b l o g o s

NYE

2009, for us, has been the Year of Change. We started off the year making use of our winter break at Illinois by readying the house for the market. In between we have a) sold a house; b) purchased a house; c) moved all of our things from point a to point b; d) gotten ourselves pregnant; e) started new jobs; f) finished our first semesters.

My first semester here at Penn State is a blur of weekends spent mostly in other cities, in my attempt to clear out all the travel for the end of (d) above. This included a few talks, a conference or two, and two dissertation defenses back in C-U. Weekdays are a blur of hard-charging spinning classes at my new gym; childbirth classes that ran way too late in the evening; graduate seminars that were simultaneously exhilerating and exhausting (this latter mostly because of the time of the seminar and my hellacious travel schedule); and appointments with doctors. 

The year is about all I can manage. To look back on the decade would mean to reflect on even more head-spinning change. Ten years ago today I was hunkering in the Poconos with a case of wine, 5 gallon-jugs of water and a small handful of grad-school friends, recovering from MLA and the plague it brought and wondering whether the compooters of the world would all stop working. 2000 was the year I got Jada and my PhD and left here to take my very first academic job; and it was the year before I ripped a giant hole in my knee mountain biking and (not entirely unrelatedly, actually) JM and I got together. We added little Tillie Fry about halfway through, in 2005, after our year in Pittsburgh.

And now we will be starting off this year, this decade, making way for a new little family member, whom I am very much looking forward to meeting. Happy new year, everybody.

this heat must mean one thing: fall.

It's mid-August, and summer has finally come to the--wait, what is this region called, the mid-Atlantic? It came blazing in, apparently hitched to one of the hundreds of u-hauls ambling around town, blanketing apartment parking lots, slowly baking the belongings of their renters. This week, State College's average age will plummet in inverse proportion to its blood-alcohol content. And the local economy will no doubt boom. Ransacked Target shelves, anyone?

As new faculty, JM and I are going to be fed a lot this week at these things called "luncheons" (two of em), and there is also a picnic at the President's house. Via new faculty orientation, we will become better acquainted with Penn State and its students--or, as the new faculty orientation schedule has it, its "student." (agenda item: "the Penn State student").

I'm sure there will be no end of compare and contrast between here and Illinois, but we will try to keep it to ourselves. No one here wants to hear how downright orderly pledge week at U of I seems to me as evidenced from the sorority and fraternity houses on my walks to and from campus. The houses here--only frat houses because of some antiquarian brothel law--seem a bit more chaotic, unregulated, and numerous by comparison, but this is just by sight. Once everyone begins their preparations for the semester and the football games, we'll know more. At that point I'm sure we'll be grateful for the heat, because our windows can be closed.

That's right, folks, even though it's just now summer, it is also very much fall. Let the incongruity begin.

hills, riff raff, grass.

These are some things about our new town that please me/us greatly (my new old town, JM's new town).

Whenever we walk to the end of our street and look to the left, THERE IS A MOUNTAIN. One of us inevitably starts (as in jumps in surprise) at the sight of the mountain, and hits the other one on the arm. The other one, upon turning to look, starts too. Our neighbors say that in the winter when the leaves fall, we will be able to see said mountain from our deck, with a sunrise and everything. Cuckoo. Not that I'm looking forward to winter, but at least there will be something nice when it does come.

Relatedly, my calves are always sore. I am cooking up a new theory which is this: the ratio of availability of delicious bread (lots) to hills (none) in my previous home town was such that living here, where that ratio is the obverse (no bread and lots of hills), is worth negative 4-7 pounds on my frame. I have previous data to support this theory (the last time I lived here, and our year in Pittsburgh), but we shall see. I do miss that bread from Mirabelle, though. Mah gahd that is delicious.

Also, this town not only has a city leaf-removal service that will COME AND SUCK THE LEAVES RIGHT OFF YOUR CURB rather than forcing you to bag the leaves (Pittsburgh has the same thing; it was divine), but it also has a service called "borough riff raff pickup." The riff raff pickup is separate from garbage--ahem, refuse--it happens on a separate day, and by request only. This means you can put just about anything on the curb and have it taken away without paying anything extra. Plus, come on, riff raff? That's awesome.

And finally, every day around 11 in the morning if the sun is out, the whippets will ask to go outside. Then they stretch and flop on the grass in the front yard and just lie there watching the activity on the street through their pleased/relaxed half-open eyes. Grass in the front yard! That is a novelty for all of us.

It must be said, though, that we really miss our friends in U.