In the past week...

I have plastered wall holes. I am very good at this.

I have not been out once to visit my garden. I am very worried about the state of things, especially as regards my baby squash plant. Also, I have some fall crop seeds that I need to get in the ground, like, yesterday.

I have subsisted off of snack foods, quesadillas, coffee and beer. I could really use a vegetable.

I have finally found the coffee maker in The Forest of Boxes. Of course, I don't have enough clean counter space to set it up yet, nor do I know where the coffee filters are. I don't want to move again until I'm rich enough to pay someone to do it for me. This whole thing is ridiculous.

I haven't yet found my clean socks, but I did find the box where I packed a pair of sandals, so now at least I don't have to worry about not having socks to wear with my sneakers. However, I have only found one flip-flop. I need two flip-flops, because I have two feet. Frustration continues.

Last night J took me to the New Pornographers' concert as an early anniversary celebration. He bought the tickets months ago, and it was a suprise! Yeay! I love suprises! The concert was a lot of fun- very high energy. It was my first concert at the Orpheum as opposed to the Barrymore or the Majestic. It was strange how not-intimate it was. Neko's voice is like scotch (non-original comparison, I know...) and I loved how the band just seemed to be enjoying playing the music... they didn't seem to be so much "performing" it as just "playing" it and having fun. I liked that. I wished the crowd would have settled down more during the few moments in between songs when Neko and AC would banter a bit back and forth. Those bantering moments are my favorite parts of concerts, but the crowd was super hyped up and kept a-hootin' and a-hollerin' so I couldn't really hear anything the musicians were saying. Boo.

We don't have internet yet at the new house. I really dislike this. However, I think Internet will have to wait until we get boxes unpacked and things all in their rightful places and such.

News not from my navel.

I've come to terms with the drama I've been dealing with lately. More or less, anyway. It has to do with work, so I won't/can't/ought not to write about it here.

Meanwhile, the world is like one disgusting giant sauna. Except for without that lovely, relaxing, heavy, pulse slowing, heavenly pore-clensing sauna-ness of a sauna. And there is no cold shower during or after. The worst part about humidity is that gross smells hang about in the air for longer. Case in point: my cat's butt. Cecily is tiny and dainty and wee and so much more like a dolly than a real cat that I don't usually don't even think of her as having a butt. I mean, yes, she does that cat thing where she walks back and forth in front of my face while I am lying down reading, but there is no gross factor. usually. In general, I don't see butt, I don't smell butt, there is no butt-ness to her rear parts. But tonight in the humidity, I became distressedly aware of the reality: my cat, she is real. and she has a butt. a cat-butt. with all the stinky butt-ness that is therewith implied. Go away, stupid yucky humid sauna weather. I want my dainty buttless princess flower kitty back.

Of course, it might not be just the humidity that is making Cecily's butt so very butt-like. The worst part of this whole packing thing is the fact that she seems to think that packing peanuts are tasty tasty kitty toys for munching. I think maybe they give her gas.

Trying to avoid the navel gazing

Best part about the packing process?

Watching Crispin hide and take naps in the various boxes and laundry baskets scattered throughout the house.

In other news, I'm feeling really low energy, isolated and sad these days. My inspiration and enthusiasm for Fiber Arts seems to have dropped off the face of the earth as the temperature crept towards 80. I need to turn my attention to the soul-harrowing process of applying for jobs, and deciding what I'm going to do with my life come September when the rest of the world as I know it goes Back To School.

Also, I taught myself how to use a manual roto-tiller. As in: the kind where the only power comes from my body, no fossil fuels involved. It was crazy hard work, but I was proud of the beautiful loose soil I created out of clay-y lumps.

I'm showing my summer-program students Casablanca. As we watch, I'm impressed with the wit, the subtlety of the script, the beauty of the images, but I'm hit over the head and in the gut again and again by the chauvinism. As if it were a 20 pound brick. I really kind of want to show them Campion's The Piano as an antidote, but don't think I can get away with showing a rated-r film to high-schoolers.

Praise Song for Arugula; a few thoughts on the subject.

A
Ru
Gu
La

Arugulaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
It sounds like a magic spell straight out of Harry Potter.
It tastes a bit like greens, a bit like pepper, and a bit like walnuts.
It grows! So quickly! And so abundantly!
Even in the summer heat. Put the seeds in the ground, and they grow!
Baby sprouts, so rewardingly indentifiable,
Covered with the lace-like veil of row cover, bugs cannot eat you, and you grow!
I will eat you with pasta, or perhaps in a salad with
a juicy pear.

(I am much more sophisticated than bugs.)

I grew you! Or rather, you grew yourself. But I am proud of me for making you possible.
Yum!

P.S. You are also the President's favorite vegetable. He is a very smart man with obviously excellent taste. If he were coming to my house to dinner, I'd totally serve you. And then we'd be eating, and I'd be all like: hey Barack, you like the arugula? and he'd be all like: this is the most delicious arugula i've have ever put in my mouth, except for maybe the arugula my grandmother grew in her garden, but maybe that is just because of the Grandmother Magic. and then I'd be all like: oh thanks. well I grew this arugula. ORGANICALLY. in a COMMUNITY GARDEN. And when bugs were threatening its life, I posted a question on the COMMUNITY Q&A BOARD, and another friendly gardener/community member gave me REALLY ACTUALLY USEFUL FREE ADVICE. So you should give America some more government funding for urban agriculture, especially for low-income people. Like, why does the WI state capitol building have like an acre of grass and fancy flowers and things but a homeless shelter next door where they only can serve processed food? but I would say this modestly and with dignity, and not angrily. and then the president, he'd take another bite of arugula, and after he was finished chewing and swallowing (because of course, Barack Obama does NOT talk with his mouth full) he'd politely wipe his mouth with his cloth napkin that I made myself, look me in the eye, and then he'd be all like: you, madam, are a True American. I wish we had more citizens like you. And then he would make a law that for public money spent on landscaping public spaces had to be evenly split between ornamental things (because flowers and beautiful surroundings ARE important) and edible food, and the food would be given away to food pantries and shelters and people who use food stamps and who live in low-income housing. The food would be delicious and nutritious. And then I would keep that napkin forever, and never let anyone else use it. However, I would totally wash it first before I preserved it, because otherwise it would be a creepy and gross kind of stalker thing to do, and I am not a creepy and gross stalker kind of person. And on my death bed, my relatives would all fight over The Barack Obama Napkin. Except for that I would instruct in my will that they should either auction or raffle it off and give the proceeds to a community garden. All thanks to you, my tasty little arugula; all thanks to you.

July Pie in the Sky

It's July, and it is far too hot and muggy to even think about baking a pie in my kitchen. I've discovered, however, that by putting my pizza stone on the grill, I can make an outside oven and make baked goods without turning my apartment into a sauna. Bread, pizza and cobbler have all worked out well so far.

I have a job. It eats up a lot of my time and basically all of my energy, but mostly I like it. Which is to say, I like my students, but find the program I'm working for to be seriously lacking in organizational goals, integrity, and basic, um... organization.

That is all for now. I'm still alive. I still haven't actually packed any boxes. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

wisdom?

enabling "advice" I gave myself yesterday to boost me out of the grumps: if chocolate doesn't fix it, try vodka...

I'm making a quilt in June. What was I thinking...

holy crap, we're moving again at the end of July. New apartment is cooler, but smaller than current apartment. I need an assisstant to help me Throw Out Crap.

oh yeah, I've agreed to spend tomorrow doing The Bikeride To End All Bikerides. I think it's something like 70 miles round trip, and it's ALL HILLS. There's breakfast at the half-way point, but still. I have not-so-secret-fear that I might not make it, and all the other children will point and laugh at the fat chick. And that I might DIE a horrid Death of Doom. Again, what was I thinking?

The Road To Nowhere Leads to a Bar

J and I rode our bikes out to Lake Mills to visit the Tyranena microbrewery today. It would have been a 60 mile round trip. It was kind of a spontaneous thing - I COULD have spent the day attending a conference all about Labor Organizing, and indeed had been planning to do so until J made the tempting suggestion to NOT spend my day in an oxygen-deprived conference center, but out on the open road getting a workout and exploring a new part of Wisconsin instead.

However, in the spontenaity of the moment, we neglected to consider that we were leaving our house at noon. For a 60 mile bike trip. Bike as in bicycle, not as in motorcycle. Had we stopped for about 6 seconds and put 2 and 2 together to get four, we would have tossed our lights into our gear bag. As it was, it got dark when we had about 20 miles to go. Dark, not "dusky" or "twighlighty" or "dim." Full on dark. We locked our bikes to a convenient tree and called some kind friends who came and got us.

Here are the specs of the trip.

Actual distance ridden: maybe 45 miles.
Beers I drank: 1 pint Scurvy IPA and about 1/3 of our tasting flight. The beers that best fitted with my preferences and tastes were the Hefeweizen, the Scurvy IPA (a not-overly-hoppy IPA that is brewed with orange peel) and the Femme Ameins, which is a version of Tyranena's beloved Bitter Woman IPA with kind of a Belgian Farmhouse style twist.

The Amber Alt was good, too, but I was not overly impressed by the Three Beaches Lager or the Rocky's Revenge Burbon Barrel Brown.

Wildlife seen:
Chipmunks: 20 or so. extremely adorable.
Toads: 3; 2 alive, one not so much.
Catapillars: about 20,000 more than I wanted to see. They are all doing that swarming thing, and that dangling from the tree by a thread thing, so I got a lot of catapillars on me as a rode, which I did not like. I like to touch bugs on my terms, not on theirs.
Cranes: 1. J identified it, and even though I called first baby ducks of the season, first goose pups of the season, first chipmunk of the trip AND all of the frogs of the trip, he pretty much just beat me in Animals: Competitive Identification by like a million points FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE. Because seriously, a crane? That's just awesome. I'm not telling him that he won, though.

Interesting people we encountered:
Lesbians riding their bikes from Chicago to Minneapolis: 1
Lesbians who asked me if I was a lesbian: 1*^
Assholes who have no trail ettiquette: 2
Cute dogs: more than 15


*It was actually the same woman.
^It amuses/bemuses me when I scramble people's gay-dar. On one hand, yeay for screwing with binary paradigms of gender and sexuality! On the other hand, I am quite blind to what it is about me that would cause somone to "read" me in this way, and knowing that I have this blind spot with regards to myself makes me uncomfortable.

Interview went ok. Now I just have to sit tight and see if there are enough enrollments for them to justify hiring me.

In other news, I'm slogging through the last circle of grading hell... after I'm done, I'm taking the world's longest shower and assessing the Fiber Arts Situation I've got going on around here.

Oh, so you think my ramblings about Fiber Arts would be more "interesting" if I posted pictures, too, do you?

I can't decide if I should flip you the bird or just start laughing maniacally. I am, after all, working on about 3.5 hours of sleep here.

Pictures! hah! Oh the technology! oh the humanity! the horror! the horror!

The digi cam and I, we are not such great friends, to say nothing of that creepy little digi cam cord that transfers the pixely pictures to the 'puter...

... but maybe after the World's Longest Shower, and the Fiber Arts Situation Assessment, I'll see what I can do.

until then, slog through the blue books I shall.

what do you think the strong verb declension for "to slog" should be? Let's have a contest! The winner will not receive a used blue book.

Second Thoughts...

In less than 5 hours I will be interviewing for a job in which I will use my finely honed bullshitting skillz to cater to the egos and college-application-resumes of extremely entitled, privileged teenagers. I will be expected to lead "seminar-style" classes, but am dubious about the whole "ability to assign homework and hold students accountable for doing it" thing.

Remind me again: why I am *voluntarily* exposing myself to judgement, eye-rolling, pubescent hormones and youthful self-importance?

16 bucks an hour, baby. Mama ain't got no standards, and apparently no pride, neither.

I will let you know how it goes. If I get the job (which I actually do kind of want) I promise not to whine about my every day material reality of pandering in this space.

As a woman much more famous, witty, educated and self-confident than I am recently wrote: rich kids need teachers who are interested in social justice, too.

Blathering

It's the first day in I-don't-know-how-many that I have the WHOLE day to myself. The sheer decadence of it is so, so very tasty after this hectic week. Just knowing that this is MY day, a day for ME is so mentally liberating and rejunvenating, that it almost doesn't matter that I'm feeling so physically gross that I probably won't get to do half of the things I wanted to to (woodworking project, bike ride, thoroughly clean kitchen...).

We put our TV in the basement, did you know that? We were spending too much time watching law & order re-runs, and then the stereo broke. We're not ready yet to invest in a good sound system, and it seemed silly to spend money on another cheap-o stereo only to have it break in a few years when our computer has a really nice set of speakers. So we set the desktop up in the living room as a combined stereo/dvd watching device, and since hulu doesn't carry law and order, we watch a LOT less TV now. J has been playing the guitar more, and I've been reading more, being more innovtive with my knitting obsession, and my brain has just been feeling like more of a creative place in general. So, yeay.

We're not getting a CSA share this year. My employment situation is what one could call "piecemeal" and "not stable," so I was just not comfortable putting down a huge chunk of change up front, especially as we did not find another couple to split a full share with, and the price of a half-share is considerably more than the price of half of a full share.

I'm a little sad about not getting the CSA. I am excited about sharing a garden plot with another couple this summer, though. I have really been wanting to learn how to grow my own vegetables, and my friend S said she'd teach me how.

It's been about 6 weeks, so time for a new post, no?

Today while walking down Bascom Hill, I overheard one dude say to another dude: "...and then someone drank my pee as a chaser, and that just made my weekend awesome."

Well.
Hearing that story did not make my Monday awesome.

But that is kind of ok, because I am so distracted by all the crazy ideas and schemes in my brain that I keep forgetting that it is Monday, and ask people if it is a Friday. I suppose, in a way, the end of the semester is like The World's Biggest Friday, with a 3-month-long weekend coming at the tail end of it.

I've been busy knitting. And playing with yarn that I re-claim from sweaters purchased at the Goodwill. And by "playing" I mean "I am completely obsessed" and by "yarn" I mean "fiber arts in general."

This is how crazy it has gotten: there are specialized wooden tools that help you do things in fiber arts: a niddy-noddy winds yarn into a skein for dying and soaking; a swift helps you wind a tidy ball from a skein; a lazy kate holds multiple balls of fiber that you intend to ply together to create a thicker yarn. Not only have a researched these tools and their uses (and crazy cool names!) I have found instructions for making them on the Internet, and I am going to build them for myself. I already have the niddy-noddy built, and I am currently tweaking the design slightly. Oh yes, I am a nerd. A fiber-arts nerd of the first degree. I won't tell you how many Goodwill sweaters made out of luxury fibers are sitting at home waiting for me to deconstruct. If I did, you might laugh too hard and die of an aneurism or something tragic like that.

Don't die. If you do, who will wear all the crazy stuff I knit with all the yarn I re-claim from those sweaters?

Tidbits

An older gentleman informed me the other day at St. Vinnie's that a lot of people like to collect old pencils, and that people on the internet pay a lot of money for them.

***

When I was a child, I took great pleasure in a new box of crayons or colored pencils- each piece of uniform length and pointiness, the colors arranged in that highly-pleasing just-from-the-factory order. As an adult, I find the same kind of pleasure in simple luxuries: a fresh card of bobby pins or hair clips; a new package of purse-tissues; an unopened pack of gum.

***

I always want to know the strangest things about people: are you finicky about your Grilled Cheese Sandwich, and if so, how do you like it? When you walk into a bay of empty bathroom stalls, do you have a preference for which stall you'd like to use? (ie, one closest to the wall, the one on the far end...) What kinds of systems do you have for organizing things or making choices? Do you feel strongly about chewy cookies, squeezing toothpaste, and the direction from which the toilet paper falls? What foods do you absolutely hate? Do details like these provide any information about a person's character or personality? Does knowing these little factoids help a person "know" an other person?

***

Today I planned to buy a paper from the homeless guy on the corner. I had some cash in small bills, I made sure to put it in my pocket ('cause I'm paranoid about whipping out my wallet in public - as a child it was drilled into me that this is a good way to get your whole wallet stolen when you are intending to only give a modest donation), and then when I exited Walgreens after purchasing a new deoderant and some cotton balls, the usually Street News vendor spot was vacant, and there was an eerie sense of emptiness on the uncrowded sidewalks.

***

There have been signs of spring. I've seen the pussy willow budding, and the house finches are returning. We put the winter coats and scarves/hats/gloves collection back into basement storage. In every other season except for winter, I know and feel that the other seasons exist and will come around. I can remember what it feels like to be in a different season. In winter, I only know, feel, and experience winter.

Notes from the depths of my couch...

... and lo, there is phlegm, and I like it not. There is much, much phlegm and I loathe it.

But before there was phlegm, there was Puerto Rico. And Puerto Rico, my friends, was 80 degrees, and sunny, and full of wide sandy beaches and frosty blended beverages. Just like in all the movies about Tropical Paradise(s). We swam, we hiked, we biked, we indulged ourselves with plates of french fries. We dreamed about becoming expats. We went on a tour of the world's most sparkliest bay of biolumenescent plankton. As in, it was dark, we went swimming in a bay, and where the water came into contact with something solid, it lit up and sparkled. Ok, not the water itself, per say, but rather, the teeny tiny little dinoflagellites that live in the water. It was amazing. It was more wonderous than watching the light play off the facets of a well-cut gemstone or than stirring a jar of glitter with a popsicle stick.

school has started, and i have been too sick to go. i am on the mend, for sure (praises be to Antibiotics When You Actually Need Them!) and am getting to that point where i am antsy and cranky and lonely. however, my prolonged isolation makes me trepiditious and aprehensive about all the responsibilities that await me in The Real World. Maybe if I wrap up some of the many projects I've got laying around here, I'll feel more confident about that tomorrow? meh.