The True Project

One hopes that one jinxes nothing but noting this but the true success of Summer 2008 is the potty training of the Z. It would not have been possible without the help of the grandma and the maestra, Egg, Thirty-One and Thirty-One's ever-encouraging kids. There was much applause by grandpa and George too. We sometimes bribed her by letting her blow out a candle. We sometimes "encouraged" her with candy--a no-no I know but OK, if one also sometimes bribes her by letting her brush her teeth!
I'm shocked by how it works. One day, she has no idea she has this thing called a bladder. The next, she's a camel who can hold it all night. She has far superior holding-it ability than I. I am very proud of the little bug even though sometimes she complains and wants to wear her Pull-Ups again. As long as the Pull-Up stays dry though, I think she can claim success.

P.S. Blogging the lost: I swear I had a book around here. A book of poems or essays...If anyone finds it, please let me know.

Projects--there's too many

I have only about 2 hours a day during the summer to work unless I leave the house and go to a coffee shop. One great and hard thing about being in Salty Town is that there are an infinite number of hours where one could hang out and not do projects. There's much hiking to do and drinking of wine to do and somehow I end up going to the store at least once a day to buy groceries to feed the people with whom I can hang out. $55 every other day seems not so bad considering the number of people and the fact that I'm living in the land of free rent and good food. Although some sticker shock applies--5 oz of organic lettuce? In March, $1.99. In June, $3.99. Outrageous. Orange juice too. It seems there's some serious gouging of the produce but the worst is prepackaged stuff. I bought a veggie tray for $8.99! It wasn't even organic!

Anyway, this is not the point of the post. The point is is that I emailed my agent to say which of my projects should I work on this summer and she said all of them. This is in no way helpful. So, of course, I started a new project. But truly,

• I must revise the novel that Dr. Write, KJ, 31 and Scorpion's Tail (is she ever coming back to blogland?) helped me with.
• I also must edit the nonfiction for the online mag.
• Mentor my mentee (especially via place book).
• Also must conjure fall courses syllabi.
• Also, finish the grant app.
• I also must work on the small book related to the grant.
• And the place book.
• And the new poetry book about Pin Art.

So I work on each of these a little a day? Plus answer Z's questions about where Grandma, Grandpa, Dad, Maestra, Cam, Lil, V and P are (they're all over there Z. We're only here for 2.5 more weeks. Go talk with them.) No wonder my writing is fractured and no projects are done. Still, I think I'll have a better draft of all these things by the end of June, just in time for another disruption and this one without the helpful distractions of grandparents and siblings and cousins.

Fortunately, I don't need to figure out bullets on blogger. Things like helpful bullet are how I save a little bit of time and a little bit of focus every day. At least I got my 500 words done.

Books

I'm reading The Road Home which I can't believe I haven't read before because a) it's the best book ever b) my old job houses the Harrison archive and c) I love Nebraska (OK. I didn't know that until I drove across it lately or until I read this book.

But still. I'm very happy living in this book right now. It will be over soon and I will be very sad. But perhaps I could choose from this list that's meming itself around called "The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users."

Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion is this
There is Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Hmm--this list seems a bit overdone. Perhaps I could try to finish Watership Down after all these years. My mom bought it for me when Waking Owl books was still around. I swear it was in Foothill Village for awhile but maybe that was A Woman's Place Books. Perhaps I'll read House of Leaves instead. Or finish Pynchon's Against the Day.

Survivor: Urban City Edition

I've been sleeping somewhat better but I still have patches of sleeplessness in the mornings. What do I think about during these times? Intensely productive thoughts like what would it be like if the show Survivor was a bit more realistic? Like, if you had to survive in your current house but without water or heat or power. And then I thought how survival would be different depending on what city you lived in, which led to these great thoughts. Forgive me in advance.

Survivor New York City: You're set down in NYC with a gun, a knife and a billfold full of cash but when you go to take the subway, you see it's been replaced by a monorail. Then you notice that the metrocard machine only takes Disneyland tokens. Your challenge: To reach the Magic Kingdom in less time than it takes to wait on the Space Mountain line.

Survivor Detroit: Opposite scenario. You have neither gun nor knife nor billfold, just a pocketful of Disneyland tokens. Challenge: To find a "revitalized" part of the city and keep it vital by sheer wit and will alone. Oh wait, that's what most Detroiters do every day.

Survivor Portland: You're set down on the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland without black-rimmed glasses, secondhand dress, or a bicycle. Challenge: To prove to Portland police that it is in fact legal for you to walk eastward into the coolie part of town.

Survivor Austin: You're set down in Austin but you've been stripped of your love for tacos, music, or margaritas. Your challenge: To explain to yourself the purpose of the city without those loves.

Survivor Cleveland: You're set down on a street in Cleveland where every house is for sale. Challenge: To find a house where the seller still holds the deed and offer to pay them what they paid for their house 10 years ago.

Survivor L.A.: Same scenario as Cleveland but with more hope toward profit. Challenge: Find a house for sale and wait and wait and think, is this the bottom of the market yet? Is this the bottom of the market yet? Purchase house and pray the house appraises for more next year.

Survivor Salt Lake: You're set down on a Saturday night after 10 p.m. of a holiday weekend. You've planned a big barbecue for Monday but have forgotten the liquor stores are closed until Tuesday. Challenge: Find a way to make/keep your guests appropriately inebriated. (This did not happen to me but it's one of the nightmares that wakes me up at 3:00 a.m.)

Survivor Flagstaff: You find yourself in downtown Flagstaff. You're starving for dinner and there's outdoor seating available at an OK restaurant. Challenge: To keep yourself warm and awake after 5:00 on a summer evening now that the sun's gone down and you realize why the patio is open.

Please feel free to add your own. As you can see, stereotype and Yahoo news headlines are sufficient to make judgments about the city. Fair is fair in the surviving game.

Travelodge, Desert Mountain Town

My brain does not adjust to drastic change very well. It punishes me by not letting me sleep. I also have many requirements for sleep like dark, quiet, clean sheets. So when I called out to outdoor-chair sitting Egg from the furniture-free floor in GR and asked in what hotel he would like to stay while we looked for houses in Desert Mountain Town, he said Little America. His family is related to the owners. This does not get us a discount. It doesn't even get us a room--everything in town was booked for graduation. As was everything except the Travelodge. Also: one could stay at the Travelodge for 5 days for what one could stay at Little America for 2. And I'm feeling the budgetary pinch of moving and buying and summer. So the Travelodge it is. I booked a suite--it came with a fireplace and a fridge. What else could I need?

When we got to the hotel (motel?), Egg groaned a little. I said that we'd stayed in worse places--in Kemmerer, WY (fossil fish capital of the world) on our way to the Wind Rivers for our honeymoon, all those motels on the Olympic Peninsula the October we first started dating, and the Chelsea Hotel--the famous hotel that writers and other bohemian types used to stay and write(and apparently go to die). The Travelodge could not be worse than the Chelsea where there was at least three inches between the floor and the outer door so you could watch the 70 year old's high heels click up and down the hallway all night and where sleeping with the light on kept a few of the cockroaches at bay.

And it wasn't as bad as the Chelsea. We were put into a regular two bed room so I had to go back and ask for the suite. Suite might be an overstatement. It meant: fridge and microwave. This particular suite came without the fireplace but it did have wireless so what else did I need?

Apparently I needed a train running through the room at night. The Travelodge sits (as do many of the other hotels, including Little America) near the train tracks. The Travelodge is a little closer than the others in that it sits on the tracks, but trains are romantic, no? Part of the charm of the west and mountain towns and route 66?
Not at midnight. And 1. and 1:30. And 2, 3, 3:45, 4, 4:15, 4:30, 4:58. They don't just drive through either. They honk their horns both with safety and pleasure in mind. Some trains honk only twice per intersection. Some honk all the way from LA to Chicago.
So it wasn't that quiet.
And apparently Arizona thinks daylight savings is for democrats or something. The sun started to peek through the not so sun-blocking curtains by quarter to five. It was full bright by 5:30. It felt like about 9 a.m. Except I didn't have the I-slept-in-so-long feeling. I had the, I-didn't-sleep- at-all feeling. One night, I woke up at 2 and never went back to sleep.

It wasn't just the Travelodge contributing to my lack of sleep. The exorbitant housing prices, the lack of friends there, the fact that it was 80 degrees already (although it snowed the next day), the concern that this new job may not be better than the old one (or what if it's worse?), and the fact that somewhere in Wyoming I realized I wasn't exactly moving home. As the Wind River range passed on my left, the craggy, I remembered that the snow-covered Rockies are not the softer, Ponderosa-filled mountains of the desert.

Other sleep issues include:
When I got to Salt Lake, a dump truck rammed the back of my car. Z was in the back in her carseat but she was OK. I was sore and suddenly busy with more paperwork.
Egg's mom's house is the opposite of the Travelodge: clean, quiet, and except for one night, cool. And yet, the 2 in the morning thing happened. As did the 3, 4, 5.....I blame it on the fluctuating interest rate, the fluctuating temperature (94 one day! 44 the next), the fluctuating time zone, and the fluctuating certainty that change is necessarily good.

Drama, Trauma, and Obama

Oy, never move, never move, never move.
That is my advice unto thee.
We packed up our house. We sent our stuff on the ABF truck toward Arizona, we put Z on the plane with her grandparents, and Egg got in the 4 Runner with Cleo and I got in the Jetta with the cat and we drove across Michigan, Illinois, Iowa and through Nebraska. We stayed the night in North Platte and made it to SLC by dark on Thursday. By Friday, we were dog and cat free and in one car and headed the 7.5 hour drive to Arid Mountain Town.
We looked at a lot of houses.
We seem to have purchased one.
We are heaving under the heavy mortgage. Unlike everywhere else in the country, Arid Mountain Town's prices have held pretty much steady. Still, I think we got an OK deal.
We drove home on Wednesday--made it in 8 hours.
The next day, driving toward my mom's house where my cat is living (although without my mom who is in Yosemite), I was rear-ended by a gigantic dump truck. My car is hurt and I'm sore and Z, who was with me, is absolutely OK. But it sucks and my mom isn't back even though she's supposed to return and the lender wants w-2's which are packed in the truck and Egg's step-dad and sister are in a fight and I want to make fish tacos right now and have a margarita but Egg and Thirty-One's husband just went to play disc golf (it is 3:52 right now Mountain Time. None of my clocks are on the right time) and it gets light in AZ at 4:30 in the morning because they refuse god's greatest gift to mankind--daylight savings, and this past ten days since I've left GR have left me twisted, sore and a bit parched.
But I think next week is going to be a lot more mellow. Especially if my mom gets home....
P.S. This blog has nothing to do with Obama but since Thirty-One blogged twice recently and once about Obama (although more about Hillary) I thought I'd highlight her efforts.

Last Day

I promised to keep a tally of the things I would miss but the list was getting too long and my organizational skills have been pressed into packing duty so whatever lists I did make were not properly demarcated in proper categories. So now all I've got is a long soupy mess of things that will be missed, categorically:
The tree out of my back porch that blooms some magenta colored flower--Erik thinks it's a blossoming plum. Perhaps.
The white magnolia-like tree that last winter the freeze got the minute the flowers bloomed but this year, we got to appreciate the thick-with-cellulose almost-southern flower.
The snow drops that were the first flower this year--bent over white noses kissing snow.
The hyacinths that perfumed my runs.
The tulips although I missed the Holland tulip festival yet again.
The morels that I never found.
The rhododendron, the dianthus, the hydrangea, the butterfly bush and the lavender we planted last year.
The weird Dr. Seuss like trees that keep their purple blossoms tight to their many-direction pointing branches.
The other deciduous trees whose names I know--larch, ash, birch, oak, maple but which I'm not 100% certain I'm applying to the proper tree. I come from the mountains where the trees are mostly pointy firred ones, aspens, or ones imported to the desert for their usefulness like honey locusts for their shade-giving or cherries for their fruit-bearing.
The blueberries. Michigan is the highest producer of blueberries.
The carrots.
They also have an apple called Honeycrisp. Do you have these? They are the best apples in all the land.
The asparagus.
The hawks.
The owls.
The cardinals.
Those little yellow flitting birds.
The gigantic bumblebees.
The fireflies.
The water, the water, the water.
The nights where it's light until almost eleven and because it's a little humid, it's still 75 degrees outside and our friends stay late and we sit on the back patio in the wrought iron chairs and wait for the raccoons and bats to show up.

I'm going on one last run through the college where I hope to see the owls but know I will see at least the geese and their goslings. I might see the frog and the turtle. And I'll definitely see some squirrels. Cleo will miss the squirrels.

Goodbye Michigan! I wish I'd stayed just a little bit longer. I'll try to come visit. Preferably in the spring.

Six Word Memoir Meme (now with more words)

Pretty Hard, Dammit tagged me for a meme. Since I have never been tagged before by someone I know only through the blog world and since I’ve been deficient in my blogging, I am going to write a series of six word memoirs. Lucky you.

1) I know the value of nothing.

I’m sitting here waiting for someone to come look at our dining room table that I’ve been complaining about for a year. The chairs are uncomfortable, the table is scratched. So I posted it on a university classified ad service for a relatively cheap price. Note that our neighbors had already looked at it and did not buy it so it’s obvious, as of this morning, that it’s worthless. After I post the table and chairs on the service, I get 10 emails within 15 minutes. Everyone wants it. Guess what? I don’t want to sell it now.

The couch I listed that no one emailed me about? It is certainly still worthless and I’m still willing to sell it. Until someone lets me know otherwise.

2) I like words: they are deletable.

This table-selling business just clarifies exactly what sorts of therapy I need. Making decisions is just about making regret for me. No matter what I decide, it is the wrong decision. This is why I like writing. I can revise. Delete. Finished is a generally arbitrary idea. I send stuff off. People like it or they don’t. I know it’s done when they like it. Similar to the idea that my table is worthwhile. Perhaps I’ll post some of my essays to the classifieds to see if there are any takers.

3) I just want to go home:

This is a mantra that I repeat always and wherever I go. Even when I am home. Meaning home is always where I’m not. Flip side, grass greener, nostalgia (sickness for the past). I am a sick cookie. I think my true home is Welches, Oregon where once I found fourteen pounds of chanterelles. But it’s kind of shady there with all those firs and pines. And cloudy. Maybe Mountain Town southwest has chanterelles AND sunshine. Except you can’t have mushrooms without rain.

Pretty Hard Dammit actually tagged me to write Zoe’s birth story in 6 word meme. The I-just-want-to-go-home one describes it pretty well. Z however very much wanted to get out into the world. So at 32.5 weeks she kicked her way out of there and made it as far as the NICU. We could see our house from the window, making the longing all the stronger. I was in the hospital for only 4 days but she was there for 20. Still, she was home four weeks before the doctors told us she would be. And she has now lived in two homes and is moving toward another. Perhaps she’ll be less of a I-wish-I-was-somewhere-else kind of person and more of a I’m-happy-wherever-I-am kind of bug. And then I will take a lesson from her and we will hang out happily in the sunny forest full of mushrooms and trees watching the otters swim in the river. I’ll keep you posted on how that turns out.

Edited to add: Woman not interested in the table. Table now back on the undesirable list.

The Next Go Round

My boss, who is really sweet one on one, took me to lunch a couple of weeks ago and gave me a bit of advice about my next job. He told me to take the long view and not get so stressed out about doing it all at once. I'm not sure what kinds of mythologies exist in peoples' perceptions of my time at this University but I was pretty stressed out. I didn't realize how stressed until I quit. I was never entirely sure how much service I was doing or needed to do, if my presence on campus was sufficient, if my publications mattered at all, if I graded too easy or too hard. So I'm trying to think about how I'll do things differently at the next job.

From the above list, it seems obvious and apparent that perhaps I should have asked. Of course, I did ask my one good friend but, as a friend, he tended to either support or tease me about freaking out about these things. I should have asked the chair these things, at least some of them, just so as to alleviate my stress. I think I was afraid he would say, you do too little. Now I find out that in some ways, he thinks I did too much. I've never been good about asking for help or feedback. In PhD school, I spent little time in my professors offices. I think this was a huge drawback to my grad school experience and, though I've known I'm like this, I still haven't corrected it. In fact, when students come to visit me in my office, I stare at them like what could I possibly tell you here that you couldn't ask me in class. I mean, my students come. We have good discussions. But I'm so unclear as to WHY they're there (they don't tell me) that I just talk and pontificate. If they have a clear question, it's easy, but the hanging out as an extension of the professorial experience makes me act all talky and uncomfortable.
So my prejudice against office-time goes both ways. One way to fix this is to change the context of the office hour by taking it out of the office. Fortunately, at my new school, there are compulsory writing center hours. If nothing else, I will have face-time with students when they don't have to specifically seek me out. The other thing to do, is to schedule time with my chair and other profs throughout the semester so I make myself go to the meetings. If I schedule something, I might be able to be more precise in the way I ask how am I doing, am I doing enough service, what kinds of service should I be doing.....
The other good thing about the new job is that my service is already built into the job so wandering around the hallways looking for ways to distinguish my service will not be so difficult. At my current job, everyone had claimed their service territories and I wasn't sure how to claim my own. I ended up doing a lot of assessment, benchmarking, curriculum development-type work (which helped me get this new job, I think) but at the new job, I'll be the point person, the public face of the department, which is something that suits the kind of service I want to be doing.

Other random things I'll do differently

1. Get to town earlier. We arrived in this town ten days before classes started. We had a couple of personal crises plus a one-year old who was still a entirely new concept. We knew where nothing was. We had no vacuum. We didn't know where the grocery store was. We couldn't decide on cable or not. I barely knew how to drive to campus. In fact, it took me a whole semester to figure out the fast way. I missed some of the first of the year meetings on campus so Erik could interview for jobs. I feel like I started behind and have been playing catch up ever since.

2. Figure out a babysitter/daycare situation. Before we knew that daycare would be the infectious trap that it was, we planned for Z to be in daycare the whole time while Erik worked. We realized that Zoe would not be able to go to school as sick as she got, we ended up in the hospital. Erik quit his job, in part, so he could take care of her. In Mountain Town I'm going to have to have a sitter to cover my schedule plus preschool for her so she can get some kid-time in but if she does still get sick, Erik and I can go to work and I'll feel like I'm putting in plenty of face time.

3. Have a party early on. Invite everyone before I figure out who likes who and who tends to hang out with who else.

4. Ask how people grade grad students and then how they grade their undergrads. Having gone to Reed and then grad school, I still find all this grading mysterious. I do grade creative work but maybe I should stop and just grade brilliant comments.

5. Get in a writing group. I have online ones but I miss having a regular face-to-face meeting.

6. Take at least one weekend day off. Go somewhere. That's why we moved there. For the somewhere.

7. Write down long-term service goals. Piece them out into workable parts. Do a little part. Again, with the long view.

8. Hang out at school. This will be easier as I hope that we live closer to campus. It sucks if it takes 25 minutes to get to campus. One is likely to go for a long time, but not as often.

I'm sure there are more ways to take the long view but this is a good start. Maybe if I make my plans public, I'll stick to them. Perhaps someone could ask me some time in October if I've been to visit my chair lately or had a party. Or find out when I will be having a party and then you can come. It would be easier if I already knew some people there....

An Update on the Z Zau McFlau

We are living under the reign of Z. She is a gentle tyrant but not to well disposed to instruction or rules or wearing of the clothing. This morning while I was in the shower, she took my make up and spread it like peanut butter all over our leather chair. Why? Because the chair was dry and it needed lotion.
Do you remember when she would wear only purple? Purple turtleneck, purple leggings, purple dress? First went the turtleneck, and now the leggings and now, if we're lucky, she will wear the purple, sleeveless sundress from last summer because she has decided that now it is summer and she is "cold enough" and it's bright out there and even though it's still only forty-degrees tops, that is all she needs to wear.
At night--she needs books. Several books. We started a chapter book. We also finished it that night because she wanted to hear just a little more. And can you say no to books? We have the goodnight moon book from her Maestra (my mom) the blue moon that her aunt Joyce gave her and the Zoe's Potty that my cousin gave her and the animals in the forest from her grandparents and some idiotic everything book that has no narrative that we must read every night. Plus the songs three: Hush, Sunshine and Zoe (Zoe still says her name Dowie so sometimes we think she's talking about her dad, Airwick). And then songs three one more time.
At 3:46 a.m. she would like more milk please. Just a tiny bit, she asks. Tiny bit?
She'll still eat half an onion but is less into other foods like turkey and chicken. Skittles? Those she'll accept.
She counts to ten if you don't make her say 7 and are OK with 8 being H.
Paint a picture of Lily, please. NO PANTS! DRESS! she demands. I tell her Lily, unlike she, wears pants. And a shirt. And some other color than purple.
She must watch Steins (Little Einsteins) and Dora with Diegos in them. We are allowed to dance--swing her around in 20 circles until one of us is about to throw up, practice our arabesques and pirouettes but cannot sing. If we do sing, we must sing loud.
It's a Byzantine system we've been living but we cut her some slack because someone's got to be in charge and she who knows what she wants and what she wants to wear is obviously someone who has good leadership and management skills. And the leather chair, it is silky soft now, even if slightly tinted human color. Plus, when she demands hug and runs full tilt into the surprise of my shoulder or demands kiss and kisses my lips and then offers me lip-stuff because they too seem dry, I give up all plans for revolt and rebellion and spin her one more time. And then one more time again.

Edited to add: Because I wasn't here, I forgot that during random times of the day, one is told to lie down and "close eyes." She puts a blanket on one's body and sings a variation of "hush." If one stirs or makes moves to get up or opens one's eyes, one is told to "go to sleep." I'm not sure why she thinks that would work on either me or Egg, since it certainly doesn't work on her.

Too much

All of those stresses of a month ago seem to be resolving themselves. The villa owner in Italy let us move our reservations to next June, the nice people at the U found my payroll reports and verified that I worked at the U for more than .5 FTE so I am vested in my 403B here, and our house has an offer and has passed inspection. If things continue in this way, I might begin to believe that the gods favor our moving. We're looking at houses online in high-altitude desert town and are gagging at the prices but think we'll be able to find a cute enough house. We're storing our stuff for a month, heading west for the summer. I'm sad I'll be missing the spring and summer here. My backyard patio let's in just the right amount of light--all sunny in the morning and shaded by trees in the afternoon. Remind me to keep my eye out for that in the new house.
Z's grandparents are coming to fly her to salty town the first week of May. I may well be eating at Em's and the Metropolitan sooner than I ever could have thought.
I still have high hopes to do here: find morels in the woods, find asparagus along the river, cross the Mackinac Bridge into the UP and see the tulips in Holland. I have a wee bit (75 portfolios) of grading to do but I think I can work in a weekend trip or two.

Things I Will Miss

I expect as it gets closer and closer to when I'll be moving and now that most everyone knows that I am going, I will be only melancholy and nostalgic about what I'm leaving. So expect a number of posts with this same title.

Today gets a sub-title: Birds and other flying things:

• The geese that fly overhead to land in the pond at the college down the street.
• The cardinals that stare into our back room from the two trees that are not, but remind me of, a magnolia and a Japanese maple.
• The ducks that are swimming in couples around the pond. The same pond where the geese are trying to land.
• The white-bellied hawks that dive from the tall trees (again, what kind? Alder? Sure, that sounds good) as I drive toward school on the big street named after the big lake.
• Fireflies. When my mom's boyfriend came to visit, he was so surprised. What are these flying lights?
• These black and white tit-mice that land on the sycamore that I watch out the bathroom and hallway windows.
• The black and white woodpecker that eats from that same sycamore.
• The squirrels that seem to fly from branch to branch, from sycamore to hyacinth to fence to pine.
• The chipmunks that chase the squirrels.
• The red-tail hawk that sometimes appears on the sycamore looking for squirrels to eat, and, who one winter, caught and ate a squirrel while perched on top of the snow, leaving the white spattered red.
• The leaves that span seventy-five colors of red--from black cherry to neon pink-- falling to the sidewalk, on the sidewalk.
• The sparrows, plucking clean the already-bare winter branches.
• The spring blossoms, having fallen on the flower beds, blanketing them in May like so much snow did just the other day in April.

The Ice

100 Years of Solitude begins thusly:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

When I leave GR, I will remember the ice.

I grew up in a mountain town next to a lake, albeit a salty one, so I thought that moving to another snowy town with lake effect snow wouldn't be that huge of a transition. But because the mountain town I'm from also doubles as desert, the snow melts. It dries. The sidewalks if left unshoveled eventually are melted of their snow and returned to their chalky brightness.

Not so here. This winter, especially February, has gone on record as having the most snowfall ever. If it had been last year, when the temperatures all winter never rose above freezing, there would be snow up to our windows. But this year, there have been a couple of thaws. This is great when it's happening. Whole roads turn to rivers, the iciles fall and stab the ground, you can exhale and inhale outside.

But it never stays above freezing for more than 6 hours. At night, all that melt turns to ice. The streets are black with it. The gutters are puddled with it. People who haven't shoveled now have frozen slush, impossible to walk on because the shoe prints of the last person to walk through the slush have solidified--it's like walking on hardened lava. You have to high-step over the foot of ice between the gutter and the curb.

Running has been hard. Some days, even the college by my house which uses enough salt to keep the walks clear at 10 degrees, can't keep the stream of melt turn to a blanket of ice. Some days, it wasn't so much like walking as ice skating. I still ran, a little, slowly but on my tip-toes.

It seems that it might be forty degrees over the next few days. The snow banks are getting smaller. There will still be that sheet of wet ice when I run because it will still freeze overnight. But when I start counting the curb ice in inches rather than feet, when walking up the driveway doesn't require sending Cleo the dog up first so she can pull me by her leash, when I don't wear my wool hat every day, when running through the college is more mud than Dorothy Hamill impersonation, then I will look at the blue skies--here for a record 6 days in a row now, and, even though break is almost a week over, call it spring.

When I came here, I wondered why we had "fall" and "winter" semesters rather than "fall" and "spring." They laughed when I asked. They said, you'll figure it out.
Now I know.
Still. The curb ice? It's down to inches.

Edited to add: Dorothy Hamill implies some sort of graceful ice-venture. That is not me. In the Upper Penisula, there's the verb pank. It means to tap down the snow hard with a flat tool--possibly called a panker. That's more like what I'm doing with the ice except the ice is already hard so my feet don't make much of an impact.

Ineffective Political Action ETA Not So Ineffective!

I got an email from the HRC last night urging me to email all 76 Utah state reps and ask them to oppose amending Senate Bill 199. Since I haven't been involved in Utah politics for awhile, I was unfamiliar with the bill but apparently the original, unamended bill would allow domestic partners in SLC to keep their domestic partner benefits although it would change the name of the registry. The amendment would make it illegal for a city to define domestic partners or benefit participants (something like that. Like I said, I'm out of Utah politics). I'd already had some wine and had nothing better to do so I emailed them all (please note that it's probably illegal, or at least very pointless, for me to do so as a nonresident) and asked them to vote against the amendment.
I remember from my old letter-writing days (pre 2004 when I gave entirely) about how nervous I was to write letters, especially to Utah Reps because I could just imagine the awful responses I could and did get--from what Utah families "are" to how it cannot be a priority to think of water management. But by emailing all 76, I realized that although 15 or even 25 would or could write heinous responses to me about their distaste for anything outside their realms of known experience, I realized that there might be at least that many who might not have such a strong response. Ones who might care what someone might say.
We'll see. I've already had one request for my address (which of course I coudln't send) and another telling me to stick it. But one person did say "thanks. This adds to my reasons to vote against." And so I say yay!

ETA:
From a rep!
Thank you for contacting me about this amendment. I share your concerns and voted against it. I am pleased to let you know that it failed.

Best Wishes,
Representative Karen Morgan

Disaster, minor

I was going to blog on Sunday about the dinner I made on Saturday night. But, right before I went to take the souffles out of the oven, I went to check on Z who had gone to find a necklace in my nightstand drawers. Instead of a necklace, she found a bottle of benadryl. The lid was on, just not very tightly. I found it underneath the pile of pink pills. I asked her if she ate any, she said yes. I said how many, she said two. I had to believe her even though she was saying yes as if I wanted her to say yes. What I really wanted was for her to say no but I didn't want to lead the witness. Two seems plausible. And two too many. So we tell our guests to make themselves at home, to pull the souffles out, to slice the ricotta tart, to add the lemon juice to the lentils and we drive over to the ER. We know where it is. (3 blocks away). We've been there before.
The nurses are pretty calm. No charcoal. No stomach pumping. They just watch her for a minute. Benadryl isn't particularly toxic, we learn. Still, two hours of monitors and lots of stickers on her chest to make sure her heart rate doesn't spike is a long time for a 2.5 year-old. Fortunately we had my cell phone and there's a Tetris-like game on it (who knew?) that now she and Erik are addicted to. We were let go with not too much shame or admonishment. I apologized to Erik and Z for my Benadryl addiction and for my wrists which are apparently too weak to twist a cap all the way to lock.

We got home. The guests had eaten the souffles, the tart, and figured out to put the leeks with the lentils. They also saved us some food and cleaned up the dishes. The best part was that they were still here when we got back. Usually when we go to the ER, no one knows where we are. This time, people were waiting to hear and then willing to hang out longer just so the whole night wasn't a total disaster.

In the end, we think Z took none of the Benadryl. She stayed up until 11 and woke up by 7 the next day.

Indexed

Numbers of pages revised this week: 268—247 of them novel, 21 of them essay.

Number of pages written: 21—1 of a new essay, 1 formal letter and 1 letter of resignation, 18 of comments on stories, essays, and poems.

Number of people who mooned me when they find out I was quitting: 1— both bra and underwear.

Number of calls and emails negotiating job offer: 6.

Number of concessions made of the three I asked for by new school: 3, although only the first by ½.

Number of forms filled out consenting to a background check: 1

Number of readings attended: 2—1 with Bill Olsen and Linda Gregerson, who restored my certainty in poetry and readings and 1 with me, Brock Clarke and Douglas Kearney, who bewildered me all over again.

Number of hawks sighted while returning from the University of Illinois where reading # 2 was held: 16.

Number of phone calls and emails about the transition including am I vested in my 401K, how will we sell this house in the down market, can we move our Italy trip to 2009? 9.

Weight, in pounds of fear, that all the answers will be no: 2,837.

Weight, in pounds of guilt and sadness, of leaving my fine, fine department here: 2,838 (thereby, the guilt will be redeemed when I’m punished by the resulting no’s from the 401K, house selling and Italy questions, though I’ll still be left with a pound left over).

Number of poems of mine re-published on Verse Daily: 1.

Number of times I emailed Verse Daily to make the archives reflect my current name and the first line of the poem: 2.

Number of times asked to listen to Didn’t Bring Nothing But the Baby per hour on the way to U of I: 12.

Number of hours to and fro U of I: 10. Thankfully, it’s a good song and I like Alison Krauss.

Back from AWP/NYC Many Days Ago

AWP was even more fun than usual. Getting out of here was less fun than usual. I woke up at 6, did not shower, did not make coffee. I had parked the 4-Runner in the carport because it was supposed to snow and do other bad things in the sky like freeze rain and spit sleet. So it was cold. 9 degrees. And the locks on the car doors? They were as frozen as the rain. I finally get in, but I'm 10 minutes late.
The roads are not good for lateness. I go very slow on the highway. I take the exit at a mere 10 miles an hour. I make it to the turn into the airport but when I move into the left-lane, all is ice and Lexus SUV in front of me. I slam into him. Hard. We pull over. It's just his ($3823) bumper. He says don't worry about it. But then he takes my phone number.
Now I'm really late.
I get to the parking lot. I park in a snow drift up to my hips. The parking shuttle passes me by. Another one comes before I get frostbite.
By the time I'm at the kiosk, I'm pretty sure they won't let me on but then who do I see but my colleagues, coming in after me, all unfrazzled and unworried.
Turns out the flight is delayed. No time for departure listed. I had checked at home! But the internet lies. It lies a lot.
So we wait and wait. The flight looks like it's ready. There's much cheering in the gate area.
And then there are many tears. Freezing rain is fine for this airport but it's windy in LaGuardia.
I fly out the next day.
The rest of the trip is less eventful. There's some shopping in the village and some good subway riding.
There are many good foods eaten.
First there was Lupa downtown near Prince Street that Mapmaker so kindly organized. It was restaurant week so for $24.07 we had 4 courses. I had the oxtail terrine (sliced very thinly), the pork shoulder fettuccine, pan-seared sea bass and ricotta with honey for dessert.
For dinner: random French restaurant with my good grad school friends. What a surprise to see two of them. Such great times. Goat cheese and beet salad without any beets but otherwise good.
Breakfast the next day at Astros by the hotel (52nd and 6th)--Lox and Bagels.
Lunch: Quality Meats on 58th. Another $24.07 deliciousness. Steak tartar (my first time!), shrimp salad sandwich and some dessert I don't remember. The steak tartar was amazing.
Dinner: I wasn't hungry and I felt a little broke but I really wanted to spend time with my grad school friends. So to Balthazar! A ravioli for appetizer. I had the pork belly. Others (Dr. Write) had the confit and (High-Touch) delicious fish.
The next morning? I went to Carnegie deli. Mistake. I order $20 corned beef hash. It had green peppers. I had four bites. I talked to nice people from Philadelphia though because the tables? They're made for sharing.
But another French lunch with onion soup and foie gras terrine almost redeemed the dining day.
Oh yeah, and then I presented on our panel (I moderated and showed up late because the lines to the bathroom were 100 miles long. Sorry for the stress Margot!). I also spent much time at the bookfair looking at pretty books and lamenting the outcast state of those who seemed desperate for a book. I try very hard not to look desperate but I did spend a fair deal of time and quite a few dollars at the Milkweed table. I'll buy my way into your hearts! I told them.
I also found a few good mags to submit to and some highly hilarious children's books from McSweeney's which Dr. Write also bought.
I didn't see a number of people I had hoped to because my trip was abbreviated but overall it was one of my favorite AWP's. Because it was NYC? Because it was so short?
The rest of the week was full of campus visits and other stresses to be blogged about shortly.
AWP's in Chicago next year. Feb 11-14. Can't wait to see how many flights are canceled then....

3 loveable things

I was tagged by Dr. Write for 3 Things that I love. I hope when I return from NYC, I will have even more things to love.

I love Lord of the Rings and not because I love hobbits or fairies but because I love broad images forests and mountains, the horses—there’s something of the western to the movies because landscape provides its own narrative arc. Because I love images that are tucked into the narrative. But mostly because the movies are Shakespearean—high drama not because it’s exciting but because it affords good language. Gandalph says, “I come to you at the turn of the tide.” And “I will draw you Saraman as poison is drawn from a wound” “Your fingers would remember their own strength better if they grasped your sword” and, the rain-compounded: “And so it begins.” (Can you tell which of the three I’m watching now?) Without really worked high drama, those phrases would fall flat and sound overwrought. The image of Aragorn returning from his near-death cliff-fall as he pushes open the castle door with his right arm is the fulfillment of the tragic hero I’d always imagined.

Mushrooms. If you slice shitakes up and fry them in hot oil, just barely letting go their juices, they can taste like wood-fired steak. Slice chanterelles and bake them in potatoes and cream, they become like butter—butter that resists the tooth and does not melt. Boletes bring out the nuttiness of spaghetti. Dry button mushrooms on pizza counterpoint the liquidy cheese. I miss hunting mushrooms. Erik and I found a few boletes this fall when we went camping with Z but not too many. I love wandering the forests, looking at the moss and the slugs and the ferns—the way the orange, fluted tops of the chanterelle is the perfect counterpoint to all that green and yet are camouflaged by the red bark flaking off into the duff and the dead needles. Looking down for a long time—it’s not something I do very often and it’s a cool upside down world.

My students. Even when they’re failing, even when they don’t show up, even when I ask them what I obviously the most stimulating questions and they stare back at me in silence—I still love them. They have interest. Curiosity. They are not burnt out on lit mags, or poetry contests, or lit theory. They have, when I bring all the tools at my disposal, the capacity to make connections and comparisons that are beyond what I can do alone. When I read a poem for the first time in my introductory class and we go line by line and the students make various associations but learn how the poem builds its own argument, I am back to that place when I first read a poem and saw the way the poem was built. I love how they’re willing to do something new. To experiment. They’re not afraid of thinking that they’re not new. They just believe what they’re doing is new. And so it is.

The Opposite

I'm back from a tour of the deep Southwest. It was snowing there too but in between the snow, it's sunny. Flagstaff is cool. Kind of like Park City, kind of like Iowa City, kind of like Evanston, Wyoming. Cool and small and western and a college town (the Evanston part has mostly to do with the architecture and the size and the westerliness to it). There's a stupid Walmart. And a Sam's Club. But the downtown is full of small businesses and a bunch of good restaurants, brewpubs (2) and coffee shops.

My flight was inane. I took an earlier flight from Flag to Phoenix because I heard that the Flag flight get canceled often. The minute the propeller started, a girl had a panic attack and they had to stop the whirring, open the door, get her bag off. We still made it to Phoenix on time.
There was an earlier flight to Chicago but it would have made my connection from Chicago to here a bit tight. I dithered. I went back. By then, it was too late. You need an hour for such a change so they can get your bag. FAA regulation that you have to fly with your bag.
I should not have dithered (I went to see how much it would be to fly up to SLC for the weekend. About one million dollars to go there and then catch a flight back Sunday morning. We have a job candidate coming in on Sunday and I have to be here).
Note to self. Do not dither.
They said for a small fortune I could upgrade to first class.
I said no.
I went to the bookstore to buy the Book Thief and some tacos (best meal I had the whole trip!) and then I freaked out and said, I need the first class. So I went back, sure they would have sold out.
They didn't. I got the first class ticket and went to do some grading with the very fine free internet courtesy of the Phoenix airport.
And then, Chicago started delaying flights in. We left an hour and a half late. I was sure to miss my connection. But, the delays were widespread and I made my flight by two seconds.
Or I thought it was 2 seconds. They said they had 5 bags to wait for and then we'd be off. They said they had to wait to be de-iced and then we'd be off. They said we had to wait to be pushed back and then we'd be off. We were off by 11:00 (a flight that was supposed to leave at 9:30).
We got in at 12:50 (a short flight but a time change). When I got to the baggage claim, what did I find? Not my bag. I feel that I should tell the FAA on them.

I got home by 2. I couldn't fall asleep until 3:30 or so.

I woke up at 8 anyway.

Today reminds me of my old life before Z and when Egg had to work all the time. I'm watching Lord of the Rings, writing, revising, and eating foods I would not eat in front of my husband. Sometimes, I sit still in the same spot for more than six minutes! No one needs milk. Or juice. Or a puzzle.
And yet, it's only 12:40 and I wonder what the hell the point of the day is. If Z were here, she'd be sure to tell me.

Z at 2 and a half.

Lately, every sentence with Zoe ends “Lily, Cam?” As in, "are we going to see Lily and Cameron, my cousins soon. "Erik and Z are going to Salt Lake next week because I have two business trips in a row plus all these campus visitors coming here and I won’t be around and they may as well bask in the glow of Salt Lake love. Plus, tickets were $178. Considering that they’re often $500 from here, that was a steal. But the Lily, Cam question comes at the end of sentences unrelated to travel. As in when I ask her what she wants for lunch and she says “chips and turkey and Lily and Cam?” Or if I ask her where her purse is she says “purse on couch. Lily Cam?” Or, if we’re going in the car she’ll say, “go in car to play with Lily and Cam?” She does know her cousins live far away and we have to take a plane but I think she thinks the plane ride is not so much to endure if one gets to see Lily and Cam at the end of it. I’m very jealous she gets to see Lily and Cam. And sad to be away from her for so long. She also has a rendition of the list that goes Lily, Cam, Doug, Mice (my mom's "maestra), Grandma, Grandpa, Daddy, Val, George (Joy) and then, in a low, Isaac Hayes-type voice says “Bart” (maestra's boyfriend). She knows Paige won’t be there and I won’t be there. We get a “no Paige, no mommy” list of our own.

Z is very into puzzles now. One, I threw away today. She had bent the pieces until they broke, doing the puzzle so many times. She could do that Princess puzzle in less than a minute by the end. The five year and up puzzles take her a little longer but she’s memorized those mostly now too.

She sings a lot. Erik recorded her a bit on his Mac with the Garageband software. She’s pretty good at singing and once Erik brings home the microphone that Z’s grandpa got her for Christmas, I imagine we'll get full-on rock versions of "I'm Picking Up This Baby Bubblebee." She likes to dance almost as much as sing but we have no video of that. Imagine a toy top that can jump. And swing her arms. With a downward dog and an arabesque thrown in for style. She dances with her dad a lot who has really broadened his dancing horizons: he has added robot dancer and the twirl and dip (both the mom and the Z) to go with general-foot-tapping-stand-mostly-still-dance of before.

Z likes to put her dolls to bed and keep them warm. She also likes to keep beads and legos and stuffed animals and bracelets and socks in her bed. We’re moving her from her crib to the big guest bed which is going OK except when I wake up in the middle of night and see her moon-like face staring at me and she barks a very loud “Hi.” Hi indeed at 3:00 a.m.

She likes to trace our faces with her fingers. It’s very sweet. Unless, again, it’s at 3 in the morning.

She likes me to sing Hush Little Baby 16 times before she goes to sleep. Sometimes, she sings it back in a very experimental tongue. She seems to love the tactility of words. If she’s playing Thomas, she says choo choo choo choo and then will turn, squish her nose up to say fake sneeze an “achoo” because choo choo wasn’t quite in her face enough. It’s pretty easy to understand her most of the time, unless he has a very long and serious story to tell and she’ll cock her neck to one side and gesticlutate with her hands and say “es tay voile moushay tone. Speksy mafle candor sloon.” Usually, she is complaining, possibly in french, against the cat. She calls all cats Box and all scratches Box too.

She like everything to match and she wants everything to be purple. She’ll wear her purple haltertop dress over anything—including another dress. Her socks have to match and the line on the top has to be perfectly perpendicular to her toes. But she does all this dressing of herself except for popping the shirt over her head so I suppose she can choose her style even if I’m beginning to find purple a little overwhelming.

My favorite is that now she speaks in sentences. “I can get down now, please.” “I want some onions, please”. (sometimes please.) She also sometimes slams the door to her room and screams “No Thank You” at me if I try to get her to wear something a little less purple. She says, “Bye. Love you.” Every fourteen seconds. Even if we’re going nowhere. If we are going somewhere and ask her to come on, she says “I’m coming” like she can’t wait to get where we’re going. Which, she hopes, is to see Lily and Cam. As soon as possible. It makes me feel a little better being away from her for 10 days that for 7 of those days, she’ll be with people who, if you add how much they love her together, probably love her as much as I do. And Egg will be with her the whole time. She probably won’t notice I’m gone. But I will.

Edited to add: She also shares her Skittles.