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?