Peachy at the beach

Ice cream for breakfast! What could be better? Grampa made waffles and the young folk provided the toppings, so we had grain, fruit, and dairy products, and we all know chocolate is a bean, right? An excellent way to start the day.

Except that wasn't quite the start. We walked out to the beach before sunrise, the grandkids' flashing sneakers lighting the way, and we looked at jellyfish and sand dollars--some still alive--while the sun came up. We had to bundle up for temperatures in the 50s with a slight sea breeze, but we expect sunshine and temps in the 60s and some great beach weather for the next couple of days. 

And we'll also have to work on finishing off the ice cream. This morning I had peach ice cream on peach waffles with whipped cream--yum!

The last time we had ice cream for breakfast was 40 years ago on our honeymoon right here on St. Simon's Island, and thereby hangs a tale. A month before our wedding, I had a fitting for my wedding gown and found it a tight squeeze. The grandmotherly Italian seamstress said she could make some adjustments before the wedding, but I would still need to watch my weight. "Don't eat-a no pasta," she commanded, and for a month I barely ate anything, which was difficult considering all the pre-wedding and pre-Christmas festivities. 

My mom reminded me that she'd lost 15 pounds just before her wedding, which she attributed to nerves, but I've seen the photo of her on her wedding day sitting in her bed smoking a cigarette. I didn't want to try the cigarette method of weight loss, so I spent a month depriving myself of everything wonderful and vowing that once this was all over, I'd eat whatever I wanted.

Which is why we had ice cream for breakfast on our honeymoon. Peach, if you must know. It was great.

For the record, I looked pretty great in that wedding gown--but I've never again been that thin, partly because of ice cream for breakfast. 

Now we celebrate these 40 eventful years with silly games, family walks on the beach, and ice cream for breakfast. What could be more fun? Let's not wait 40 more years to do this again.  

When the waves come close, everyone jumps back.

A tiny sand dollar, still alive. We threw if back.

 

Stopping by birds on a snowy morning

Just now I counted nine cardinals on and around our bird-feeders, their scarlet feathers standing out brightly against the blowing snow. The ground beneath the feeders is hopping with juncos while finches, bluejays, woodpeckers, and the occasional starling make brief visits.

I thought about taking pictures but the camera bag is out in my car, and the temperature outdoors is something like 2 degrees Farenheit with a sharp wind blowing snow all over the place. My fingers don't work well under those circumstances, so let's just let memory supply the visuals. 

Last evening we celebrated my husband's birthday with a great meal and a visit to the Guernsey County Courthouse holiday light and music show an hour's drive north of here. It's amazing how many people will stand outdoors in a light drizzle dancing and singing along with Christmas music while the wind whipped cold rain into our faces, but at least it wasn't cold enough to change to snow. We came home cold and damp and ready to sleep and then woke this morning into a world of white.

I know that others not too far away are experiencing much worse weather, so I'm not complaining--especially since I don't need to go anywhere. My son made a lengthy road trip to his sister's house last night to deliver some gifts but turned around and came right back home to avoid getting stuck in a blizzard, but here we just have a few inches of snow and lots of wind. Earlier, my husband went out to batten down the hatches after some deck furniture went airborne. Right now I'm more worried about wind damage than snowy roads, but we'll be fine as long as we don't lose power.

Yesterday I worked on spring semester syllabi. Last night I sang Christmas songs. Tomorrow I'm baking a ham. Today, though, looks like an ideal day for sitting inside a warm house and watching colorful birds flit around the snowy feeders. It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it. 

 

 

 

Shutting the door on the semester

Today's top task: pack up my office laptop and some books, set my office trash can outside the door, lock the door, and walk away. My goal is to avoid campus until Jan. 3, and I may even emulate a colleague and stop reading campus emails. 

Maybe. 

I don't know. I expect to hear from a few students embroiled in an academic dishonesty incident (word to the wise: if you must submit a classmate's paper, make sure to remove the classmate's name from the top), and we still have some unfinished business re: faculty governance (when I see a smoke-screen, I want to know what's being screened and why). But otherwise it would be really nice to shut the door and walk away both physically and mentally so as to free up some bandwidth for fun times ahead.

Like, for instance, our 40th anniversary, which we observed two days ago but we'll celebrate more fully next week when we take a road trip to St. Simon's Island, Georgia, where we spent the first part of our honeymoon. I don't know what the weather will look like in coastal Georgia next week, but it's got to be better than Ohio--and most of the family will be joining us, grandkids and all. Beaches! Bird sanctuaries! Board games! What's not to love?

And then there's Christmas, of course. The resident pastor now serves three churches, all of which have some sort of special activity this week, although only one, thankfully, has a Christmas Eve service. When Christmas falls on a Sunday the worship service tends to be fairly brief, but he'll still need to drive to all three churches and lead three services before noon on Christmas, and then he'll need to come home and sleep it off. So I think we're doing our celebrating on Saturday. 

Before then, though, I need to bake cookies, buy two more gifts (because Amazon failed to inform me that two major gifts were no longer available), wrap some things, and pack for our trip. Most importantly, though, I need to shed the excess mental baggage I've been carrying around thanks to all our campus controversies, and that starts with shutting the door. 

Gently, of course. I wouldn't even think of slamming the door and stomping off in a huff, tempting as that might be.

Here we are 40 years ago. My favorite wedding photo.

 

In the grips of Grading Brain

This time of year college campuses everywhere experience uncontrolled outbreaks of a virulent malady. I'm not talking about Covid-19 or flu or the million little viruses causing coughs and sniffles all over final-exam classrooms but a more cerebral disorder I call Grading Brain.

When there's nothing left to do but grade final papers and projects, we sit in our offices or at home staring at screens and grading one fool thing after another until our eyeballs want to jump right out of our heads and run away to some island or mountaintop or desert where they can look away from whatever isn't pleasing and seek something more soothing.

My head hurts. My neck hurts. My eyes are really angry, and my brain is twisted into knots from the effort of wading through tortured prose. It's not all tortured, of course; this week I've read quite a few original, clever, witty essays that fill me with hope for the future. But mostly I'm reading the other kind: not bad enough to be amusing or good enough to glow but just dull, mediocre, uninspiring.  

And of course at this point there's no respite from grading. Final grades are due next Tuesday, so procrastination is no longer possible. I move from one paper to the next to the next, inserting comments into margins and punching numbers into rubrics. Every once in a while I get up to take a walk around the building just to reassure myself that there's a real world outside the realm of final papers. Recently I discovered something remarkable: for the first time in what feels like weeks, the sun is shining! Too bad it's too cold to grade papers outside.

The grading process so dominates my brain that I find it difficult to communicate off-rubric. I see someone in the hallway and the only phrases that pop easily into mind are things like "nice thesis" or "abrupt transition" or "where's the apostrophe?" I see semicolons in my dreams--which, I guess, makes up for how few of them I see in my students' papers. 

But the end is in sight. With every number I punch into a rubric, the pile of grading gets a wee bit smaller. At some point I'll look up from a paper and realize that there's nothing left to grade, but by then I'll be so deeply in the grips of Grading Brain that I'll just sit here wordless, with empty eyes and drool rolling down my face, hopelessly transformed into a sniveling lump. 

There is a cure, however: it's called winter break, and it's coming soon to a campus near you. Without it, we would all be gibbering idiots.

 

Crash smash smoosh lunch

The message came down from on high: in times of financial austerity, it behooves us to eschew frivolous spending, so no departments were allowed to spend College money on holiday lunches this year.

Fine: so we'll bring our own food. Instead of grading finals and papers, I've spent the past hour and a half sitting in the department reading room and sampling delectable dishes made by my wonderful colleagues. Artichoke dip! Persian rice! Kale and pomegranate salad! Rum cake! The kind of food that encourages relaxation, storytelling, and laughter.

And I'll tell you: I really needed that gleeful break from grading. I thought I was having a fun grading break yesterday, but instead I had one of those days that made me wonder why I ever bothered getting out of bed. 

I managed to mail the last two Christmas packages... but caught my hand in the door on the way out of the post office (ouch!).

I was driving to Jackson to visit a friend and stopped on the way to shop at the only store where I can get this fabulous locally-made yogurt...but dropped a four-pound sack of sugar on my foot (double ouch!).

And I stopped at a rest area to use the facilities but had a moment of inattention while pulling out, looking away briefly to locate my glasses, and the car in front of me at the stop sign, which I thought was turning, wasn't, and so I slammed into him. It was a slow-speed crash; my air bag didn't even deploy, and you can barely see the minor damage on the front of my car. The license-plate holder cracked, but Ohio doesn't even require front license plates any more so who cares? This is damage I don't intend to report to my insurance company.

If the other guy had been driving a junker, we probably would have shaken hands and walked away, but his car was both much nicer and more damaged than mine. So we did the whole dance with calling the state patrol, filling out paperwork, and waiting waiting waiting while this patrol dude who looked like he was barely old enough to ride a tricycle took photos of the nearly invisible damage and filed reports.

And wrote up a ticket. For me. Because the whole thing was entirely my fault. When he asked me what I could have done to avoid the accident, I said, "Well, I guess I could have put on my glasses before I started the car." The thing is, I don't even need my glasses for distance anymore, but if I leave them off for too long I get a headache, and by that time I'd been driving more than an hour.

So I got cited for failure to maintain assured clear distance, and since it's been 14 years since I last got any kind of ticket, I'm not complaining. But I also got cited for distracted driving, which adds $100 to the fine unless I complete a 45-minute online training program about how to avoid distracted driving, which I guess I will be happy to do if it'll save me $100 but I'll bet I already know what it's going to say: keep your eyes on the road and your glasses on your eyes.

The accident left me undamaged but flustered, so that last night when I made pasta salad for today's department lunch, I left out some of the usual ingredients. But nobody cared. We were having too much fun talking and laughing and eating just one more slice of rum cake, which I'm sure will make us even more equipped to grade that flood of final papers and exams. And hey, there's lots of food left--come and get some!

Funny/not funny

Yesterday my granddaughter was reading us riddles out of a joke book when she stumped us with this one: What has four letters, sometimes has nine letters, and never has five letters?

I'll give you a minute to think about that. 

Keep thinking.

It's pretty obvious once you see the answer.

But maybe that's a little deceptive, because the secret is that there is no answer--because it's not a riddle.

Rather, it's a statement of fact: What has four letters, sometimes has nine, and never has five.  The thing that makes it funny is that it's not a joke at all.

I'll tell you what else is not a joke: sitting in a room full of campus decision-makers as an IT guru introduces a new database that attempts to quantify how each department, program, and course contributes to the College's mission. It's bad enough that this meeting was scheduled for 3:00 p.m. on the last Friday of classes, but the moment that made me want to slide under the desk occurred when the IT guru decided to use the English department as an example: "You can see here that the department as a whole brings in a decent amount of revenue, but when you scroll down to these low-enrollment classes, you can see that they're costing the College more than they bring in," and as he says it, he's pointing at the very sad number for a class I'm teaching right now.

Does it matter that students are doing remarkable work in that class? The database doesn't care. When the Powers That Be look at all the factors that determine how much a department contributes to the College's mission, this database will be only one piece of evidence they consider--but it's the most easily quantifiable piece, so it will surely loom large. No one's threatening to stamp out the English department, but it certainly doesn't feel great to be held up publicly as an example of someone whose contributions to the College fall into the negative numbers.

And on my birthday, no less! I had a hard time shaking off the glumness until I went to a colleague's house for a wreath-decorating party, where we ate comfort foods, juggled hot-glue guns, and helped each other tie bows in pretty holiday ribbon while friendly dogs looked on curiously from underfoot. It turns out that I'm not very good at decorating wreaths, but neither am I very bad. Fortunately, no one tried to quantify just how my wreath-decorating skills compare to those of my friends and colleagues, and if they did, I'd tell them that the experience was immeasurably worthwhile despite the mediocrity of my performance. 

Now I'm spending the weekend with the grandkids and assiduously avoiding the massive grading pile while listening to the kids tell silly jokes, and if you ask me how much fun I'm having, I'll say what? (Four letters.)

Hark, the herald chipmunks sing

I don't know what my son was thinking when he popped in the Christmas with the Chipmunks CD while the grandkids were visiting for Thanksgiving a few weeks ago--I mean, those kids know how to work the repeat button! We heard a year's quota of Chipmunks songs all in one day and somehow no one took a crowbar to the CD player.

Today on my way to campus I turned on the local holiday music station and heard Vince Guaraldi playing the Charlie Brown Christmas theme followed by Jose Feliciano singing "Feliz Navidad" followed by Trans-Siberian Orchestra playing "Carol of the Bells"--a trifecta of holiday perfection. Okay, so they followed up with "Frosty the Snowman," but that's why the tuner button exists.

Seven years ago I blogged about my top-10 holiday music selections, a list that remains remarkably accurate even though some of the links no longer work. The local production of Handel's Messiah never fails to fill me with awe, and this year's soloists were especially powerful and even, sometimes, fierce. But I'll also happily listen to any dumb little song my grandkids want to sing, even if it's accompanied by squeaky little chipmunk voices. 

Tomorrow I'll be inundated with piles of student papers and projects demanding to be graded, so I think I can be forgiven for taking advantage of some free time this afternoon to pop in some holiday music and write some cards and absorb the joy of the season--before it gets drowned out.

The curse of constant communication

My composition class started with a viewing of the printer-smashing scene from Office Space, always a therapeutic way to start the morning, and I was surprised once again to find that none of my students have seen the film. The topic of today's discussion was technology, how it simultaneously aids and impedes communication and why it sometimes fills us with a mad desire to take up crowbars and smash things. 

Even as we were discussing our love-hate relationship with technology, however, some angry people were sending long email messages demanding immediate response from me and others in a particular group, but fortunately, I was too busy actually doing my job to contribute to the discussion, which moved toward resolution without me. Sometimes the fast pace of electronic communication is part of the problem. Sometimes the best thing to do is step away from the keyboard and take a breath.

I've been away from blogging for a full week, fighting a cold and feeling as if my entire head was under attack from a raging mass of phlegm. Teaching has happened but probably not my best work. With all my students working on end-of-the-semester projects, I've spent more time listening and offering feedback than standing up and trying to be brilliant in class, which is good because my voice has been coming and going on its own schedule without any advance warning. I can still type when I can't talk, so technology has been helping me teach.

But still I find myself seeking solitude and distance from all my devices. This morning's reading in composition dealt partly with the dearth of solitude in daily life, the way the constant availability of communication makes it hard for our brains to get a break. I need to get out for a walk in the woods, away from phones and texts and messages, but I've been too sick and too busy to get too far away from all my electronic devices. Things are happening--important things--and I need to stay involved!

One of these day, though, I'll bypass my phone and reach for a crowbar instead, and then all my electronic devices had better look out. (My luck, I'd drop it on my foot.)