Not writing

I was writing, maybe, once. Earlier in the semester. But then the we had company. And then the swine flu. Zoe was out of school for seven full days. She also seems to have given up her nap. Erik is in the midst of scraping the cottage cheese ceilings (don't worry. No asbestos. We had it checked by a lovely lab in Sacramento). He's retaping and remudding and sanding and it will look lovely but the whole house is awash in a fine mist of drywall sand. Especially the living room where I usually write.
Did I mention Zoe gave up her naps? That means Saturday and Sunday afternoons are no longer dedicated writing days. Also, Mondays are now reserved for prep for Tuesdays. On Tuesdays, the line of advisees is so long that I have stayed an extra hour or worked to get someone's transcript fixed on a Friday. Wednesdays are meetings and special recruitment days. The summer program I'm in charge of needs me to begin to plan it. John D'Agata is coming in February and since I'm taking off three weeks in January for the baby, I need to get a jump start on that now. And I have 7 letters of recommendation to write.
But the worst part is, I'm starting to drop balls, which makes it hard to write. What was I thinking? How is this book supposed to work? Did I want to talk about my grandmother or how much bacon I ate for breakfast? I did something stupid on Sunday that resulted in me looking like a complete idiot. I also am literally dropping things like salt and woodchips and grapes and pieces of drywall mud all over the floor. I have 32 emails in my inbox (and, because of Sunday's error, I've tried to be very careful about my emails) and a research proposal due. Plus, Sunday morning, before I made this massive email screw up, I edited the book one last time. I caught some things. I'm sure, in my mental state, I missed a few more. Zoe's cough returned. I knew it would. The rumor about the swine flu is that it keeps on coming back in new and more intriguing forms. When she coughs, there's no sleep. So when I go to write, even for the hour I have today when Erik took Z to the park (she's off for Veteran's Day), instead of writing, I forget even what my project is and check my email which I'm not allowed to check. Food. The Apocalypse. So why do I end up writing about my doctor's visit? Or blogging? If nothing else, blogging counts as writing. Perhaps this post isn't entirely blithering. Perhaps I can take that confidence over to the Word doc over there, waiting for me.
And yet, I come into the living room, turn on the gas fireplace and realize, my lap top no longer fits on my lap.

H1N1--at least I hope it was

The pathology of the H1N1 progressed like this at our house:
On Monday, Zoe’s nose runs. It runs all the way through Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday, she was grumpy and feverish. On Friday, I call the doctor’s office. The nurses say to watch for lethargy and for respiratory distress. I tell the nurse that the doctor promised to prescribe Tamiflu. The nurse says no. There is a nationwide shortage. And Tamiflu comes with side effects. If she turns blue, take her to the ER, they say.
On the one hand, I feel better. They have confidence that my kid, even with her Reactive Airway Disorder, could kick this thing. On the other hand, if they aren’t giving Tamiflu to my asthmatic kid, who were they saving it for?
I sniff and hung up. I have had a stuffy nose for days. To sleep, or rather, to not sleep, I have to turn onto one side, let my sinuses drain into one nostril and then turn to my other to drain the other side. I imagine white blood cells attacking, attacking and then succumbing, succumbing. My mother- and sister-in-law are coming to town. I hate the idea of inviting them to come and take a dip in the flu germ bath that is our house. I turn and turn and don’t sleep. As if not sleeping is a vaccine. As if worry acts as some kind of Lysol.
Is insomnia a symptom of the H1N1? Are insomnia, worry, and overzealous phone-calling underlying conditions? If so, perhaps that’s why pregnant women succumb more than others. Or is it just that it’s already so hard to breathe. Insomnia, worry and phone calling are each conditions of struggling breath.
Saturday, Sunday and Monday—rebound! Zoe is up and around and not collapsing in my arms. We go to get our 8:10 and 8:15 o’clock shots. The nurse said as long as she wasn’t wheezing or didn’t have a fever, Zoe could get her shot. She was not wheezing between 8:00 and 8:30. I hope wheezing or fevering at the exact moment of the shot is what the nurses meant.
That night, Erik and I have to go to Phoenix for the Regional Emmy’s. Have to go might be overstating it a bit, but Erik bought a tuxedo. After the vaccine, I feel slightly less frantic about the swirling, imminent flu of death. I write directions to the hospital on a yellow notepad. I also include directions to the Thai restaurant to mark my sense of perspective and balance. She’s on the mend. I couldn’t have written directions for Thai if I thought she was still that sick.
We return on Sunday. Zoe has survived the night. No one else has as much as a sniffle. I thought this thing was the contagion to end all contagions. Apparently not, as we go to the brew pub for dinner and then return to drink wine and watch Madmen.
On Monday, the fever returns. Her grandmother leaves and she is bereft. So bereft that she sleeps for two days. By Tuesday night, she’s all cough and shivers. A relapse. Is this lethargy? Is it my lethargy that lets her sleep and can’t bring myself to panic. Perhaps this is how the flu kills. After seven days of worrying about it, you find you can’t any more. Tuesday night, I finally sleep. In the morning, Zoe is coughing but no more than with a usual cold. We have albuterol and a nebulizer. A cough I’m used to. Thursday night, she has an ear ache. She’s never had an ear ache in her life. Maybe this is how the flu kills. By confounding me.
By Friday, she’s back to her normal, ear ache free cough. By Saturday, she’s dressed for Halloween. I want to dress up as the swine flu but I don’t want to tempt the fates. Instead, I go as a Volkswagen bug since I’m big as a car. “Bug” is as close as I want to get to “germ.” Erik wears his tux and takes Zoe’s floaty tube with him to go as a Titanic survivor. Swine flu survivor to boot. So far. I knock on wood. Although we didn’t win the Emmy, the tux gets double use. And Zoe goes as a witch—perhaps it was some kind of Wiccan magic that kept the flu from taking her down. Or maybe we’re just waiting for relapse number three. Apparently, the vaccine can manage only so much protection. At night, I still turn, drain one nostril, turn, drain the other but in between the turning, I sleep.

Name change

OK. Barrow Street will begin advertising for This Noisy Egg on November 5th. This leads me to believe I need to professionalize up my blog title. How sad for Otterbutt. I'm not sure about nikwalk. I also like Otterbutter but still, not particularly professional. Since all my email addresses are nikwalk AT something or the other, I thought this would make the blog findable but not overly so.

Blog abuse

I like how when I go write a new post, up around the Blogger login, there's a button to push to "report abuse." Blog abuse. What is it? It's certainly not posting enough. It's also potentially posting too often. In my case, the blog is the repository for all manner of complaining--whining abuse. But, as previously noted, when I rejoice and have nice things to say about the world on the blog, the world slaps me down for acting with such hubris. It's better that I abuse the blog thusly. Report me if you must.

This week is no different in the complainy department. The complaints are different but the gist remains the same. One good bit of news--I resolved some of the tension in the class of sensitive and insensitives by handing out midterm grades. Nothing seems as dorky as handing out grades to graduate students in a workshop but I think the students appreciated knowing that I was keeping tabs on everyone. As long as I could confirm I was overseeing, they seemed less stressed out about their workshop ego and could worry about their grade ego. Oh how the world loves a grade.

In bad news, I haven't slept in 3 days. 1 day, I awakened (p.s. I like to say woke up but perhaps that's incorrect or too informal? An editor I knew once went through all my woke ups in a novel and changed them to awaken.) I was worried that Zoe's runny nose would turn into the swine flu. I also was cold and worried that I couldn't write a positive, uplifting poem but mostly I was worried about the flu. In the morning, who woke up with the flu? Zoe. As if ny not sleeping could have prevented it. Not only did I have to think about (brief complaining interruption: oooh Deer! 4 adults and 3 babies. I want to give them an apple. I won't.) all the various consequences I'd read about the flu--pneumonia, pulmonary embolisms, constricted airways--and revisit Z's previous scary respiratory run-ins, I had to think about my mother-in-law and sister-in-law who were coming to town. Hey everybody, come visit! Catch the swine flu! We're hosting a two for one deal--respiratory distress and insomnia!

And I had to think about the story in the NY Times about a pregnant woman's desperate bout with the flu.

I was desperate about getting the vaccine. I had woken up (awakened) at 7 on Monday morning when the county opened appointment lines for the vaccine for Saturday. I called and called. Busy signal. Dial tone. Voice mail. Finally I got through. Two appointments for Saturday at 8:10 and 8:15 a.m.

Whenever I have an appointment before 9 a.m. I really can't sleep.

Apparently, not for two nights because I slept little both Thursday and Friday nights.
I fretted all Thursday night that Z couldn't get her vaccine because she would have a fever or would be wheezing. I was afraid I'd have the flu before I could get the shot. And it doesn't matter anyway. It takes 2 weeks for the vaccine to really take effect.
I woke up (awakened. Man that sounds pretentious) at 4. I really almost fell back asleep. And then I didn't.

Now, I'm going to see if I can wake Z up and, if she's not wheezing and has no fever, will put her in the car and take her to the County Health Department for a vaccine for a thing she probably already has.

I knew better than to complain that the vaccines were going to be given on a Saturday. The Saturday of the Emmy's. I will have to sleep through the show but at least the regional Emmy event is in the valley. I'm not looking forward to 90 degree weather in October but I am looking forward to the oxygen. It's hard enough to sleep up here, let alone breathe.

Not that nice

I had a sense that posting a non-complaining post would result in a turn of events. Usually, when I see a hawk, I take that as a good sign, that today will be a great day, maybe even something great will happen. Yesterday though, the hawk I saw was being tailed by 5 ravens. Ravens trump hawks in the high altitude desert. They gang up, harass the hawk away from his meat.
Somewhat like students.
The day started off bad with a student complaining of meanness in workshop. The day is already unsalvagable. I bounce between being mad at the student for complaining and not developing a thick, workshop resistant skin to being frustrated at the student(s) in the class who are making me have to deal with this. I didn't see anything disrespectful go down but if I don't nip it in the bud, I'll get low evals on "created a respectful learning environment." And yet, if I do say something to the students (one of whom, I guess, rolled his eyes at something someone else said), this student will dig in harder, thinking the class is full of over-sensitives. If I don't say something, I run the risk of being cited for not looking out for all students. When you raise students behavior as an issue in class, the class seems to begin to break apart. Sides are taken. In this case, it will be the sensitives against the insensitives. The insensitives, upon my instruction, will try to be more sensitive. The sensitives will start being insensitive. The insensitives, better at insensitivity, will return to their insensitive ways and shut the sensitives down. Now, instead of class being a fruitful exchange of ideas, it will be a class where I say, "that's enough, student" and "if you can't say anything constructive, don't say anything at all." This isn't how a grad class should go.
So, as I spent two hours trying to decide if I should intervene, knowing that this might make the rest of the semester a long and painful one, I held my advising hours in the advising center. I advised: one grad student who had her own student problems, one student who I asked if she was feeling in anyway disrespected (since the sensitive student had claimed it was this student who had someone's eyes rolled in her general direction), one student who wanted to further explain his anti-abortion poem, and one I-would-graduate-if-I-take-six-classes-next-semester undergraduate. In between, a campus tour arrived and said they were told I'd give them a tour of the English Department. Never having given one and not sure what they were expecting, I listed the program requirements and made a long list of career options for the English Major off the top of my head. Advertising, publishing, nonprofit administration and computer management--all jobs I'd had. One of the parents asked, so you teach graphic design? I argued, it wasn't so much the graphic design that I learned as an English major but how to think critically and learn on my own. I knew that's what I was supposed to say. I've been trained will in the promotion of the liberal arts. I did not mention that it wasnt' so much the 14 persuasive papers I wrote on Jany Eyre that taught me how to think critically but the way I could convince people that my ability to read Jane Eyre allowed me to think critically. The advertising and self-promotion aspect of the English BA is what I learned to sell. And was selling it here.
Afterward, I decided to talk to the students in their office about the eye rolling. They of course apologized but then didn't talk much during class. The senstive did not show up to class. Having become, over time, an insensitve in workshop, I'm trying very hard to manage the senstivies but classroom management is an exhausting and not particularly rewarding task. Everyone's on edge and now have to sell the class on how this is a "respectful learning environment" even if it feels more like Kindergarten. I'd rather sell them on the many-job opportunities that await them with their English BA.
Egg made delicious soup for dinner. That was the highpoint. The day ended, or rather wouldn't end, on a low point because I couldn't sleep. I think I carry all my stress in my back and with a baby in my front, I couldn't get comfortable. I felt stretchy and broken and chagrined for ever writing anything nice about October.

October is nice

Although there have been a few moments of lameness--exhaustion and a flotilla of failed festivals, primarily--October is good. I like the fall best. I still am finding about 12 hours a week to write which, considering we're mid-semester, is pretty decent. Nothing like the impending noise machine that an infant brings to keep you typing, I suppose. I need some readers though and haven't had much luck finding a writing group here. I think a long distance group must be coordinated but, as I'm a little spacey as of now, I'm not making much progress.

I went for my 27th week OB appointment today. So far, so good, knock on wood. I'm still freaking out about the swine flu but I can't get anyone in the health care field to freak out with me so I guess I'll freak out on my own, with the help of Yahoo. Except for a slightly low hematocrit, all my blood tests look good--no signs of preeclampsia and my blood pressure is hanging in there. I also passed my gestational diabetes test which is good news because I'm already having a hard time finding enough food that's interesting to eat--I'd have a hard time cutting down carbs, although they're not my primary staple. So far, this baby will be made from mostly almonds, yogurt, bananas and peaches. And bacon.

Erik's mom and sister are coming down for a few days so we can leave Zoe up here and go down to the Regional Emmy's Festival. This better be better than the other festivals we've attended this year. The Apple Fest, the October Fest (actually canceled) and the Autumn Fest were all a big fail. Z got to jump in a bouncy machine for one of them but otherwise, $5 pumpkins, no apples, $6 brats and bands covering James Taylor do not a festival make. The Emmy event will be more expensive--$150 for me and Erik plus a room at the Sheraton but at least I won't have to stand in line for the port-a-potty.

The book is still making it's way out. We've got blurbs, cover. Now the manuscript is in copyediting for a potential release date of December 1st. If it weren't for my low hematocrit/exhaustion, the 12 hours a week of writing I don't want to give up, the bad festivals and impending Emmy's, I would start up some sort of publicity machine. Self-promotion sucks worse than an Arizonian festival.

Yahoo--the late-night panic-inducer

Every night, one last time before I go to bed, I check the headlines on Yahoo. I don’t know why I do this. Obviously to guarantee fitful sleep. It works. Last night, I checked again the “White house administration to campaign for H1N1 vaccinations.” As usual, when I click on any link related to health, the story indicates my imminent death. This time, the story read that pregnant women are especially encouraged to get vaccinated. They are the highest priority since they die at exponentially higher rates than others. 6 times as often. Only 28 pregnant women have died of H1N1 from April to August but still, the 6 times as often as others who contracted the swine flu freaked me out.

I went to bed. I couldn’t breathe well because we’d had the wood-burning stove going all day and there were woody particulates in the air. I kept having to change sides to use a clear nostril. It’s hard enough to breathe when you’re pregnant, let alone, when you have a stuffy nose. I suppose it's nearly impossibly if you have the swine flu. I imagine Z with her lungs' asthma-type response to colds breathing even less well than my doubly-demanded ones. I think of ways I can prevent me or Z from succumbing. I can teach online. I’ll take Zoe out of school on extreme flu days (that would be Tuesdays and Fridays right?). We can start mainlining Tamiflu now.


I can already tell the whole vaccination attempt will be a disaster. Z has been 3 times to get her regular flu shot and has been turned away by her doctor (for wheezing), by a nurse (for a high temperature), and by the pharmacy (for not being 18). Then, she was scheduled for a shot this coming Tuesday and they canceled that appointment because they’re out of that vaccine. This doesn’t bode well. I called the county health people who are supposedly in charge of distributing the H1N1 vaccine. I asked them what their distribution plan was. They weren’t sure yet. I should call back next week. Um. You have no plan yet? I’ve been waiting for the vaccine since July and you have no plan? I would like to be on a list. Some list. Any list for my pregnant self and asthma-prone kid. I asked my ob/gyn. She said, hmm. Yeah. I don’t know if we’re getting any vaccine.


Perhaps I can make my own batch of vaccine. Find a kid whose had the flu. Borrow a little blood for some home-grown inoculation serum.


I have started stalking the county health building. I call every day to see if the shipment has come in yet. I write a letter to the editor but that would have to be succinct and to the point but sometimes I think the most healthful thing to do is to stop reading Yahoo headlines before bed.

Guest Post

Guest posting today over at Pansy Poetics.

Cookies and Butter

It's very bad to go for 2 weeks without posting because then all the things I was going to post about, I didn't post which leads to a meandering and pointless update.

I've been cooking again with a little more joy. Last Friday, not the 25th but the 18th, was a great day. I sat outside and wrote for 5 hours, picked up Z from school, and made cookies. Oatmeal cookies. I haven't made cookies in ten years because I can't eat fewer than four at a time. But now I'm pregnant so four seems like a reasonable number of cookies to eat. Plus, they're filled with all that nutritious oatmeal and butter. Friday the 18th was a great day. Then, things went down hill with a trip to Sedona's Apple Fest where, upon arrival, we learned all the apple blossoms had frozen the spring before. So it was really more like a sell-your-jewelry-in-a-stall fest. And I didn't need any jewelry. Then, other lame and annoying things happened like a complaint about workshop comments, three meetings on Wednesday, a rejection on a manuscript and a meeting on a Friday morning. Dumb week.

But this weekend, things began to improve. Speaking of butter. Erik and Zoe and I made butter in a Nalgene container (BPA's be damned) yesterday. We took some whipping cream and a marble and shook. And by we, I mean mostly Erik. Zoe hit herself in the head. I lost muscle interest early. Then, when we couldn't hear the marble anymore, we poured out the "butter." Erik was like, this is just whipping cream. He also wondered why we didn't use the Kitchen Aid. We knew it could make whipping cream. He also thought this was going to be the most expensive butter ever made ($3 for Horizon's Organic Cream). Or rather the most expensive whipping cream. The whipping cream tasted good but it wasn't butter. I investigated on the internets what went wrong and discovered that you shake the cream until you can't hear the marble any more. Then, you're halfway done (that's the whipping cream). You keep shaking until you can hear the marble again. Then, the butter has separated from the milk. You pour off the buttermilk and then wash the butter. Erik admitted that it was super fun and that the butter tasted good. All half a cup of it. It's not cost-effective but the process leaves you with the feeling of self-sufficiency. I'd like to think that if the end of the world were upon us, and if I had a cow, I could make earth's most precious resource with the aid of a Nalgene bottle, a marble, and Erik's willingness to shake.

Spontaneous Camping

It looked like it was going to rain. At least in part of the sky it did. You can see for a long way up here. Part of the sky was black as a parking lot. Another was dotted with white clouds, round but light looking. Another part was blue as a popsicle. I had 10 hours of work scheduled. The house was a mess. We didn't sleep much last week. Zoe had a bad fever for two days. I woke up at 3:45 one morning and didn't go back to sleep until 6.Z still was recovering from a three-week long cold. It was cold. At least at night. The furnace had kicked on the night before. We had no groceries.

And yet, whatever. It would only take an hour to pack the car. I could work while Erik packed. Zoe really, really wanted to go because you know, camp. It has fires. And tents.
By 2:30 we were ready. We stopped at the store for brats and hot dogs, chips and yogurt. And cookies. We wouldn't starve.

Erik drove down logging roads, toward oak creek canyon. We got deeper into forest where dispersed camping spots became more and more dispersed the deeper we went in. As usual, and we'd drive by one camping spot, and say, maybe this one is it. But maybe there's an even better one just a little bit further ahead. We do this a lot, keep looking for the best spot. We drove deeper in. Zoe fell asleep. The problem with this always-a-better-spot mode of camping spot choosing? Sometimes, we look so long it gets dark. Sometimes, we look so long, we have to turn around and go home. It was already 5:00. It gets dark here at 7. We drove so far, we ended up on a ridge that overlooked what was maybe the back part of Oak Creek. The road ended there. If there had been a fire pit, we would have stayed. Instead, we went back two spots to a place with a fire pit and a clearing in the trees.

Erik put up the tent and Zoe and I unrolled the sleeping bags. We made brats. Easy. We made a fire. Zoe fell asleep on her dad's lap. We could hear some lowing in the woods. We decided it must be elk. The clouds moved past and we could see stars. Erik was right. The star I was calling north was not, in fact, the north star at all. Still, I pointed out Orion correctly.

We waited until at least nine, which was impressive, since it had been truly dark for an hour and a half, to go to bed.

Of course, no one slept. Zoe snored. She got a charley horse. Also, in the 3-person tent, Zoe, Erik, me, and Cleo do not really fit. I can't sleep on my stomach except that's the only way I can sleep is on my stomach but on the hard ground, The New Addition (tm Fellner), objects. I turn on my left side and the ground chips away at the bone in my shoulder. I turn onto my right and the ground grinds into my hip. I turn. I get up to pee. I flop and get the sleeping bag all tied up around me and Zoe's sweating because she's sleeping in my too-hot sleeping bag and I have the sleeping bag I got at Wolfe's 20 years ago that is square (which my feet thank god for) and flannel lined and perfect except the part that I was lying on before becomes the part that's on top of me now and the zipper's making it's way down as if the sleeping bag is trying to wring me out. I watch the moon come up which is how I know my north star was really a south-in-the-sky star. The hunters on their ATV's drove by before even the first crack of light. I must have slept a little because I swore at them for waking me up. And then I felt bad for the elk they would be hunting. And then I got up to pee again. (Only my friend Misty knows how many times I pee a night when I'm camping. Erik and Zoe can sleep through it but the tent-zipper sound is tied directly to Misty's disaster-sensory-system. She's been known to abandon the tent and sleep far away from me. She's also been known though to give up the out-of-tent sleeping and put up with me when the mice start to crawl around in her hair, forcing a similar kind of sleep-flexibility on her.)

And yet, even though I didn't sleep much at all and I had gotten no work done and the house was a mess when we got back, it was the most fun I'd had in a long time. Camping, if one thing, teaches you not to be rigid. You don't need a spatula to cook hashbrowns. You don't need a cup to drink your coffee; a bowl works just fine. You don't need to sleep because it's cold outside and you're warm inside your tent. Camping puts a soldering iron to your rigid-- I must sleep, I must have ketchup, I must use toilet paper--metal rivets.

And, I have a plan for next camping trip. First of all, I'd been rigid even in my camping methods. I've always used a sleeping bag because that's what you take camping, right? But I hate them. I get too hot and I get oragami'd in them so tight I can't get out. I'm taking a lesson from Jo's blog and taking many, many blankets, and maybe a mattress camping next time but I am not wedging myself into a straight-jacket-sleep-destroyer unless I'm backpacking. It never occurred to me, because what I gain by being rigid I make up for by being unimaginative, that you could not sleep outside without a sleeping bag contraption. I probably still won't sleep and I'll still feel bad that the house is a mess and I didn't get any work done but at least I will be able to toss and turn rigidity-free.

Purpose

I have recently discovered the reason why pregnant women wear overalls--regular pants don't fit and maternity pants, with nothing to grab onto but gravity, fall down. Overalls stretch out and hold on not by any usual pant-holding mechanism like hips or butts but via the sturdy, steadfast, non-morphing shoulders.

Would that I would be caught dead in them. But who knows? Maybe the sheer physics of the pants will persuade me?

Too much health care?

2009 has been another banner health year for my health insurance company. It hasn’t been as grim as the 2005, the year Zoe was born and was in the NICA for 3 weeks ($60,000), but unlike 2005, when the NICU stay was inevitable and necessary, some of the health care administered to me seemed entirely due to the fact I had good insurance. In January, my doctor discovered I had high blood pressure. Not really surprising since I’d been prehypertensive before and living at high elevations can exacerbate hypertension. Plus, my dad had high blood pressure and my grandmother had high blood pressure. Circumstance predicted I would too. Not great news but not the end of the world either—The cardiologist I was sent to prescribed good medications and the smallest dose seemed to manage the symptoms well. But the cardiologist wanted to be sure it was just run-of-the-mill hypertension. So he scheduled me for a CT scan and an echo-cardiogram. The echo-cardiogram was painful. The CT scan stressful. Both were normal.
Maybe I wouldn’t be writing this if the scans hadn’t been normal but all evidence suggested they would be. Perhaps if the mediation hadn’t worked then maybe the cardiologist should have run those tests. Perhaps if I had any symptoms, chest pain, shortness of breath, palpitations, then he should have run the tests. But what was it to him, the tests? My time and a big check to him..
A couple of weeks after the echo, I got a bill in the mail for $3,460 for the procedure. This wasn’t good for my heart. $3,460 for an hour long ultrasound test that was administered by a insensitive tech? I’m sure the big bucks were for the machine as much as the cardiologist and the tech. I freaked out, called the office. Obviously, my insurance just hadn’t tracked. They fixed it. No problem. Except when I received the statement from the insurance company, the cost of the procedure, $3,460 showed in the left hand column. To the right, the amount allowed by the insurance company. It read $789. The cost of the procedure had been reduced, thanks to the bargaining power of the insurance company, to less than a quarter as much. If I hadn’t been insured, I would have owed that original amount. If my insurance company had less sway, they would have owed more. Did I even need that $3,460 procedure? Would the cardiologist have asked me if I wanted it or could afford it if I didn’t have insurance? How would I be “healthier” if I had to add $3,500 to my debt?
I know I’m lucky. To have insurance. To not have anything truly funky going on with my heart. To have access to doctors and to medicine. But that’s what it is—pure luck that I have a job with health insurance. Why should I be so lucky and someone else who may need the test more than I not be able to afford or not be offered the test in the first place be so unlucky? Too much health care for the lucky ones sucks the health care right away from the not so lucky.
*I didn’t name my health insurance company for fear they would somehow find this, get pissed off, and kick me off their policy. Because luck only holds for so long.

More Complaining

I think I shall change the name of the blog from Otterbutt to the Complainer. I think that sounds more professional and more accurately describes the content found here.
The return to the semester has put me in a sour mood. Every second seems chock full of things to do and, my only release, blogs, appear to have been abandoned for more interesting territory. As Dr. Write says on Facebook (where, I fear everyone has gone), the only thing left good on the internet is the Go Fug Yourself website. It's almost enough, but on the weekends, when you're writing recommendations, and sticking evidence of scholarly activity in a binder, working on a grant, figuring out why godadddy.com takes 24 hours to make your website available, when you think you backed up all your files before your computer went kaput somewhere between Rome and Bari but you realize that you are missing some important, annual review file files and all your responses to your students from last year that you like to use to make writing the letters of recommendation specific, when putting your kid to nap (or discovering that this is the weekend that the nap will be forsaken), writing the proposal that you can't write, that your agent says, be funnier!, when you're grumpy and you can't be funny, you want something to go to on the internets, like Go Fug Yourself but they don't update on the weekends and neither does anyone else and you can't decide what to make for dinner, when the pizza you grilled last night turned out floppy and so you really don't feel like making anything tonight and when you stretch your muscles because if you don't then your body never wakes up but then if you do you over stretch and walk around all old-woman like anyway, and when you got another rejection from The Normal School and were only a semi-finalist for a novel contest, and when your regular clothes are all too small and your new pregnancy clothes are still too big and you really want a popsicle but you're all out, then even Go Fug Yourself is not enough.

The Complainer

Some people won't do it but if I don't, the as-of-late-untouched-blog will prove insurmountable and I'll never be able to return so here I go with the complaints. Please forgive me in advance.

Start-up funds: Where did they go? One day I had some money. Then the next day, I bought a computer and some books. Now that I have to use start-up funds for travel, I'm wishing I bought a much cheaper computer (would an iPhone have sufficed?) and read far fewer books. Or at least read them on the cheap computer or iPhone for free even as I complain that no one buys books anymore. How can they? The start-up funds are gone.

Advising Center. No I can't get you into a math class. I can barely get you into an English class.

Pre-class-beginning discussions with students: Don't spoil it! If we talk about the class now, what will we talk about on the first day???

Book cover: If I didn't tell you I have a book of poems coming out, well I do. I feel very, very happy about it but I am not 100% certain that I will have the cover art I worked hard to get the permissions for and who I asked my good friend to go through the book and help find a piece that she felt fit the book the best. This makes me crabby even though I know, I'm very, very lucky.

Agent: Again. I'm very lucky and I actually adore my agent but she thinks I need a beloved blog or a revered restaurant to launch my writing career. Is this not a beloved blog? Don't I already have a writing career nascent and small-press-y/lit-maggy though it is?

Hornets: Yesterday, Erik was poking at the ceiling above the staircase where some drywall had fallen. When I hear, "Nik, will you come look at this," I know it's time to barricade myself in the laundry room. Which I did until Erik called someone who rushed out and dusted the hornets nest. I did let Erik into my barricaded room but he brought a bee with him, who was pissed at him and stung him. Erik's not entirely persuaded that the dusting of the bees was an awfully harsh response. I'm a hypocrite for wanting both no bees and no hurt bees. They're hornets, he reminds me as he shows me his swollen arm.

No rain: The cobwebs from my last post. Perhaps you were afraid they had swallowed me and that's why I hadn't updated my blog. They had.

University Graduate Committee: We meet in August? Really? In some building I've never heard of? And you're going to ask for volunteers for the review committee and I'm going to have to avert my eyes and stare hard at the floor for at least ten minutes and may have to whip out the excuse that I'll be on maternity leave next semester.

Maternity leave: We don't actually have maternity leave at my U.

Being pregnant: Didn't I tell you I was pregnant? If not, it's because I don't like people to know I had sex but now you can tell by looking at me which means everyone knows. And I walk sometimes with that cliche'd hand on my back. Embarrassing all around.

Classroom: I forgot I agreed to have my class on the first floor, across from the English Office where now the powers that be (e.g. the Administrative Assistant) can record my every move. Are they just talking in there? Is she giving them writing time in class? Does she really put her feet on the desk? Even when she's pregnant?

Milkweed: A rejection letter from then about my water and wine book from Monday that is still harshing my groove.

The end of the world: I can't eat fish or I will deform my unborn child with the mercury that courses through its once coursing veins. It's hot in Flag. It won't rain.

Laundry: Laundry

Friday's email: Few and far between.

Dinner: We're having fish tacos. Good thing I'm not that hungry.

Vultures

In my mind, I think I title a post every three months or so "vultures." If not, I apologize. If so, I think I'm due for one.

Today, Cleo and I went running out in the woods behind the house. We get barely passed the fence when I see on a snag 12 hunch-backed turkey vultures. You know they're turkey vulturs when they're heads are disproportionately smaller than their bodies like Beeker on the Muppets. The snag sits right on the trail and lo though I love vultures, I don't feel particularly safe walking under them. I don't want them to fly off. I don't want them to poop on my head. I don't want them to cruise down and run off with me or my 90 pound dog (unlikely, but vultures are big and travel in groups). So I walk to the right around the snag and what is in front of me but another snag filled with more vultures. I see a guy walking up the trail and though I love vultures, I'm happy to see him so he can bear witness to the vultures flying off with me or can grab my shoe and tell me to hold on. His dog runs over to mine and I'm like, it's cool (meaning the dogs are cool, meaning "I love vultures, even if they are staring at me). But the dog running sends the vultures flying, so I of course duck, thinking they'll fly right into my face or decide that someone must pay for all this skag-sitting-disturbance and they'll decide to carry me off. But instead of taking me by the shoulders and letting me know who's boss around these parts, they just fly off and form one of their dead-thing-sighting gyres.

Sometimes I worry that we live in a place where the predominant wildlife is scavenger--ravens, vultures, coyotes, flies. Maybe we all live in that place.

I also worry that there are more vultures here this year than last. It's been very dry this non-monsoon season. I imagine all the thirst-dead creatures lying out in the woods or off of the road. At least the vultures won't be thirsty.

It seriously needs to rain. It's so bad that whereever you walk, you have to wave through cobwebs. That's how the world will end. Not because of drought or flood but cobwebs blocking our entrances and exits, no rain to wash them out. And the vultures will just patiently watch.

Brought to you by the letter Z

Do you know what Gleed means? It means in a tiny, soft voice you take the drapes and take them down to make a coat out of them and draw small circles for the buttons.

Do you know what Zeek means? It means you take a little frog and play with him.

Do you know what alik means? It means you take your iPod and dance around.

All asked and answered while Z read Harry Potter to me. Who needs drugs when you have a 4 year old?

This Overwhelming

This overwhelming good feeling is the Sudafed isn't it? Or maybe the afterglow of the eclipse? Or the fact that I've resigned myself to the No of the would-be blurbist and now am actually enjoying writing to the famous poets of the world--with much lower expectations. Or perhaps this proposal of the food book is the one. Or is it the fact that two good friends await my arrival in Sedona for some swimming and barbecue fun? Either way, drug me up on the Sudafed and get me to Sedona. I'm feeling summer today for the first time.

The Writing Day That Isn't

It was a crazy long weekend revolving around Zoe's birthday.Thursday was birthday proper which entailed swimming, Fratelli's for pizza and dancing in the square. Friday we threw a party--12 adults, 8 kids, many bratwurst--turkey, veg, and regular. Cleo the dog was the party fouler by harassing the babies and the crotches at the door and eating a hot dog off one of the kid's plates. Then, we had to recover all day Saturday which involved watching many already-seen movies. Yesterday, farmer's market and a special night called Erik went upstairs to watch TV so Z and I could watch Mamma Mia. The movie was as bad as the musical on broadway but it was pretty fun to watch with Z who had a million questions about veils, weddings, bachelor parties, mom's who paint toenails (dad's the toenail painter around here), and smart questions about, why are they singing now, isn't the wedding starting? And, why didn't Sophie just tell her mom the truth? And, why does his (Pierce Brosnan's) face look so silly? Indeed. When Pierce broke into song, it was hard to cling to his suaver Remington Steele days.
Yesterday, I got some work on this new proposal done (because I wanted to write this proposal 6 times) but the ambition has been shanghaid by needing to withdraw an essay and poems from other mags, which I hate doing, and by getting rejected by two potential blurbists in one day. Two. In one day. No one told me getting blurbs would be so heartbreaking. I thank jacket copy gods everywhere for the two I do have.
So now, I should eat lunch. And then Z comes home.
Perhaps this afternoon there will be some progress.....as long as I'm not derailed by more Monday rejection.

ETA: I also felt compelled to make wheat berry tabbouleh since wheat berries are falling out of my cupboards. Pretty good. Too much lemon juice. I conquered too much lemon with feta.
Also, I washed some sheets and made a bed. And I still have some time left today, right?

Almost Z's Birthday

4 is old. 4 is like totally back-off, unless, of course, I need you to sit in the back seat with me. 4 is I can crack an egg and scramble it but, for some reason, I need your help getting me a tissue. 4 is I can't wear these shoes, or these shoes, or these shoes. Where are my shoes? 4 is that exact number of clothes changes per day. 4 is why doesn't dad like yellow flowers to which dad says he just doesn't like the yellow-flowered invasive butter bush to which she turns and asks me, why doesn't dad like yellow flowers? 4 is bracelets and necklaces. 4 is Frosted Mini wheats and salmon but no strawberry juice on my carrot. 4 is lost bracelets and lost necklaces. 4 is I want to go outside. 4 is it's too hot. 4 is I want to sit in the other room. 4 is may I have some more milk please. 4 is swimming lessons and gymnastics. 4 is I want to give you one more hug and one more kiss. 4 is why do I have two toothbrushes downstairs? Two. Toothbrushes. 4 is which peach is ready for me. 4 is don't sing that song it gets stuck in my head. 4 is feeding Cleo a scoop of dog food, tapping on the food in the bowl and saying, I like to keep it organized. 4 is me saying, Z sometimes you drive me crazy, and 4 says, Sometimes YOU drive me crazy. 4 wonders why in the song "On Top of Spaghetti,” is there cheese on the spaghetti? 4 agrees knowingly when I answer, "It's Parmesan." 4 asks, Why does the meatball roll right out the door? Was the door wide open? 4 tells me she likes to move it, move it. 4 is saying to me, you shouldn't have dropped it. 4 is singing songs about getting up, getting dressed, eating breakfast, driving in the car. 4 is getting everyone a napkin. 4 is wanting to go to Fratelli's for pizza every day. 4 is thinking it's hilarious to hold up 3 fingers and say, no this is 4. If only it were so 4, because 4, 4 is old.

The Electronics

Part of the difficulty in travel was assuming I'd have my laptop at the villa. They had wireless! I could type by the pool. More importantly, I could google important sites to visit, research more deeply the history of the region, find out where to go for dinner, figure out what the 7 hour siesta was about. Without that, I really had no way into places. I felt like a passive observer--more like traveling when I was a young kid. Being in the backseat of Erik's parents' rental car probably attributed a little to that feeling too.

The good part was that I really disconnected. So much that I've been a little better since I've been home. I had a loaner computer without wireless so I was connected via an anachronistic wire to my DSL. I couldn't move it around so I left it behind. I watched whole television shows that I already thought I'd seen, like Burn Notice, and realized that 90 percent of the show I hadn't really paid attention to. It was like getting another whole season in!
The sadder, and embarrassing news, is that my Kindle is already lost. I'm only admitting it because I believe in blogging the lost. I was on the last flight of a 28 hour trip (including layovers) from Rome. Z was asleep, shoeless and saying "Stop it" when I tried to wake her up when we landed. I was all concerned about how I could get her milk that late since the airport shops would surely be closed (needless concern: Paradise Bakery in airport and restaurant in hotel still open). I remember reading it right before take off, asking Erik if it counted as an electronic device. I decided it did and I put it in the dreaded back seat pocket. Then I turned on CNN, watched about Michael Jackson's cardiac arrest, then coma, then death, then fell asleep. I woke up, gathered up everything except for the expensive reading machine. I've spent the last 1.5 weeks calling Delta and harassing their poor lost and found folks but to no avail.

1 Lesson learned here: books, one by one are cheaper.
2 Lesson learned here: milk is cheaper than Kindles.
3 Lesson learned here: don't forget stuff.
Hopeful lesson to be learned: blogging the lost a surefire way to have materials returned.

Other electronic disasters included forgetting the iPod with my Italian lessons on them (which was OK since I'd had the lessons burned into my earbudded head), the microphone on Erik's camera breaking, and of course Z's nebulizer. She still has a bit of a cough. Perhaps I could make a trade with the lost and found gods: one cough for one Kindle.

Zoe abroad

I'm not sure what made us think Z would have fun on a trip to Italy. When we first talked about going, her cousins had planned to come. We chose a place with a pool and an ocean and a kitchen so we weren't going, going all the time but we went a lot and she did so well, even though her cousins didn't come. She walked miles upon miles on cobblestone streets. She drove in the car uncomplainingly for hours. She slept strangely and scratched her bug bites with good humor. 

She has always spoken Italian--she's been saying 'a' for 'to' since the she started to talk, as in this morning's "read a book a me," but now she's added  'mama' inflecting the 2nd syllable all latinate and lilt-y. She also says 'bella' and 'grazie' in a whisper but the coolest part is just that she understands language and culture a little bit. She wonders what people speak in Utah (Erik answers, "Texan drawl") and she wonders why girls here where tops on their swimming suits and why they don't in Italy. She also thought that the villa was Italy and that Rome was Rome and neither the twain shall meet but you could see the mental cogs that clicked as she understood 'gelato' was also 'ice cream.'

She still complains that her feet hurt--a week after all the walking but her mosquito bites have healed and her cough is almost gone and for now she remembers Italy fondly. When you ask her what her favorite thing about the trip was she answers the snowman with a headband, the bad cats, the frogs, the lizards. The fauna seems to have made more of an impression than the flora, even the fruit!, and who wouldn't have fond memories of Italian, headbanded, snowmen?

All the fruit in Puglia

The good parts of the trip were very good. When we arrived at the villa, after a somewhat disheartening drive by some very soviet looking apartment buildings and through towns of cardboard-flimsy buildings and over roads more hole than pot, we met Paolo, the son of the owner and our English speaking host. He pointed out the coffee, the semi-stocked mini-fridge and the fact we had to pay in cash. Except for the cash part, which would prove one of the stickingest points of the trip, we were happy there was cold milk and cold, fresh cherries in the fridge. Z could live on cherries and milk. 

Paolo invited us to pick any fruit on the fruit trees. This was early June. What fruit could possibly be ready? I was already amazed about the cherries but then we saw the peaches. Walking around the villa's couple of acres I found lemons, oranges, pears, apricots, figs, some weird caterpillar looking fruit under which Milo, the caretaker, draped a huge net to catch the falling fruit. Apparently, in this region of Italy, this is also how they collect olives. Most of the olive oil in Italy comes from this region but since they collect the olives with the net, which means the olives are a little over-ripe, it's not as high quality as the olives that are collected directly from the branch. These fruits were more starchy than sweet. I was the only ones who ate them. 

Not all the fruit was ripe yet and while we had a few peaches from the tree abutting one of the stone huts, Paolo and his girlfriend came by and collected them all one day. There was another peach tree but it wasn't ready yet. The figs were almost ready and we ate a couple. We pulled some almost ripe apricots and plums--still tart but pretty delicious.

Around the town of Lecce and in different cities we found even more fruit. Watermelon in June! More cherries. We went through pounds of peaches. While there weren't as many berries as you'd imagine, Z did find some strawberries. To complement her obligatory "Spaghetti con il burro," we also learned to order "Frutta da Stagione." One time, the seasonal fruit included a whole half a watermelon. Apparently Erik isn't much of a still life photographer so I don't have any pictures of the monstrosity but when he served the melon, the table looked very Flinstone-esque.

We had melon and prosciutto and kiwis. Oranges and apricots. I'm not sure in what world all these fruits are seasonal simultaneously. I attribute it to the dual ocean breeze but for someone who loves fruit more than other foods, and whose mother-in-law and daughter who love it as much, the bounty was more than welcoming. 

The long story

Scroll down. I have many posts. I'm trying to make amends for my lame-ass blogging.

OE

Though the trip was lovely, as documented in Erik's pictures, it was also traumatic. Most of the trauma can be ascribed to operator error. Italy is a foreign foreign country and it was more difficult than I thought it would be to get the nuance of things. It was hard just barely knowing the language but harder was not knowing the customs. The south of Italy partakes in the longest siesta I've ever heard of. From 1 or 2 until 7 or 8 at night, everything was shut. Grocery stores and museums, restaurants and shops. That's a long time not to be able to do much--thank god we had the villa and the ocean for swimming. But with the Z, we couldn't stay up too late and because we were at the villa, we mostly cooked dinner at home. But if we had plans for a short trip to a little town in the morning, we couldn't shop and go. We had to plan and shop for dinner, drop the food off at the villa, and then travel out. With 7 people (at the height of my mom's visit) that didn't happen much. So we ate a lot of salami and cheese, tomatoes and fruit for dinner, which was good but wasn't exactly the cooking adventure I'd hoped to embrace.
But the true trauma started early. First was the laptop. People. I'm addicted. It was so hard to reorganize how I'd planned to acquaint myself with Puglia. I figured I would do as I do at home--learn a little about something, go home and Google it, then go out and discover some more. But as it was, I was only able to see the surface of things--to imagine how baroque was baroque, how poisonous was oleander, if Gallipoli was more interesting than Santa Maria de Leuca (answer: yes). It was like flying blind. Plus I couldn't blog. Plus I couldn't write.
Also. Z had a pretty bad cough upon flying over. No problem. We brought the nebulizer and an outlet adapter. And yet. I did not bring a voltage adapter. And, apparently, the nebulizer needed one because as I was administering the albuterol to Z, the machine started to hiss. And then smoke. And then kaboom. The first night there. 3.5 more weeks to go without her breathing treatments. Should we go home or risk pneumonia? Every day, the cough would get better. And then worse. She still has a cough. (Now that we're home, we have a new nebulizer).
Then, there were the bugs. The first day, we left the doors open. Erik woke up with a mosquito bite on his eye that made him look like the pirate he always wanted to be. Z looked like she had measles. When we came back from Siena (she stayed with Erik's parents at the villa while we took the train), I had hoped she would be mosquito bite and cough free. Instead, she had even more bites all over her face and was coughing like crazy. Erik's parents had asked the villa's owners, who speak no English, where a doctor was. The hosts, having been more recently acquainted with measles, had Z stick out her tongue where no spots or whiteness or something could be found. Safely diagnosed it was hard to take the girl who looked like she had measles/leprosy out to lunches. I practiced saying morso di zanzarra over and over but as usual when I tried to tell jokes in Italian, the Italians looked at me like I was just covering for having the swine flu.
We also learned there were these contraptions in our stone houses (read: stone huts) that you could plug into the wall and insert a "Vape" which would "vaporize" the mosquitoes. When I die 4 years from now, you'll know it was from the fog of pesticide I inhaled while in the southern part of Italy.
Some of our meals were a consequence of our general stupidity. If there's no one eating there, should have been our motto, don't go. But we were often desperate for lunch or dinner and the Italians seemed to eat at times not in any way in alignment with ours. One day, we went for what turned out to be a feast. Antipasti, I ordered for us all--figuring cheese and salumi would be safe. He asked "Antipasti di terre or di mare?" I swear I said di terre but really, this guy with one squiwampous eye, he didn't want us to order di terre. No we were by the sea and he wanted to impress us with his 15 ways with squid. Squid with oil. Squid, di salento, squared and roasted, squid with tomatoes. Also, eggplant that looked squid innards. And calamari, fried on a stick. And roasted peppers roasted until they were slimy like squid. And Z's obligatory spaghetti with butter which was all overcooked tentacles. The only edible bit was the zucchini frittata. When he asked if we'd like more, I finally got to use the word Basta!
Also, on our trip back from Siena, I was in a grumpy mood and, when he asked which train we needed to change to at Empoli, I meanly said, the one to Pisa duh. Then I marched off to the bathroom. He went to the platform. When the train came to Livorna, I saw him over there but assumed he wouldn't get on. It didn't say Pisa. But then, when the train pulled away, I couldn't find him. He did get on! I couldn't decide what to do. I was sure he was destined for some weird town far off our path. Our flight back to Bari wasn't for 4 more hours. I decided to wait in Empoli. It took me two hours to figure out the train to Livorna also went to Pisa. I jumped on the train, assuming he would be waiting at the airport for me. I actually imagined the running into each other's arms reunion scenario that should mark all good Italian vacations. But this one? He was not at the airport. We were down to 1.5 hours until our flight. The trains came every half hour. He wasn't on the next or the next. We wouldn't make the flight. He had my passport, I had the tickets. We would be trapped, and mad, in Pisa. Finally, on the 4:30 train, he appeared. Our flight was at 5. The check-in desk was closed. We ran to security but they wouldn't let us on without having our visas stamped. We went to the ticket counter. She claimed to have no stamp. No one else from RyanAir was around. Finally, the security woman called someone, she came and escorted us to the ticket counter, where the woman did indeed have a stamp and stamped our passes without the slight look of chagrin. We made it to our flight, which ended up being 30 minutes late any way.
The 30 minutes ended up being its own problem because the train from Bari to Lecce left at 7. It was an hour flight to Bari. The cab ride? About 40 minutes. We showed up at the train station at 6:58. The train was there. We went to buy our tickets. There was a line. And then the train was gone. The next one came two hours later leaving us to have to take a 50 euro cab ride from Lecce to our villa to find our measle-ridden looking child. Who itched and coughed for 2 weeks straight (fortunately, my mom let Z sleep in her clean, bug free apartment for the week she was there with her cortaid cream and albuterol inhaler. My mom probably saved Z's life. Or at least made it possible for us to still have fun with the poor, tortured baby.
There is more but I don't want to sound too complain-y. Most of the trouble really was just me, not knowing. Next post: The best parts.

Rome

And then we spent 3 days in Rome. These were good days except maybe the last one when we were so exhausted and we went to the Vatican and so the entire populous of the earth on one piazza and had two horrible meals. We were pretty beat by then but Z is the biggest trooper in the world--walking all over the Palladium and the Vatican Museums and all around the town. I can't believe she did all she did.


P.S. Each of these pictures, but the one of himself, was taken by Erik.

The last week in Puglia

The last week was a little rough. I missed my mom and was getting a little tired of speaking Italian badly and eating pizza.
But we still managed to hit the beach again, as well as return to Otranto since the Cathedral had been closed on our first visit (note--siesta from 13:00 to 19:00 sometimes includes tourist sites). We drove to grottoes (sea caves) and decided Castro was the most beautiful town on the coast.

My mom arrives!

The second week was action packed because my mom was in Lecce for only a week. We had the white city of Ostuni to visit, the Ionian sea to swim in near Gallipoli, Otranto's castle and cathedral to see, plus much swimming to do at the villa. The high point of food might have been the fish I made on the grill at the villa although Erik and Bart (mom's boyfriend) both had good pasta with mussels (cozze).


The highpoint of this week, of which Erik took no pictures, was the fruit extravaganza at the La Fontanelle beach near S. Roca Beach. After swimming for awhile, Z was hungry. We asked the bar (having now figured out how to rent an umbrella and beach chairs (pay 20 euro)), if they had fruit cups. They kept saying 2 minutes, 2 minutes. Every 2 minutes, we'd go check. About 40 minutes later, we're standing at the bar and everyone starts to come in from the ocean. A man on a speaker phone is yelling about frutta. There's a line. We're confused. I mean, we like fruit but it doesn't usually achieve celebrity status. People had their cameras out for the huge tray--the size of a kitchen table, that was delivered to the people. And then champagne popped. All for free. Z ate more fruit than her share but there was plenty--watermelon, kiwi, cherries. Delicioso. From then on, we started ordering Z Frutta da stagione (seasonal fruit) almost as often as we ordered her spaghetti with butter.

Siena

That weekend was our crazy trip back across the country. Erik and I woke up at 4:30 on Saturday morning. Rick drove us to the Lecce train station (after much lost-getting). We caught the 5:07 train to Bari, took a crazy taxi cab (also 30 Euro) to the Bari airport, flew to Pisa and took the train to Siena.
Our hotel, the Pensione Piazza Ravizza, was lovely. Siena is gorgeous. Miriam, she who runs the school with which our school is affiliated, took us to lunch, told us about how Siena and Florence were each in the running for Italian cultural center. Siena lost but thanks to said loss, the city has retained a lot of its medieval character, with a few baroque touches, as seen in the Duomo.

The rest of the week 1

Our thought behind this trip was to go somewhere where we could experience the great food, the culture and still make sure Z would have some fun. Hence the villa with a pool and our close location to two coasts--the heel of the boot divides the Adriatic from the Ionian seas. We went to the Adriatic that first Thursday. We didn't quite get how the whole umbrella/lounge chair thing worked so we just went to lunch and ordered great mussels au gratin, proscuitto with melon, and Z's omnipresent spaghetti with butter. Erik's mom, the veg, ordered seafood pasta which might have been her undoing but she tried a shrimp and some scallops. At least she didn't order the spaghetti ai ricci which, we discovered later, was spag with sea urchins.

Back from Italy Lecce 1

It was lovely. In many ways.
This is the positive post. I'll have a "What I wanted from Italy, what I got," more grumpy post tomorrow. But today. Today I will try to detail all of the great adventure that was great.

One negative that will have to come first: My hard drive crashed on the first day. It worked in Rome. I turned on the laptop at the aeroporto and then turned it off when they wanted 9.99 E to access the internet. When we got to the "villa" (quotation marks explained soon), I turned it on and the black screen with white letters read: "No internal drive found. Please press F1. Try to re-seat drive." F1 pressed. Hard drive reseated (using kitchen knife to unscrew small screws). Nothing but black screen from now on.

So. Hard drive free I got to "enjoy" my vacation in the manner that one enjoys rehab.

We flew from Rome to Brindisi, Zoe, Erik and I. We actually met up with Erik's parents in Brindisi, then drove, thanks to in-laws renting a car, toward Lecce, the main city near our villa-compound. We arrived at the compound at 4:00, tired but determined to stay awake until at least 8. Our hosts left us with some snacks upon which we snacked and then we ventured into Merine (Ma--REEN--ay) to the Non Solo Cafe (meaning they never close--unlike everything else between the hours of 13:00 and 19:00). My Italian comes in a tiny bit handy so we can get a table but Erik's stepdad, Rick, does a better job actually ordering us whole pizzas rather than the pizza-sandwiches available at the counter. I order us some house wine (rosso) and we eat what we can and then drive back to finally sleep.
The next day, we go into Lecce. They call this the Florence of the South. Having never been to Florence, I'll have to take their word for it.
Here's a picture of Lecce. We spent much time here since this book shop was across the street from the Internet Point--which I visited once a week or so. The first food was among the best. We tended to eat big lunches out and dinners at home. At this somewhat British-themed restaurant, we ate Ravioli with walnut sauce, pizza, and antipasti with duck prosciutto, wild boar, and some kind of delicious goose lardo.

What I want from Italy

The best prosciutto I've ever had.
A cheese I've never heard of.
A scene that reminds me of Ovid.
One that makes me think of Virgil.
One that reminds me of John Fowles The Magus.
Some distance from my obsessions.
A return to blogging?
A behavior modification that lets me learn to roll with the punches (i.e. fly across the Atlantic without panicking, sleeping on a lumpy bed, 3 hour dinners that I fall asleep in the middle of, 5 a.m. travel, not worrying about the cat, plus more, much more).
A revised food book. A new proposal--who comes first? Must I be driven by my desires/appetites? When can you put someone else's bodily desires before yours? A man's? A child's? A chicken's?
A swim or 20 in the Adriatic.
A plan for next year.
A little bit of a sun tan.
One conversation in Italian where I don't sound like a complete idiot.
A taste of something I never suspected that I would love so much I will, after my return, always pine for. Or maybe I already said that when I noted the cheese...

Random things

I'm going to do that 25 random things list but only one at a time. And maybe not all of them.

But here's one.

I have never used bleach without spilling getting some on whatever I'm wearing. Or, it's not even like I spill. I'm soooo careful. I pour it over the sink. I hold my arms out as far as my hands will take them. I wrap the bleached item in a towel or pour the bleach in the wash using something as overly-cautious as a pour spout. Today, I wasn't even wearing what I'm now wearing when I was playing with bleach. But somehow, the bleach puddled or pooled or melted through whatever barrier was between me and the bleach. Now there's big caustic stain on my brown skirt. I'm thankful the whitish-brown splotch is at the top and I can pull my shirt over it, but I can't get passed the feeling that my skirt is tainted, and therefore permanently ruined.

What kind of summer is this?

This is not turning out to be a normal end of the semester. Usually, by now, I've watched 18 episodes of Top Chef and started writing to make up for the last two month's non-writing festival I call teaching. And coordinating the "area." And planning on a visiting prof at the end of the month. But, even before turning in grades, I took off for Tucson for a weekend of swimming and applying sunscreen. I still smell like chlorine and sunscreen--it was magnificent. But also crazy because I came home to grades and visiting prof plans and meetings and appointments and oh yeah a presentation I gave this morning and then do laundry and pack for a camping trip this weekend.
Also: with housesitters? One feels compelled to leave less than 1,000 dirty sunscreened, footprints on the floor.
All of this is in preparation for the trip to Italy about which at this point I can only complain. It will take three days to get to Lecce. We have to drive down to Hub City on Sunday, get up at 5 to fly out from Hub at 7 on Monday, fly to Atlanta for 3 hours. Hang out in Atlanta for another 3 hours and then fly 10 hours into Tuesday, land in Rome, fly to Brindisi. Then, dumbly, I told my dean I'd check out our sister school in Siena where Egg and I will interview and film people about I don't know what. We'll get to our destination and then fly out again 4 days later from Bari to Florence, which is 1.5 hours away and whose flight leaves at 8. Meaning we wake up again at 5 and drive to the plane.
I'm sure/I promise that when I get there, I'll stop complaining about my so hard existence. Or maybe after the Siena part of the trip, when I'm back, fully sunscreened and chlorinated in the villa's swimming pool.
Perhaps I should have stayed in Tucson.

Cure for Insomnia Discovered

Cheerios.

Sleep

I woke up when Z woke up for milk and didn't go back to sleep. I think it was 3 or 4. I hope 4. I finally got up at 5:30 to eat some Cheerios. Now, of course, I might be able to go back to sleep but in an hour, I have to get up anyway.
Why is the end of the semester more stressful than during? I think it's this one foot still grading, one foot in summer business. And I don't feel I'm going into that collapse of summer. There's so much travel ahead. It seems as busy as work.
Just like with sleep, and that impossible place you get to when you are on the verge of falling and then think something stupid like "hey, I think I'm falling asleep," which then wakes you up, a too busy travel schedule interrupts what might have been actually relaxing.
But instead of agitating against the universe, I'll try to relax and travel simultaneously. It's like being asleep and awake--

My friend Craig is missing

Dr. Write, who called, and Hightouch, who blogged, made me realize that the "Find Craig Arnold" facebook was not a game or a hoax. Craig is really missing on an island in Japan. There's work to be done: John Gallaher posted some information about how to urge the searchers to keep looking for him.
I was just IMing with him like 4 days ago. Where could he be? I can imagine he just wandered off, deciding to become more familiar with the trees and the women of the forest. But I also know stupid things happen: falls, slips, disorientation. My hope: is that he got turned around on that 14 square mile island but has now rediscovered his compass and is heading back toward the inn and the people who know him.

Post party post

I am beat. I just went outside to "help" Egg trim the hedges. Such help included lying on the driveway. Z helped by taking a branch and pretending to saw like her dad, first asking Egg if "It's OK my use one of your branches?" One day she will stop saying "my" for "I" and it will be a sad day.
I came in to empty the dishwasher and make lunch. For lunch we are having leftover bacon wrapped water chestnuts! Pick out the toothpicks--rumaki is no longer an appetizer any longer. We're also having leftover cabbage and cucumber, which I had prepared to serve the tuna tartar. Now, tartarless, they'll be a great comb with the bacon and water chestnuts. I hope. The leftover (3/4 of a pound) tuna tartar is in the freezer along with the fully 2.5 lbs of ribs we didn't end up cooking. We couldn't. There was so much food.

This party made me feel grateful. Grateful to Egg who cleaned the office, went on an ill-fated trip to Arby's for lunch, went to World Market, fixed the drain on the upstairs bathtub and barbecued the ribs we did eat, for the graduate students who brought fruit salad and flowers, 15 avocados worth of guacamole, hummus, carrot-curry dip, and delicious artichoke dip, for the professors and staff who brought popcorn and chicken curry, stuffed mushrooms, homemade raisin bread (which I ate for breakfast) smoked salmon cream cheese and delicious miniature chocolate cakes and beautiful white flowers.

As I put the dishes away, I'm thankful for the platter I got for my wedding and the blue dish that set off the tuna tartar. I didn't end up talking to many people because I was always getting someone drinks or turning over the rumaki we did eat and then retrieving from the garbage, rinsing and recycling the plastic plates (I could reuse them but they still smell like curry. I still might go get them out of the recycling bin). But everyone was funny and kind and even though the kitchen was mobbed and the other rooms just waiting for people to sit down in the comfortable seats, I felt pretty unstressed the whole night. I think I messed up a couple of people's names and maybe overstated my plans for the Lit Mag before the current staff finished up for the year, but overall, I put few feet in my mouth, went to bed with a mostly clean house and in general feel like this is a good department and I am so lucky to be able to host with my blue plates, Korean bbq ribs and tuna tartar (though Egg thinks maybe he and I ate it all--which is fine with me!) and chopsticks and comfortable chairs, a pretty good party.

There's leftover wine to boot. And much hope that by tomorrow I'll be fully recovered.

Hosting

I used to host parties a lot. I think though I burned out on big parties after I made a hors d'oeuvre of deep fried crouton stuffed with "cassoulet" for Steve Fellner's goodbye party. But then also Z was born. I had family parties but no big shindigs. So, this weekend, I'm biting the bullet and throwing a party for my grad students and some English Dept. faculty. I'm making Korean bbq ribs, tuna tartare and edamame salad. I also asked everyone to bring an appetizer and drinks so I can be monetarily responsible with the pending furlough etc. I've never had a party where I invited my chair although I did have Thanksgiving in GR with almost all of my colleagues there. So I guess it won't be that weird.

I wish that Little Hands (should I even link, she who blogs no more?) and her people could have stayed for the party. They were here for nearly a week and it was one of the loveliest weeks I've had in a long time. And Little Hands is the best co-hostess. She made waffles for breakfast. I made frittata for lunch. She made Egg's entire birthday dinner--a whole turkey, mashed potatoes, turkey broth and strawberry-rhubarb pie (which we're eating the final bits of now). I did make the gravy and may have, against her will, made her a gravy convert. The next day, she made more waffles--this time with blueberries. I made open-faced sandwiches with turkey and gravy. We made spaghetti bolognese together. One night, we madenachos. (Egg made popcorn. For dinner!) Why is so much cooking so much less effort even when there's twice as many people to cook for when there are two of us?
We had a great trip: Slide Rock Park in Sedona, Oak Creek Brewery (with a bill that made us never want to eat out again), shopping at Gene's Western Wear downtown to buy Carharts for Little Hand's husband, a very fine western shirt for Egg and stuffed horses for the kids. We went running in the hail and snow and to wine at the wine bar. We went to the Skate Park for Little Hand's eight-year old and the regular park for Z and Little Hand's four year old. Z has not been the same since they left. She wants someone to play Crocodile with, stamps with, red-light-green light with, Tinkertoys and horses with. It's always when they leave that I feel guilty that Z is an only child. I think Little Hand's kids don't feel the absence of their cousin so much because they still have each other.
I did promise Z her best friend from school will be at the party on Saturday. It's not a cousin but it's better than nothing. I just wish Little Hands were here to help host.

Environmentalism as bad work ethic

Sometimes, two belief systems get in the way of each other. I try to make a slightly smaller impact on the environment. I also try to get some work done. But there are many ways that I've chosen to do a little bit to be less of a energy/resource glutton that have probably gotten me into a bit of trouble.
To wit:

• Letting students turn essays and poems in on Vista to save paper: This is fine in the abstract but students take the electronic deadline as a negotiable one. And I care and tell them they'll lose points for turning in late but if everyone does it, then the points don't really take or matter in the end anyway. And since I grade/comment the day before class, I don't care as much as I should.
• Speaking of grading or commenting: I grade/comment electronically to save paper. This means I give great, long narrative commentary but not so much of the grammar/proofreading variety. I will do "Track changes" on larger documents but that's only so helpful.
• My own writing: I revise online. Sometimes I'll print it out to great guilt. In revising this last project, I printed twice and revised from there. Perhaps this will appease the publishing gods.
• I try not to drive. So I go to campus less often than I would if I lived across the street. I go in twice as much here as I did in GR though, probably because campus is twice as close.
• Clean house: I hate to use paper towels. Sometimes, that's all that works. If I could use a paper towel each time I had to clean up a tiny spill, well, my table wouldn't look like this.
• Dog: She probably would be a lot thinner if I didn't try to save water by letting her be the pre-recycling, pre-dishwasher cycle that she's become.
• Yard: I'd try to grow some flowers or plants this summer if I didn't cringe at the water I'd need. However, we're planting wildflowers when the monsoons hit so it won't look exactly like a campground outside our house.
• Alerts, newsletters, etc.: I think I might have a better outcome if I put notices in my grad students' boxes. But instead, I send email reminders weekly. I'm wasting electrons as much as I'm wasting my time, since I'm pretty sure students have come to ignore my incessant emails.

I'm sure there are more instances but even if I find them, I'm not sure I'll reform. I pretend these little things make a difference.

Orange Marker

Zoe is covered in it. And since I believe this will be a random updating, starting with that random bit of information is a good start. She's drawing her letters. She just asked if she could draw a note on her hand or something. If she wants something and she's just thinking she's the first ever to come up with the idea of wanting that thing, she says, "Can we go to Fratelli's for pizza or something?" or "Can I have gummy bears or something?" As if something is an option.

Speaking of food I made the most delicious thing I've ever made. Last week, I went to my butcher (see? Mountain Town has some of the basic necessities) and asked if I should get a flank steak or something. He's prone to suggesting the prime rib eyes ($17.99 a pound. Haven't splurged yet. But did buy the Kobe beef burgers). He took a flank steak and said, let me do something first. So he took it, butterflied it, and put it through his tenderizer--I think he called it a ricer. I didn't look at it. I took it home and proceeded to convince Erik that we should go to dinner.
But on Sunday I decided to make the flank steak. Usually I marinate for an hour or so in something. I made up a Korean sauce with sesame oil and soy sauce. And then I waffled for an hour about whether I really wanted to make that. I looked online for awhile. I tried to convince Erik that I should do something new. He truly did not care.
So I found a recipe about braciole or pinwheels. I had none of everything. But I had some of a few things in some recipes. So I julienned some red pepper, some carrots and some scallions. I grated some fontina. On the one side of the steak, I layered the vegetables and topped with cheese. I rolled it up and stuck it shut with some gigantic skewers. Erik grilled the packages for 6 or 7 minutes a side.
We ate them with rice pilaf. I had never been so happy.
Tonight, I think I'll take that leftover rice and stuff some porkchops. With a little more fontina.

And, in the revising world, I'm working on the manuscript that did not win but finalisted. It's close I think. I re-read it today and didn't cringe. That's a good sign. I had to axe three whole chapters and might have to delete one more but I complicated one of the already complicated essays and in doing so, think I found the narrative thread through the whole thing.

And I'm happy that Hightouch and Dr. Write invited me to poetate this April. I'm already behind but I'm trying to keep up with their good work.

It's snowing here. We're staying in even though it's Gallery Stroll downtown. We went in March and it was super fun but cold then. We'll go in May when there's a 50% chance it will be warm. It's supposed to be 64 degrees here on Monday!

Edited to add. Actually, it's snowing sideways. The snow's smacked up against the east side of the trees. Erik is says we're just getting the tail end of the storm--flicked like an alligator.

Languages

I used to think I was good at learning languages. I started taking German in the 8th grade. I kept taking it every year until in high school I progressed out of the sequences and they brought in a woman to teach three of us--Pete, Alyssa and me--the 6th year German course. By the end of that year, I thought I knew German pretty well. That year, I went to Germany with my family. From the hotel room, I ordered towels. The housekeeper responded in English. Apparently, either my knowledge or pronunciation could have used a 7th year.
At Reed College, we had to take a third year language course in our English major. I thought, no big deal. I'll test out of that first year.
Not so much. I do think I got an A in first year. And I studied with my boyfriend who grew up with grandparents who spoke German (who is now also strangely living in Arizona. Thanks FB.) and therefore got A's and B's in second year German. Third year German, I read Perfume, The Clown, The Sleepwalkers, and the Magic Mountain--in translation--but read a few pages of each in the original German.
At the U, to graduate, you had to be proficient in one language or competent in two. I took the German test for proficiency. I translated the strangest passage about bees. I have no idea what that had to do with the title of the piece, which was something like "Disorientation in Adorno's Metaphor." Or maybe that wasn't the title at all, for I did not pass that test.
I high-tailed it to Spanish. I could never remember what aufrichten meant in German. I had a hard time with the verbs that cut themselves in the middle and the prefix is tossed to the end of sentences like: Ich richte meine Mutti auf. That could mean I called my mom up, out or bought her a sweater. "Auf," a preposition, can mean at, to, on, or upon. "Auf" can also be an accusative or dative perposition meaning that the articles, die, der or das, changed depending on how auf is used.
Although I may not understand German, I understand German grammar better than English.
Spanish proved easier because I already understood that sometimes verbs are reflexive, like "me gusta" and that adjectives can come after the noun "the cornflower blue." Again, the words didn't stick that well. Egg and I once tried to help a guy move his car. He spoke only Spanish. I kept (in my version of the story, Erik says this, but I really don't know which of us brought out the heavy cannons of translation skill) saying "Parko el caro." I think that means are parrots expensive here.
Now I'm trying to learn Italian. I have a language tape for my iPod. It's 70 minutes long so I listen to one half when I run one day, the second half the next running day. Over and over. There's fancy music in the background. The Italian woman who teaches me is named Philomena. I understand "mi piaci" is "me gusta" in Italian. I get "I would like," is "vorrei" in Italian and "Ich moechte"(the o should have umlauts but Blogger won't let me umlaut. The e suggsts umlaut) in German.
I had to look up how to spell "vorrei" since I only know the sounds of the words from Philomena. I presume, by the time I get to Italy, I will know how to order a towel in Italian. (Vorrei un asciugamano?) I expect that someone will counter with, "You'd like a towel" just to be sure I'm not asking for a wiry ice cream (gelato asciutto). I do think I know how to order a bottle of wine, red(vino rosso) and some bread (del pane), which is, in the end, all I probably need to know.

Green

My friend Steve has a new blog about poetry--gay men and gay critics specifically but also about the poetry world in general. Steve's writing voice is one of my favorites--both smart and sweet. I don't know how to be that vulnerable with words.

In response to Dr. Write's posting about the end of blogs, I do fear for the blog. People post less frequently, it seems. Facebook is OK but it's not as revealing. To me, it's a good way to remember I have friends but not a good way to actually learn anything more than I didn't already know. So, in honor of Dr. Write's Long Live the Blog, I updated my blog colors. Maybe one day, I'll make my own graphic. Maybe one day, I'll choose a more reasonable blog name. I thought Otterhead would be funny but now I can't remember why. When I updated, I accidentally lost all my links so there's new ones and old ones but if somebody wants me to add theirs, I'm happy to.

And in honor of more than you didn't already know I will tell you that I called some people in the department to invite them to dinner tonight--impetuously! Spontaneously! They, in turn, invited us over to their house instead which means I have a) a lot of food and b) might have to impetuously/spontaneously invite different people over tomorrow. I'm working on the making of real live friends. We'll see how it goes.

And, in Zoe news, she would like you to know that we have three flowering croakersez.

And I'm still revising a research proposal and a book proposal and an essay. I think the essay is nearly done, thanks to Steve. One day, I'll write something new. I think it will be about grilled cheese. Stay posted.

Saving Daylight

Good morning ye who are wondering where that hour went, thinking man, that sun is pretty low for 9:15. But ye people know that spring has arrived. Or will shortly and you can look forward to warm evenings when the sun sets at 9 or even 10. When we were in Michigan, right near the solstice, the sun wouldn't set until almost 10:30.
But now we are here. Where the Republicans don't like to switch time. Where there's some thinking that in Phoenix, it will be hot for a shorter amount of the day. I suppose one sleeps through an hour of extra sun?
But up here, it's not so great. First of all, I like daylight savings. I think everyone, everywhere should always wake up later and drive home in the light. In the summer, I like sitting outside until midnight. But when the sun goes down, at least up here, in this desert mountain town, so does the temperature. Therefore, inside we go, tamping out the fires in the fire pit and closing up the blinds at 8:30.
Perhaps I will spend the day writing an ode to Daylight Savings.
I look forward to going home next week where home isn't just a place, it's an altered, and therefore perfect, time zone.