b l o g o s

scattershot 5: plenty for a wednesday

1. I can't *wait* for the holidays, when I will apparently get my copy of this long-awaited release.

2. Something unexpectedly cool about expecting is learning about other people who are. Two cousins will now have babies 4 or 5 months on either side of ours. And then there are the academic "cousins" like little Nancy Wible or little Pezzullo-Striphas jr. Fun!

3. Now that my papers are mostly done, I'm really looking forward to my trips to the good old Midwest. Madison and Minneapolis in the same week, hooray. Nevermind that in my spare time while traveling I will be writing one of my NCA papers.

4. Speaking of NCA, one of the grad students in our seminar just informed me that this year's conference is *not* the week right before Thanksgiving but rather the week before the week before Thanksgiving. I was just assuming it was the weekend preceding T-giving, not having scrutinized the calendar all that closely, and having become quite accustomed, thank you very much, to chasing the conference with a nice (and much needed) week-long holiday. Such rhythm disruptions are definitely discombobulating, to me at least. 

5. And speaking of Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving this year will be all kinds of fun. JM's sister KM is flying to State College from London, and we are going to assemble the crib and the new stroller and whatnot. It also marks the end of my talk-based traveling for a good long while.

lost and (in some cases, marked with *) found

the garden hose

the silver bicycle pump*

my course director folder

two recommendation letters that were supposed to be in the mail*

my awesome columbia titanium jacket

a check for $75.00

that book about the history of speech communication**

order in my campus office

**if anyone at Illinois has this, the library there would like it back.

rhythms

It's September now, so I imagine I ought to put up a post. I know, inspired, huh? This week brought the first faculty meeting, the first full-on seminar discussion in the Kenneth Burke seminar (it rocked), and a host of other meetings, lunches, and whatnot. In other words, this week was pretty busy. My weeks this semester will be heavily frontloaded, with recovery time in the middle (when you teach until 9:30 at night, you need recovery time, especially if you are me). This leaves the end of the week for heavy-duty writing time. That's good, because I have two talks in mid-October I need to prepare this month, and there's also NCA, hovering, as it always does just before Thanksgiving. Hooray, Chicago! Oh Chicago, how I miss you.

This busy-ness also means that I don't find my way to facebook, email, and this blog as frequently as I usually do (though admittedly blogos has all but slipped into dormancy this summer). Such are the rhythms of a new semester: shifting, adjusting, going hard, recovering.

someone has taken to the new chaise lounge.

how expecting a child is an awful lot like preparing to move and change jobs

So, as most of my family and friends now know, and are probably tired of hearing, JM and I are apparently going to have a kid in early February. A hellish first trimester is to blame for the scanty activity on this site. Many women can't abide smells or food. My sickness was prompted by moving around, but especially by looking at a computer screen (scrolling was the worst). So blogging was a no-go except for those rare nights when there was a good breeze in my office and I felt okay and wasn't typing up things that I had written longhand.

In any event, I am sitting in our relatively clean house with no plans tonight. JM is off mountain biking, to shake off (or at least cover with mud) the week of greeting and eating and sitting and clapping that is the week before the semester for a new faculty member. I'm here with the sleeping whippets, having said goodbye to good friends S, M, and Z who stopped for the night on their way home from Ithaca, and having reached my brain's capacity for writing this morning. In other words, it's quiet here, and I'm a little bored. And yes, those of you with kids, I KNOW that times like these won't be had once the baby comes, and that I better enjoy it.

The mandate to savor and enjoy is something I'm not a stranger to. After all, just months ago we uprooted ourselves and all our things and moved three states away to start new jobs in a new department. We knew for a good six months that this move was happening, and those months held the very kinds of activity that very recent and coming months have held/will hold in getting ready for this baby: deferral of preparations, preparations combined with a stiff nostalgia for the present, a good dose of discussing uncertainties and making decisions as well as cautious optimism about the coming change, more preparations, frantic "lasts"--time on the porch at C & J's, a last meal with S & C, a last brunch at Luna--and then finally something of a goodbye to life as we knew it. In other words, it was a present that is largely unsettled.

Much as we were before and after the move, we will for the most part be the same people after the new arrival. But time itself, its rhythms, our days, will no doubt be different. We are adjusting, slowly, to the move and coming to terms with the fact that some things in our previous life--our friends, the Urbana farmer's market, those effing unbelievable beignets at Luna, the train to Chicago, the quiet yet close-to-campus street, just aren't replaceable. But there are new things--the extremely close and errand-friendly downtown, already beloved neighbors, the hiking paths all around us, the biking--that fill the gaps.

And so we are settling, adjusting, and making our lives, all with the knowledge that things will change yet again. We're not anywhere close to ready, but we'll find our way around the newness, because that's what people do.

hey mama rock me

My car turned over to 100,000 miles about 2 hours south of Rochester today. I was coming home from a quick trip to visit E! and to hear her band play at a local farmer's market there. They were great! Folky, bluesy music by the likes of Bob Dylan and Steve Earle (e.g.), with even a gospel song tossed in. Totally fun. I personally loved their version of "Wagon Wheel," which I decided was an adult version of a lullaby.

And it's also just as comforting as a lullaby to hang out with a long-time good good awesome friend and HOPS ("her own personal spouse"). We got to eat Ethiopian with their most delightful in-town friends. With E!'s visiting me a couple weeks ago and my visiting her this week, no one can accuse us of not taking advantage of the painfully short period of time during which we live within 4 hours of each other. But soon she and HOPS are off to a new house in SW VA for some fun new adventures. Luckily they'll live right on the way to my folks' house in Tennessee.

not really.

Having spent several weeks away from cable internet, JM and I have started catching up on missed tv shows at hulu.com. Last night we caught the episode of the office called "casual friday," in which one of the subplots features Michael discovering what fun it is to fake fire people, wherein he gives the worker the bad news, watches her face fall. Then Michael's own face fills up with air, and he explodes with laughter. The worker is of course appreciative to find out that she still has a job, but only partly so. That shit is not funny (though watching it kind of is in an outrageous "The Office" sort of way).

Today, JM and I experienced our own little taste of a real life Michael Scott, and he works at the DMV. The DMV is outside of town in a little village called Peru. It's a nice drive that takes you past the (s)mall and Mt. Nittany, then past the prison and into Peru. When we first arrived there was miraculously no waiting, but of course we were told we didn't have nearly the proof of identities and addresses that we needed. We needed passports, social security cards, our Illinois licenses (the only things we actually had), and two proofs of our new address. So we drove all the way back home to get these items--past the prison, Mt. Nittany, the (s)mall, and back again, and presented them to the same guy. The DMV guy took one look at JM's passport and said "this won't do." My shoulders fell. I looked at JM, panicked. Then the DMV guy burst out laughing: "I'm kidding! It's great! Funny, huh?"

why i like loops

JM makes fun of my love for loops. And here loop is more verby than nouny because I like the kind of loops that involve movement. This preference began with my little running habit, or rather as a reaction to the coaches that made me and my teammates run down and back, down and back, down and back. God, how boring and awful that was: running by the assistant coach with his clip board over and over again, or in college by the scorekeeper's table, the opposing bench, back by the scorekeeper's table and the home bench. Touch, go. Nothing to look at but one wall getting closer, and then the other.

So when I was finished with organized sports, I will tell you that I resisted any sort of down and back or out and back, opting instead--and resolutely so--for loops. For starters, loops offer so much more variation than downs-and-backs. It is possible to avoid a certain hill on the path home, more or less. It is less likely that you will twice encounter the exuberant woman who made you stop your run and take your headphones off so that she could pronounce that you had "two whippets! not one! two!" or any other version of that person who will inevitably comment yet again.

JM and I just finished a lovely loop. We didn't plan it that way, but we set out on foot and with the dogs in search of a root beer float. We headed south to paradiso. They didn't have root beer. Then we headed across campus, through the lingering graduates and their families to stop at my office and print something, then up by the long line of people waiting to have their picture taken by the alma mater in their caps and gowns, then down green street to cold stone creamery. They didn't offer root beer floats. We then went to potbelly's, where JM had to opt for plan B, a vanilla milkshake. After that, we made our way back to the mouse house by cutting through the north quad, across boneyard creek, by university high school. And yet even though our main goal of a root beer float went unfulfilled, we didn't have to walk on the same sidewalk twice. I'm pretty sure the whippets appreciated that. More smells, more discarded food, more whippet fawners, and no embarrassing repeats.

banana tales

In line to get my boarding pass at heathrow the other day, I got behind a multi-generational family that took forever to, as the brits say, get themselves sorted. The issue had to do with getting their seats reassigned to accommodate the fiery grandmother with deep and bright red hair who was in a wheelchair. Fair play, of course, though I've no idea why it took upwards of forty-five minutes.

The grandmother was obviously the ruler, because her daughter kept rushing over to her to clear each decision, and she (the grandmother) wasn't happy with anything. Never smiled once, in fact. Meantime, the skinny and bored tween granddaughter ate a banana while shifting her weight and staring at people in the line next to her. When she finished the banana, she tried to give the peel to her grandmother, who shrieked at her for even considering it. The daughter then handed the peel to her mother who was busy rebooking and who absentmindedly took it, like that game we all played when we were kids. The mother then handed it to the quiet and helpful grandfather who, after a quick glance around the bin-free ticketing area, tucked it on the top of a bag hanging on the back of the grandmother's chair. When the grandmother got a whiff and craned around to see the peel hanging on her chair, all hell broke loose. The flamy hair shook all at once. I--and a few others--took a step back.

***
While in London, I met KM's friend Jess who is making a name for herself food-wise in London. She has a cool blog, has even done a tv appearance, and occasionally runs demonstration workshops at places like Whole Foods. This is hard work, especially with a low-attention-span set like mothers of young children who themselves can be, well, distracting. During this demonstration, Jess had a display of fresh fruit, paid for out of pocket. In the middle of Jess's instruction on a particular technique, a little boy started reaching for the fruit. His mother interrupted Jess's demonstration to ask if the boy could have one of the display bananas. Jess paused and said yes, and then after the boy gobbled it down, the mother left the peel on the counter for Jess to clean up.

***

Yesterday on the way to campus I had a banana. It took me less than a minute to eat it, and then I considered these two scenes on the rest of my walk while toting the peel, limp, mottled, and folded in my left hand.

how to help your home inspection go smoothly (older home edition)

JM and I had our home inspection today. For people who have sold houses, you know this can be very nervous-making. Even if you're fairly sure your house rocks, who knows what your own inspection failed to turn up? I am therefore offering you some tips to make your home inspection go well.

1. tell the inspector that if you weren't a professor you think you might like to have his job.
2. only tell him or her that if it is true (for me, it is totally true: i like the range of knowledge it requires, and i also like nosing through people's houses, and i fancy myself butchily handy. i had no idea how much our inspector would like hearing this, though i'm also fairly sure he has dealt with his share of asshole professors who don't think he knows what he's doing or are afraid and show it). 
3. have an inspection prior to this one that goes somewhat awry so that the people make unreasonable requests that help you to find your limits on what you will and won't do. this also helps you to tell your newer, nicer buyer what you won't do well before the inspection takes place. for example, we won't replace all the windows in the house. it's ridiculous. this buyer thought it was a little crazy to replace the windows with new plastic crap. the inspector today confirmed this by saying that the idea that old houses always need the windows replaced is "categorically untrue."
4. know your house. before our inspection, we had electricians come take a look at the wiring. the electricians were able to determine that some of the outlets are grounded and some aren't. they told me i could buy a 5 dollar tester at menard's and investigate them myself, and that if we want to meet code, any outlets without grounding wire ought to be changed to two-pronged outlets. so i bought the five dollar tester and about 10 two-pronged outlets. this turned out to be way too many, because only about 5 needed to be switched. the rest simply didn't have the grounding wire attached properly. once i did that, they checked out perfectly. this also meant that when i heard the inspector speculating about the knob and tube wiring that he could tell was somewhere in the house, and thinking out loud that it was probably all throughout the upstairs, i was able to fly down to the basement and tell him exactly where the knob and tube is and that none of it is upstairs. he then said maybe the light fixtures upstairs were knob and tube, but since i changed ALL of those a few years ago, i was able to tell him that no they all have grounding wires, but that the lights in the dining room and study are in fact knob and tube. this satisfied him and inspired his monologue about how fine knob and tube in fact is.
5. encourage the buyer in advance to view the inspection as a good road map to the house, a way to learn about what needs to happen down the road. (this i think is a good way to view an inspection rather than as a way to nickle and dime the sellers, which is what happened at our house in pittsburgh.)
6. know that some stuff will go wrong, and be ready to nut-up. this isn't the home inspection proper, but the radon test came back positive. so we're having a mitigation system installed. it's the right thing to do, and it's just not worth stressing about (except for the fact that we are going to have lung cancer from living here).
7. if you know there's stuff that will show up on the inspection, either say so in advance or--better--have it taken care of. we had a new furnace installed just last week, for example (totally should have happened long ago, that thing was 70s era). and when we negotiated the price we mentioned the roof will need to be replaced in 3-5 years and that we would be willing to negotiate on that, so that was already built in to the price.
8. keep reminding the buyer about the tax credit he is going to get thanks to the new stimulus package!
9. don't hover or seem overly anxious; be confident in the house. you did good work on it! it's beautiful and solid and awesome.
10. if you are a southerner, don't be afraid to let that southern accent creep in, especially if your inspector is from downstate illinois. if you are not southern, don't fake it. people can see right through it. 
11. luck in to a nice, smart buyer who appreciates houses like yours. this isn't really in your control, but i do wish it for you. everything in life is so much better when reasonable people conduct transactions reasonably.