February: out with a bang, not a whimper

Around here February seems to be going out with a bang--or a bunch of bangs, alternating with pops, shrieks, and fizzles. Why would anybody set off fireworks on a cold, dark February Thursday in the middle of nowhere?

Well, it's complicated. The story starts with a tractor that needs some serious maintenance, plus a son-in-law whose idea of a fun way to spend a day off is to fix things. He arrived here with our grandson in tow this afternoon, and then the men bundled up and went down to the garage to see if they could get the tractor going again. It was a three-person job, with the two-year-old patiently holding the flashlight while my husband and son-in-law fiddled with air filters and hydraulic lines and various murky fluids.

I went down to check on progress at one point and found that they'd gotten the tractor started (hurrah!) and moved it inside the garage, where my son-in-law was lying on the cold floor so he could reach some essential part under the tractor. In my view, anyone willing to lie on the floor of a damp garage on a cold February day deserves some kind of reward, which is why I had black beans simmering on the stove all afternoon and home-made guacamole in the fridge.

But in the course of moving things around to get the tractor into the garage, the men found another kind of reward: a cache of fireworks, probably dating from our daughter's wedding ten years ago. How long can cheap fireworks survive in a damp garage? There's only one way to find out, so after our grandson settled into bed, the men went down to the meadow to properly dispose of the fireworks in the most celebratory manner possible.

From the sounds of it, most of the fireworks retained their sizzle. I would go down and watch, but I don't want to leave my grandson alone. Besides, it's cold out there. Let the working men blow off some steam, because soon enough they'll be lying on the cold floor trying to make my world run a little more smoothly.

Flashback to the movie "Mouse Hunt"

Good news! I finally found some old-style mousetraps that I can set without snapping my fingers--and boy, do we need 'em. Last night while I was reading in the living room, a mouse (or mice?) went skittering past the sofa and proceeded to play hide-and-seek around the houseplants on the hearth. I set four traps in the areas where mice are most active, firmly expecting to see some results by this morning. Here is my report:

The mousetrap behind the desk in the hall looks untouched.

The mousetrap along the wall right next to the sofa has been stripped of peanut butter and is surrounded by mouse droppings, but it did not snap. Ditto the mousetrap on the hearth.

The mousetrap under the stove has disappeared entirely. (How do they DO that?)

I'm beginning to suspect that the only way to get rid of the mice is to burn down the house. (Don't tempt me.) 

Update: My son-in-law found a "mouse superhighway," a gap in the foundation where mice and snakes and anything else could get into the house, and he and my husband mixed up some cement and blocked it up. He also stapled steel wool and aluminum screening material over a bunch of holes inside the house, including the big hole behind the stove. We know of one more spot where mice could be squeezing in, but it will have to wait for another visit. Progress!

Don't even talk to me about the joys of country life

In retrospect, driving under the tree blocking my road may not have been a brilliant idea. Granted, I had watched another car drive under the trunk of the tree without scraping on the dangling branches so I knew it could be done, but I didn't even consider what would happen if the tree shifted in the high winds and continued falling (crunch), and it didn't even occur to me that squeezing under a tree that had fallen on a power line was probably not the textbook way to Arrive Alive. 

I had been driving around an obstacle course of fallen trees and limbs for more than an hour and I was eager to see whether anything big had fallen on my house, so I took a deep breath and drove under the dangling tree. On the wrong side of the road. On a blind curve. Under a tree that had fallen on a power line.

But I made it home unscathed and soon discovered that nothing big enough to do damage had fallen on my house, hurrah--but on the other hand, the power was out. Which means no heat and no well pump and therefore no water, no toilet-flushing, no lights, and did I mention no heat? Without power, my house is very quiet and very cold, but I had good flashlights and candles and plenty of blankets. Last night I lay in bed listening to the wind whipping through the trees and wondered what I would find outside in the morning, which came earlier than I'd expected: I woke around 5 needing a bathroom and more blankets.

The inside temperature fell to 54 overnight, which is not bad but also not particularly comfortable, and it was still very dark and did I mention no water? So I dressed quickly and drove a few miles up the highway to a McDonald's that had light, heat, and water. The tree I drove under yesterday had been removed, but two new trees had fallen to cover half of my road at that same blind curve. I don't know about you, but driving on the wrong side of the road on a blind curve isn't good for my blood pressure. (It didn't occur to me until much later that I'd left the house in such a hurry that I'd forgotten to take my blood-pressure pill.)

But here's the goods news: the storm didn't kill me and didn't hurt my house. The power company estimates that power will be restored by midnight tonight, although that estimate is subject to change based on unknown elements. The outage map shows a power outage affecting only 25 customers along my road, so I suspect that we won't be at the top of the priority list, especially with many more customers and businesses still lacking power in Marietta. But the campus has power (and heat, and light, and water), so I'll hang out there until things get back to normal, or as close to normal as it is possible to be when high winds are dropping trees all over the county.
 

Quick, run outside before the clouds come back!

After days, weeks, maybe months of rain, sleet, snow, and fog, the sky cleared and the sunshine lured me outside for a walk along my road, still mushy from rain but more walkable than the waterlogged meadows and woods, and even though my legs felt like tree stumps rooted in place after days, weeks, months of sitting too much and exercising too little, I walked up the big horrible hill, felt the sun on my face and the wind in my hair, saw a red-tailed hawk and two turkey vultures (even though it's a little early for their return from the south) and a kingfisher and tufted titmouse and who knows what else, and I felt the gloom lifting and blowing away like a wisp of cloud drifting off into a clear blue sky.

I asked for customer service, not a life coach

So I'm talking to customer service at Frontier Communications again, trying to impress upon them the importance of having a functional landline in an area with no cell-phone coverage, and the customer service rep comes up with a novel solution to my problem: "Why don't you just move someplace that has cell-phone coverage?"

Well, that would certainly make life easier for Frontier, because they wouldn't have to repeatedly send technicians out to fix the phone lines--unless, of course, someone else moved into the house and expected that because there are phone lines connected to the house, there must be phone service. Which there is. Occasionally.

And it would make my life easier in one way, because I would, presumably, be able to rely on my cell phone for all my communication needs and I would therefore never again have to deal with customer service at Frontier. However, this solution would make life more difficult for me in many other ways because it would require selling my house, packing up everything I own, and moving. Not exactly a walk in the park.

I'm trying to imagine other service industries making similar suggestions:

• Sure, ma'am, we could have someone come out and exterminate your pests, but wouldn't you be better off moving to a place where no mice live?
• Yes of course we could deliver your package to your house, but it would be easier for all of us if you would just move a little closer to the post office, preferably to a house with a less steep driveway.
• Are you sure you want those tires rotated? We're busy. Why don't you just start riding your bike everywhere?
• Cleaning your teeth is such a pain. Have you thought about pureeing everything in a blender so you won't have to chew?

Ridiculous. No reputable service-oriented business would survive if it operated this way, and yet Frontier thinks that, on the whole, it would be better for me to uproot my entire household than for them to provide the phone service for which I am paying them. If that's customer service, I'm Eleanor Roosevelt, and I think I'll call and tell them so.

As soon as they fix my phone.
 

Of traffic spikes, detours, and dead ends

I was sitting at my little house in the woods one evening last week when I noticed a steady stream of traffic wending its way down my road. Seeing two cars at a time on my stretch of country road is pretty unusual, but this caravan of cars and trucks continued all evening. I assumed that traffic was being re-routed from the state highway, and sure enough that was the case: a fatal car wreck had closed the highway and sent rush-hour traffic down a road so rural that our neighbor's dog can safely sleep on the pavement.

That's life in the slow lane: a sudden spike in traffic is a sign that something, somewhere is out of whack.

And that's life in the slow lane on this blog, too. Page visits are up and so are comments, but the vast majority of those page visits are from faceless bots and the vast majority of comments are quickly identified as spam and deleted. If I subtract the bot-driven spikes, readership is practically nothing, and comments have dried up.

Where did everyone go? I know many of my fellow academic bloggers have headed off to the Twitterverse, but I'm not going there for several good reasons, not the least being that I still have no cell reception at my house. I generally prefer the slow lane, but at the moment it feels a little too slow. And quiet. And lonely.

What's the answer? I wish I knew. I'm not one for courting controversy or making emotional appeals for attention, but at the same time I don't want to be the last one in the room who's unaware that the party is over. 

So I'm sitting quietly and watching traffic and wondering what to do when the traffic finally stops. It's quiet over here. Anybody have a suggestion? 

Just feeding my addiction

When I served (briefly) as interim director of our campus Writing Center, I would sometimes arrive first thing in the morning and find that someone working in Center the night before had left a porn site open on one of the computers. Annoying--and very different from the guilty pleasures I indulged in during my own undergraduate service as a writing tutor. True confession time: If I found myself alone in the Writing Center, lacking a client or blessed with some unsupervised free time, I would secretly indulge my addiction to reading style guides.

Yes: I might have started with a taste of Strunk and White, but I soon moved on to the hard stuff--Fowler and Bernstein and the AP Stylebook and even (gasp!) the massive Chicago Manual of Style. I loved exploring lists of easily confused words, examples of dangling participles, and techniques for repairing faulty parallelism. 

The taste has never left me; as evidence I offer my four-foot shelf crammed full of style guides, grammar grumblings, and weird word books: The Transitive Vampire. Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. So many more, and I love 'em all.

The newest addition to my collection is Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer, a longtime copy editor and now a vice president and copy chief at Random House. But don't let that Utterly Correct subtitle fool you: Dreyer explains grammatical principles clearly, but he understand the language thoroughly enough to know when the rules need to be broken. He rejects those pettifogging rules that are "largely unhelpful, pointlessly constricting, feckless, and useless," explaining that his goal is to provide writers with a rational basis for the choices they make:

Quite a lot of what I do as a copy editor is to help writers avoid being carped at, fairly or--and this is the part that hurts--unfairly, by People Who Think They Know Better and Write Aggrieved Emails to Publishing Houses. Thus I tend to be a bit conservative about flouting rules that may be a bit dubious in their origin but, observed, ain't hurting nobody.

See how he flouts your third-grade teacher's rule against "ain't" in a sentence about flouting rules? Dreyer's playfulness enlivens discussions about normally stodgy topics such as, for instance, ending a sentence with a preposition, which "isn't such a hot idea, mostly because a sentence should, when it can, aim for a powerful finale and not simply dribble off like an old man's unhappy micturition."

He covers the usual suspects--punctuation, numbers, dangling modifiers, frequently confused words--with brevity and verve and memorable images, like this one: "Think of colons as little trumpet blasts, attention-getting and ear-catching. Also loud. So don't use so many of them that you give your reader a headache."

Or this:

As a serial abuser of parentheses, I warn you against their overuse, particularly in the conveyance of elbow-nudging joshingness. One too many coy asides and you, in the person of your writing, will seem like a dandy in a Restoration comedy stepping to the footlights and curling his hand around his mouth to confidentially address the audience. One rather needs a beauty mark and a peruke to get away with that sort of thing.

Also refreshing is Dreyer's appreciation of aesthetics, his attention to both how a sentence sounds and how it looks on the page. "I suppose it's an obvious point," he writes, "but if a style choice follows the rules but results in something that looks awful or makes no sense on the page, rethink it."

And then there are the footnotes, snarky little tidbits in small print well worth the squint, like this comment on a certain unnamed magazine's house style: "If you're going to have a house style, try not to have a house style visible from space." 

(Hmm: Maybe I should shelve Dreyer's book next to Mary Norris's Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, in which the former New Yorker copy editor explains that magazine's devotion to the diaeresis, which doesn't look right no matter how I spell it. Let Norris and Dreyer duke it out between themselves while I'm not looking.)


Sometimes my students complain about having to consult a style guide or wonder why they should care about semicolons or numerals or parallel structure, but they'll never know the joy of consulting competing style guides to track nuances of usage through multiple examples and footnotes. Style guides are my guilty pleasure, toolbox and toybox wrapped up together, and Dreyer's English will make a charming addition to my bookshelf. If I'm an addict, I'm also a pusher: go ahead, give it a taste. You won't be sorry. 

Candle in the wind

Is it possible to be awakened by silence? I'm lying in bed in the wee hours when the silence suddenly feels frighteningly deeper and the darkness darker, and I realize that I hear absolutely nothing and see no trace of a glow from the phone or the alarm clock or anything. 

The power is off. No light, no heat, no water, no fridge, and soon all the battery backups will fade and I'll have no contact with the outside world--because all our recent rain has drenched the phone lines with thick static. 

I fumble through the dark house for the flashlight on top of the fridge, find some candles and light them, and then start checking out the situation: 4 a.m. and 30 degrees outside, with a light coating of snow on the ground. The sun will come up in a few hours and forecasts are calling for warming temps today, so it's unlikely that the pipes will freeze. Still, a few candles aren't going to keep the house from getting unbearably cold. Could I manage to light a fire in the fireplace? I would have to move a dozen unwieldy houseplants out of the way and haul in some wood and get it burning. There's the challenge. We all know that fire-starting is not my forte, and my husband is in Jackson until Thursday.

As I hunker under a blanket in the candlelight, I realize that the silence is not absolute: the wind outside is blustery, with sudden gusts rattling the windows and shaking the trees. I'm thankful for a sturdy roof and sufficient insulation--and a reliable car that can take me away to find warmth if the outage lasts. If I weren't home alone in the bleak midwinter, the candlelight could feel romantic, but as the wind gusts outside, those flickering flames provide a wan defense against the darkness.

And then just as I've settled in for the duration, the power flicks back on: the furnace comes to life, nightlights come on, and the microwave starts blinking 12:00. Relief! Back to normal--but I think I'll leave the candles burning a little longer while I sit here and listen to the howling wind.

What's on the menu? Copious notes.

When some friends took me to lunch at a restaurant called Copious Notes, I had to laugh. "Story of my life," I said--or at least it's the story of my sabbatical. Once a week I go to campus to drop off a pile of interlibrary loan books and pick up the next pile, and then I spend the rest of the week reading and taking copious notes, which will I will eventually have to massage into some sort of shape, publishable or lecturable.

To an outsider, this process must look pretty boring, and not at all like real work: 

What have you been doing lately?  
Copious notes. 

How was your weekend?  
Copious notes. 

What's on the schedule tomorrow?
Copious notes.

Lunch at Copious Notes was fun and fabulous--Cajun shrimp and cheese grits accompanied by live jazz music, colorful art on the walls, and interesting company--but most days lately my life is much less flavorful, with copious notes for breakfast, lunch, and midnight snack. I would much prefer to eat at the restaurant called Copious Notes than to sit in my study space being consumed by copious notes, but I am propelled forward toward the time when I can put a fork in my sabbatical project and call it done, and the only way to get there is to keep piling up all these copious notes.

And when I'm done--what better way to celebrate than to go back for a real meal at Copious Notes? 

Random bullets of happy happy joy joy

I feel as if I've been grinning from ear to ear for the past four days, but did any of that really happen if I haven't written about it? And I'm not talking about the Superbowl, either: I've just experienced an intensive outpouring of moments so joyful that they've made me (mostly) forget all the painful ways in which my body is betraying me and the world is falling apart. Here's a sampling:

• On Saturday I saw Hamilton in Columbus, thanks to the generosity of a friend with a spare ticket, and even though I now know all the ways in which the play is flawed and historically inaccurate, it was an absolute blast. I already knew Hamilton was an amazing feat of storytelling, but seeing all the parts come together on stage made it so much more magical--even if I did have to twist myself into a pretzel to see around the pumpkin-headed man in front of me.
• As I drove north to visit the grandkids, the polar vortex moved east to torture other souls, leaving behind beautiful snow and warming temperatures that tempted us out of the house over and over. Walking along an icy sidewalk, my grandson solicitously advised, "Be careful, Grandma! It's slippery!" (Or, as he says it, "swippewy.") He learned what happens when you jump on melting ice over a puddle deeper than your rain boots, but we all enjoyed warming up together afterward.
• "I love going to the dentist!" proclaimed my granddaughter, and I could see why: Puzzles! Bubbles! And two loose teeth! Later, my grandson showed how well he can brush his own teeth, and then he offered to help his baby sister with her tooth-brushing skills. When small children take such delight in dental hygiene, someone must be doing something right.
• And speaking of doing things right, my adorable daughter has many skills that are justly lauded: she can sing like an angel, bake cookies to die for, and express kindness in so many ways that I've lost count. But this morning I witnessed two talents that are seen too rarely: she can gobble like a turkey so convincingly that the wild turkeys stop in their tracks, and she can take photos with the eye of an artist. From a distance the wild turkeys looked dark and dull, but the camera reveals a lovely range of colors and textures on their feathers.
• I've been bothered by e-mail after e-mail regarding a particularly messy committee task, but yesterday I received the best news ever: tomorrow's meeting is cancelled. If that isn't enough to keep me grinning for another 24 hours, nothing will.

 

I'm the king of the world!

Be very careful, Grandma. It's swippewy.

Such beautiful evening light.

Levitating!

Just hanging around.

Wanna make something of it?

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