First Days

What I wore on Monday: beige suit, black tank, chunky choker necklace.
I never wear jewelry. Effectiveness? Unknown.
The first class was Intermediate Nonfiction. I'm pretty excited about it because we're using The New Yorker as our exclusive text. Though I hope to be critical of the magazine, mostly I'm just excited to teach what I read every week anyway. The class went OK but I let them go a bit early because I thought we'd be in the computer lab and we weren't until Wednesday so my "go research what you don't know" assignment had to be a take-home one. The students were pretty quiet which was a bit disappointing since I thought I was pretty "on" but who knows.
I used Middlebrow's Science Fiction defamiliarization post in both the Int. Nonfiction and in Intro CRWR. I said "make the stone STONY" with the exact right amount of inflection.
To Intro (which are both on Tues & Thurs) I wore the outfit Egg's mom bought me from J Crew. Vest, long-sleeved wrinkly shirt, brown, above-the-knee skirt. With cowboy boots. Very fun class. I had them go and find something in the building that they didn't know what it was and come back and write an exquisite corpse about it. Students in this section, which is downtown, were great. I teach one more section of it this afternoon--I hope these main campus students are as fun.
I'm already beat but I attribute that to the newness of everything and the commuting between campuses. And the threat of weekly faculty meetings. I think the classes, once they get going, should be great.

Other news includes: more bats. We're moving. (Not really. Called a bat catcher. This will cost mucho dinero).
Electrical work--also mucho dinero.
But, we will have a bit of extra money--if nothing goes wrong this time--because we think, according to mucho paperwork, that we've sold the house. We close on the 19th but they want to rent from us from Thursday on. Sad and good news. I miss that house so much. Plus, there were no bats there.

Food front: Still grim. We've eaten at Big Bob's Pizza--weird sausage; Tokyo Grill Sushi--slow service, weird mayo in many of the rolls, fish a bit warm; the BOB--downtown building supposedly full of restaurants but each time we go we end up at the Bobarino. I had very bad sandwish of blackened (with thyme & cayenne) ahi, mango slaw, and some aioli that I couldn't discern. Yuck. There's an Indian food place that Zoe and Egg loved but I thought was mediocre. I'm being difficult but still. I like to eat out and I'm being thwarted. A place called Rose's had OK food but the food was made better by the location: upon Reed's Lake. We'll try this Tapas place next. And a place called Leo's.

Number of new acquaintances: 42
Number of new friends: 0.
Number of Bats: 2 or 4 depending if the bats left the first night or hid until the next night.
Number of Service techs called to fix house: 3 (plumber, electrician, bat catcher.
Number of Restaurants eaten at: 14.
# of restaurants loved: 0.
Number of sisters visited: 1.
Number of times said sister will have visited by Labor Day: 2.
Number of times Zo has climbed the very steep, very hardwooded stairs: 1,000,000
Number of essays or poems written: 0
Number of poems due by Sept. 1: 1

I have office hours now in my very swanky LEEDS building office. Since no one will visit today, perhaps I'll get some work done.....