he'll be back in just under two weeks. My own classes are going smoothly, and I got lots of great suggestions on the piece that I workshopped last Thursday, which may be something that could become part of my thesis. I do wish I could get more motivated to write, but lesson planning conveniently fills any time I have if I let it. Must do something about that ...

Speaking of distractions, I finally finished Wendy Werris's An Alphabetical Life on Friday -- I had picked it up before moving from Texas (which seems a lifetime ago) and hadn't gotten around to cracking the cover until last week. It's a quick read. I can't say it makes the top of my list of must-read memoirs, but there's a great quote in there by Fran Lebowitz that Werris uses at the beginning of a chapter: "If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass."

This is absolutely true. Time to stop noshing on those Hershey's Nuggets after dinner! The ones with toffee bits in them are my favorite. If you look closely at all the planning debris in the picture above, you can see an incriminating wrapper hiding there ...

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

The waiting game

Three days until D's here for another weekend. Hard to believe that it's been nearly three weeks since his last visit -- keeping busy has its perks, I guess.

I'm also waiting to hear back on some bloodwork I had done two weeks ago. Either teaching is the next fad diet or I'm shrinking for other reasons. Since coming back to Little U. on the Prairie, I've lost enough weight to make at least one pair of pants too loose to go without a belt and one skirt too dangerous to wear, period (would make class too interesting if that were to fall down in the middle of discussion). If it's just the demands of teaching -- and it's possible since this happened to me in New York too, though not to this degree -- then next semester will require a wholesale wardrobe change. I'll be teaching two sections instead of one. Yikes.

But yes, some answers from my local M.D. would be much appreciated. He's the old-school sort who has practiced privately in these parts for decades and has a staff of two (nurse, receptionist). So he processes all of his patients personally -- but also more slowly.

Sigh.

In other news, D has been playing around with our camera lately, and a few experiments have produced some pretty pictures. Here's one I especially love (downtown Seattle at sunset from the top of a skyscraper on the Eastside as the city lights are just beginning to come on). The space on the blog doesn't do it justice, but if you click on it, you can see it in a larger format:


Coincidentally, while reading W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn for one of my classes this week, I came across a lovely passage that seemed written for that image. As translated from German by Michael Hulse, Sebald writes,
Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night ...
I get shivers thinking about that, the ephemerality of it all. And yet, because time is so elastic, our moment in which we sputter into existence and then back out again stretches beyond our field of vision. We are sparks in slow-motion, blinded by our own flame.

I guess it's nice that we get to have such a concept as "tomorrow."

Saturday, September 20, 2008

On growth

The weekend, at last. It was so good to sleep in and not have to rush around this morning. I took quite a schedule-beating over the last few days -- but it was worth it to get my students situated well for the next few weeks.

Office hours were very good. Everyone came in with interesting paper ideas, and helping people narrow down the things they wanted to focus on in their analyses from the get-go felt rewarding. This will hopefully prevent eleventh-hour panic and students' turning in shoddy work. People seemed appreciative too of the individual time to check in with me, and I got to have some one-on-one conversations with students who are shyer in front of the class. All in all, a good investment of time.

It is such a surprise to me how different this teaching experience has been so far at Little U. on the Prairie, compared to my last stint in New York. Of course, I'm teaching a totally different age group, but I think it's also got something to do with just having had those extra two years under my belt. It gives me some kind of reassurance that I know what I'm doing (at least, with the basics of classroom management, lesson planning, grading, etc.). And that makes a difference in how comfortable I feel in front of my students -- the end result being that I'm more relaxed and therefore more approachable when students need help.

All this is to say that I think I really want to make this some part of my career when I get done here. I never thought I would say that or know that with any amount of conviction, but I think my last year here (writing without teaching) contrasted with just these first few weeks back on campus (writing and teaching) has made it clear to me: teaching is where I'm happier using my creativity. It doesn't mean I won't keep on writing. It just means that I don't want to be on a career path that requires me to pump stuff out for the sake of having publications. I'd rather write when the desire seizes me and channel most of my energy into the classroom. I get such a high from having a class go well, watching students respond to something I've designed to help them engage with what we're studying. It's a first for me. I almost can't believe I'm saying that, after so many years of not knowing what would fulfill me, but this is it. This is what makes me happy. Or at least, it's the beginning of something toward that end.

D finally sent me a picture of our irises, which we intend to plant in the ground when we get our first house. Right now, they're thriving in their pots. Here's a shot from the week I left for school (mid-August):


And here's how tall they are now:


Ah, May. It won't be here for a while, but it's so much closer than it was last year. I can almost taste it.

Friday, September 12, 2008

This is how I feel


Well, not exactly, but the picture was too funny not to post, and I do feel like bunches of things have suddenly dropped on me in the last week. Namely deadlines, some self-imposed.

This shot was actually taken over Labor Day weekend -- D took a solo trip to the Olympic Peninsula to check out some hiking trails, and he came across these three crabs on the Dungeness Spit, which is part of a national wildlife reserve. These guys are no longer alive, but it looks like they are (at least, the ones that are still intact). Poor things, I think they're shell-shocked from the sight of their friend ... sorry, couldn't resist. But don't they look appalled?


The hike along the spit is about five miles on nothing but beach. Beautiful, but tough going on the legs, says D. At the end of the spit is a lighthouse that looks out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Quite a nice summer retreat! If you apply to be a keeper, you can apparently stay there for a week for very cheap. The high season for tourism seems to be July and August, so finding a place for D to stay wasn't easy (and at the last minute -- he called me and said he wanted to check out more of the area if a room was available for a reasonable price). After some Googling, I located a hostel not too far away while D was driving back toward the ferry to Seattle. Oh, the benefits of cell phones and the internet ...


This is going to be a heavy writing weekend, so I'd best get to it. Next week, my students will be meeting with me to discuss their plans for their first formal paper, so I'll be extra short on time. I'm really enjoying how well lessons are going -- a first after my two years of teaching middle school -- but I wish I didn't feel so completely exhausted!

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

What is this "work-life balance" you speak of?

I know, I know, I've been a little quiet over here. Chalk it up to trying to figure out how to juggle being a teacher and student at the same time. Forget being a plain old citizen of the human race ...

Things sort of picked up rather rapidly after Labor Day, and D came to visit this past weekend. Less than optimal combination. But such is life -- D and I have learned just to work around my work. Sometimes I let things slide a little on my end, as I did this time, or we just treat the days together as if they're not going to run out any time soon (and I do what I have to do while he hangs out). That takes the pressure off most of the time. We learned last year that trying to use up every waking minute doing special things isn't realistic and that having a relaxed, "normal" weekend together is rejuvenating in itself.

Okay, so I do have some work-life balance.

But in terms of getting my own work done vs. getting work done for teaching, the teaching is winning out way more often. It's paying off in the classroom -- discussions and activities have gone really well -- but my writing has been sorely neglected. And my first workshop piece is due in a little over a week ...

D and I took Saturday afternoon to take a little road trip to a local German heritage historic site, which was fun. We ate ourselves silly on Wienerschnitzel and looked at local arts and crafts. One of our stops was at the Wine, Cheese and Jelly Haus (yep, that's what was over the door), where you could find everything you needed for a picnic, including baskets. We restrained ourselves and only picked up a summer sausage and some strawberry-rhubarb jam (D's favorite).

We also stopped at a historic church that had been converted into a studio and gallery, and we got to meet the primary artist who works there. Our biggest find, however, was at another gallery. We came across some whimsical prints by an artist named Laura Lee Junge, whose style (per art critics) can be described as "surrealistic expressionism." There's definitely some Dali in there, but it's softer, I think. In any case, D and I both fell in love with the same painting, something that has never happened before since we tend to have different tastes. We took it as a sign -- now the piece is at my place, waiting to be framed. I believe we have the last one ever printed; it's marked 500/500. You like?


Well, I had hoped to post a longer update, but I'm getting pointed looks from Hamlet. More soon, I promise, as long as I don't lose more sleep -- I'm still waking up way before I'm supposed to, and I wouldn't be surprised if nightmares about Kenneth Branagh gone mad were to visit me tonight!