From falling trees to failing teas

If a tree falls in the forest and I'm not there to hear it, does it still make an impact?

Yes, and you could have heard the long-term effect of this impact early this morning if you'd seen me bonking my head against my car's door frame. It may not be immediately clear how these two events are related, but one led to the other as inevitably as washing the car leads to rain.

So the resident woodsman cut down a tree, a lovely tulip poplar that unfortunately grew too close to the driveway and interfered with delivery trucks' ability to get around the last steep curve. I'm amazed that he brought this massive tree down without doing any damage to nearby rhododendron bushes or the bottlebrush buckeye, but there was nowhere to drop it but across the driveway so there it still sat when I got home last night. I parked my car further down the driveway and clambered up a wet, muddy slope to get to the house, too tired to think about how I might eventually get the car out of its tight spot.

This morning the rain was pouring down when I went out the door laden with umbrella, tote bag, flashlight, and a loaf of zucchini bread (for a retired colleague who's coming by for a casual colloquy this afternoon). My husband helped me get down the muddy slope and then executed a perfect 14-point turn to get my car facing the right direction--and off I went, never even noticing that I'd left the house without my usual travel mug full of tea. Yes, I blame the tree for that, because if the tree hadn't been in the way, I wouldn't have been too distracted to notice the travel-mug-shaped void at the center of my being.

But I didn't notice the absence until I was halfway to town and I can't get through the morning without my usual quota of caffeine so I decided to stop at a convenience store and pick up a jolt of Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi, which is not my usual morning quaff but there really isn't anywhere in town to get real chai brewed from loose tea leaves or even bottled unsweetened iced tea, and beggars can't be choosers.

So I walk out in the rain and open the car door and the slippery plastic Pepsi bottle slips out of my hand and starts rolling away, at which point I lunge after it but miscalculate the angles and bash my head against the door frame. Ouch! (Again, I blame the tree. Obviously!) And there goes my morning quota of caffeine rolling across the parking lot into the path of a car, whose driver stops and looks at me where I'm holding my aching head and nods to indicate he'll wait while I retrieve my drink, which is just about to roll into the road. This is a person who understand the power of caffeine addition. 

Did I go running across a rainy parking lot this morning to chase a bottle of Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi? Yes I did. I may have sacrificed my dignity, but I salvaged my caffeine.

Now I'm in my office preparing for tomorrow's classes while the resident woodsman disassembles the tulip poplar's trunk to move it out of the driveway. If all goes according to plan, I'll be able to drive all the way up my driveway when I finally get home. If not, I think I'll just leave my car in a ditch and drop out of the rat race, wandering off to become a woodland hermit. 

(But who will bring me my morning tea? If my tea fails in the woods--trust me, you'll hear it.)

Let them eat cake!

So I'm sitting in my Honors Literature room a few minutes before class starts and a student raises her hand and asks, "Can we have cake?" 

Well sure, why not? Cake in class would be a great idea, now that we're no longer operating under those strict Covid protocols that outlawed food and drink in the classrooms. However, on the first day of class I'm not generally equipped to serve cake to students, so I guess the answer to the question is: Yes, but not today.

I'm trying to say Yes to students more often because they're coming to my class after all those Covid disruptions and I want to create a comfortable and challenging learning environment, but also because I'm aware that some people find English teachers scary. I don't think I'm particularly intimidating but then I'm not an 18-year-old freshperson, so what do I know? So I say yes to cake (but not today).

I also gave a qualified yes to a student who emailed me last week with a question related to my new no-laptops-in-the-classroom policy. I told him about the problem I had last year with students being so busy doing on unrelated things on their laptops (emailing, assignments for other classes, shopping, games) that they simply weren't available to engage in class discussions, and I told the student that if he can meet with other students in the class and come up with a proposal that will meet their needs for technology while meeting my need to have students engage in class discussion, then I'll be happy to negotiate. I hope to give students a sense of agency, but not so much agency that they'll disengage from class entirely. We'll see how it works.

And we'll see how I work too. I've taught two first-year classes back-to-back this morning and I'll teach two sophomore-level classes back-to-back this afternoon, which is a workable schedule. This is the first time in 20 years that I haven't had an 8 a.m. class, but I was ready to go at 8 anyway. Old habits die hard! This morning's classes went well, with students appearing alert, curious, and eager to ask questions. Let's hope they're as interested in learning as they are in eating cake. 

My first-day-of-school picture.

 

Rule 1: No pajamas at meetings

Yesterday I received an email requesting that I attend a meeting today from 3:30 a.m. to 3:40 p.m., and said, "Dude, I don't meet with anyone at 3:30 a.m. except my pillow." So he sent a corrected time for the meeting: 3:30 p.m. to 3:40 a.m. the next day. Someone needs to figure out his scheduling software!

When people ask me whether classes have started yet I say, "No, but I have a lot of meetings," but outsiders don't seem to understand just how disruptive and time-consuming academic meetings can be, even when they're not scheduled at 3:30 a.m. Three meetings yesterday, two today, three tomorrow, each one requiring a different level of preparation. Today's meeting required me to dress professionally, but I don't even know what that means anymore. I showered, and I'm not wearing pajamas. Isn't that enough?

Given the current campus climate/budget crisis/dystopian nightmare, some of these meetings get pretty intense. Spend an hour immersed in a thick gray sludge of anger, fear, and gloom, and then emerge into a lovely sunny day with butterflies flitting among the flowers--it's like moving between parallel universes. But even the butterflies can't stop people from congregating outside for the meeting postmortem, where we prod the corpse a few more times to see whether it's really dead or just sleeping.

Sleeping gets more difficult after a stressful meeting, which is why it would make some sense to start scheduling meetings at 3:30 a.m. I mean, if we're not sleeping anyway, why not do something useful?

Not really about sharks, or anvils either

Somewhere deep in the darkest recesses of my memory lies the scene from Batman where Adam West, dangling from a helicopter, gets attacked by an extremely phony shark and saves himself by asking Robin to hand him an aerosol can of Shark Repellent--and I know I didn't just dream that up because here it is on YouTube.

The scene raises a number of questions, starting with Why and moving on to Who's flying the helicopter while Robin fetches the Shark Repellent, but you've got to hand it to a guy who has so deeply internalized the Boy Scout Motto that he can Be Prepared to fight off a shark attack even while dangling from a helicopter. 

I wasn't a particularly good Girl Scout, but even I knew that you can't Be Prepared for everything all the time: you wouldn't take Shark Repellent on a trek through the desert any more than you'd take sunscreen while spelunking. There just isn't a tool belt big enough to deal with all possible problems, much less the impossible ones. I mean, you don't whip out a handy can of Anvil Repellent unless you live in a world where anvils routinely fall out of the sky.

But what if you do?

This week an anvil fell on my campus, and those of us who were close enough to see a beloved colleague's career go splat are suddenly asking ourselves a bunch of questions we've never had to ask before. For instance:

• Is this a one-time event or should we expect showers of anvils?
• How does one protect oneself from showers of anvils? Umbrellas would be useless, and no one's selling Falling Anvil Insurance.
• If an anvil could fall on that end of campus, what's to stop one from falling on my building or my department or my office?
• If I saw an anvil falling toward my office and had only 30 seconds to save what I could from the wreckage, what would I grab? What would I gladly leave behind?
• How does one prepare for the possibility of falling anvils? I'd start with a home computer so I don't have to be entirely dependent on my college laptop, plus an email account separate from my college account, plus copies of all my valuable files, but what else do I need in my toolbelt?

Even Batman couldn't fight off that shark on his own--he needed his trusty sidekick. If the local forecast calls for showers of anvils, I hope those of us who see it coming will band together to share whatever we've got in our toolbelts. Now is the time Be Prepared--to make sure those toolbelts are fully stocked up with useful things, because once the anvils start falling, it'll be too late.

Wandering in the realm of possibility

I'd like to say that this morning I found myself boldly going where no man had gone before, but clearly others had bushwhacked through the wilderness before me and left random stuff behind. At one point I asked my companion to identify some unfamiliar foliage on the ground, and she said, "Christmas tree." Which indeed it was: branches from an artificial tree, scattered amongst teasels and ironweed and milkweed in the middle of nowhere.

We were exploring a 44-acre tract of land that had recently been donated to the Friends of the Lower Muskingum River. The hilly land would be ideal for hiking trails and a picnic shelter and a pollinator habitat, but first the group needs to figure out what's there and what needs to be done to make it usable. I offered to go out with the FLMR director and take some photos to put in the newsletter, and that's why I found myself early this morning stumbling through thick stands of giant ironweed and sliding down a deer trail toward a secluded creek. 

Butterflies and other pollinators were out in abundance, along with pesky horseflies adept at landing on that unreachable spot in the middle of my back. Up on the ridge (which I'm calling Butterfly Ridge until it gets a real name) we walked in bright sun over the overgrown remains of a gravel drive, but along the creekbanks the foliage closed in and we found ourselves ducking under branches of autumn olive and avoiding thickets of multiflora rose. It's a narrow, twisty creek and we don't know whether it's prone to flooding, but we were pleased to see some small fishes and some easy places to wade across.

At first it looked like untouched wilderness, but by the time were were done, the whole place was overlaid by signs of prior habitation and dreams of what could be there in the future. It doesn't even have a name but it's a place of possibilities visible only to those who are willing to look. But you'll never find the place without a guide, and I was really happy to have a good one this morning.

 

Making a nuisance of myself, maybe

I'm sitting in the lobby outside some administrative offices wondering to what extent I ought to make a nuisance of myself.

Some would say I've spent 22 years making a nuisance of myself and I ought to hang back and let some others pick up the slack, and they have a point. I am aware that I do an awful lot of complaining and demanding and grumbling about every stinking little thing that goes wrong on campus.

But on the other hand, I'm being only a minor nuisance here today. As it happens, this lobby has fast, strong, reliable wireless internet service, while my office, at the moment, has ... nothing. Or nothing usable. It took me nearly an hour this morning just to upload a single document to our new course management system, with a hard-wired internet connection in my office that kept disconnecting at random or running at speeds so slow that I couldn't even check my email. I'm accustomed to that kind of service at home, but not on campus.

We're required to use the new course management system but it's going to be pretty hard to do that if I don't have enough connectivity to upload a single document. One option, of course, would be to simply print out all those documents instead of making them available online. In one class I have around 200 pages of readings I need to make available to 18 students, which would be an obscene amount of printing even if we weren't in the middle of a serious budget crisis. And that's just one class!

I have a limited amount of time to get my courses ready before classes start next week, but fortunately, our crack IT staff is on the job. Yes! They have a solution: "Have you tried turning it off and turning back on again?"

Yes, in fact, I have seen every episode of The IT Crowd and I know that's the first step to solving any IT problem, so that's actually the very first thing I did when the problem started. It didn't help. 

And so instead of doing my important prep work in my comfy campus office, I'm sitting in the busy lobby outside some offices where our top administrators enjoy excellent internet access along with the power to require us to use a new course management system that I am not actually capable of using because there's no usable internet connection in my office.

I'm working steadily and quietly and without a lot of fuss and so far I haven't made a nuisance of myself, but give me some time and you never know what might happen.  

Skyrocketing stress levels on campus

It's a good thing the pollinator gardens on campus are attracting visitors right now, because I needed that flutter of fritillary wings after my morning meetings. 

Classes start two weeks from now and everyone is scrambling to adjust to a new course management system while trying to develop fall syllabi, which causes one kind of annoyance and stress, but an entirely different level of stress and grumbling and despair arise from the rumors swirling about impending cuts of faculty and staff and programs and--well, anything that can be cut to save a nickel, and meanwhile, many departments are struggling to do essential work with insufficient staffing. It's easy to talk about doing more with less but it's not so easy to make the painful decisions about valuable things we won't be able to do at all.

The grumbling gets louder the closer I get, so after my meetings, I'm spending time with the fritillaries. As long as no one decides to add the pollinator garden to the list of items to be cut, I think I may survive this semester.

Thrills and spills in a smelly office

I'm pleased to report that my office on campus smells really good this morning, and so do I. Vanilla latte! On the floor, my shirt, my pants, and even the new shoes I'm wearing for the first time today. (Good thing they're not white.) The coffee cup itself and a good measure of its contents ended up in an open desk drawer containing manila envelopes, labels, and about half a ream of copy paper. That's all in the trash right now--but, again, it smells really good.

Great time for a colleague to drop by with a prospective student who needs an answer to a question! I had to assure her that I did indeed have a clean shirt on when I arrived on campus this morning, even if it now looks as if some vengeful plagiarist poured an entire pot of coffee down my front.  

I had intended to do a little cleaning in my office this morning--sorting papers, putting away books, dusting--but instead I did a whole lot of wet and messy cleaning. My trash can is full of ruined envelopes and coffee-soaked paper towels, and the rug beneath my desk still has a big wet spot.

But it smells really, really good. Delicious, actually. I can taste that vanilla latte just by sitting my office and breathing. Not the way I prefer to ingest my vanilla latte, but under the circumstances, it's the best I can do.

A day that starts like this can't possibly get any worse, right?  

Here comes Trouble

When a stray dog tries to "herd" our lawnmower by nipping at the tires, it's kind of cute; but when that same dog tries to herd my grandkids by nipping at their hands, not so cute. Big, energetic, jumping dog, small children, lots of distress. My daughter, the dog-whisperer, tried to do her magic to distract the dog while I got the kids inside, but for her pains she got bitten--just a small bite, no stitches necessary, but even a small bite can be dangerous when you don't know the dog's vaccination history.

It's hard for the visiting grandkids to enjoy the great outdoors while a big bossy jumpy dog keeps trying to control their movements, so we called the county sheriff, who eventually responded with two options: we could restrain the dog so they could come and collect it, or they could set up a live trap. I pointed out that a live trap would be more likely to capture the family of raccoons that's been ravaging our birdfeeders, so we made a plan to restrain the dog.

Easier said than done. Tuesday morning we took the kids out on a creek hike, with lots of splashing and shrieking and fun, and we kept our eyes peeled for this stray dog.

Now I have gone on record stating that I'd like to get a new dog to replace Hopeful, but this is not that dog. From the first time she followed me home, Hopeful started sleeping across the threshold of the front door as if to protect us, and even at her most energetic, she never bit or nipped or threatened anyone. A dog that nips at my grandkids and bites my daughter is not going to be my best friend without some intensive training of the sort I'm not equipped to provide, so we needed an intervention.

We were splashing through a shallow section of the creek when the dog came charging up. My husband was equipped with thick gloves and a leash, and he soon had the dog restrained--temporarily. The dog acted much more obedient while leashed, but he kept slipping out of the collar and running off, and off the leash, he's a maniac. Finally the resident dog-wrangler tightened the collar and tied the leash to a stake out back and came in to get ready for work while we waited for the deputy sheriff. I sent her out back to collect the dog, but all she found was a limp leash.

At that time the dog-wrangler was in the shower and I was in the house awaiting developments while my daughter and grandkids were building a dam down at the creek, and all I could think of was that dog rushing off to try to herd them up again, nipping every hand she could find. But the dog got caught and the grandkids were fine and the deputy took the beast away. Problem solved!

Until this morning, when the dog came back.

The grandkids have gone back home so the dog isn't going to menace anyone but us and our lawnmower, which he apparently hates. I can only assume that the dog belongs to one of our neighbors, though he has no tags and I haven't seen him showing signs of attachment to any particular house. If the dog was released, I assume that means he's owned and cared for and up-to-date with vaccinations, although the sheriff's office isn't providing any further information.

So we carry on, trying to coexist with a visiting dog that thinks it's the boss of us. Call him Trouble--and when he comes charging, guard your hands and children and lawnmowers, because he's not giving up until he's got everyone just where he wants 'em.