In for some wild times

July! Academic summer is half over, but Grandma and Grampa Camp has just begun. My daughter and son-in-law will be making beautiful music in Italy for the next two weeks, so I went to fetch the grandkids and bring them here. My son has come back from South Africa with photos and fun gifts, so he'll be here to play the role of Fun Uncle while the grandkids are here.

Already they've helped me shop for groceries, examined the garden, thrown rocks in the creek, and met the chicken. (Marauding raccoons reduced the chicken population to one, but the chicken run has been thoroughly reinforced and the raccoon population has been significantly reduced. At some point there will be more chickens.) Now the little imps are doing crafts while wearing the adorable Springbok rugby jerseys their uncle brought back from South Africa. 

Day One of Grandma and Grampa Camp will soon be in the books and so far we've all survived. Tomorrow we're off to The Wilds to see some wildlife and then who knows what might happen? We're in for wild times...while I try very hard not to hear the clock ticking down toward the start of the fall semester. 

Fun watching the kids pursue their interests.

 

Sweet, sweet, sweet corn season

The best way to eat sweet corn, of course, is to chomp on one buttered ear after another while  standing up in a field with your closest high-school friends and listening to a bluegrass band singing "Just a Bowl of Butter Beans," but since you're not a teenager anymore and online "research" reveals that the Zellwood Sweet Corn Festival ceased operations in 2013, you'll have to go with the next-best way to eat sweet corn--start the water boiling on the stove first and then run down to your garden to pick a dozen ears, shuck 'em, and then plunge 'em into the water within minutes of removal from the stalk.

But if you don't have a garden or your corn patch is not yet producing or, tragically, the raccoons have removed every single ear (it happens!), the next-best way to eat sweet corn is to drive a few miles up the road to a farmstand surrounded by cornfields and pick out a dozen ears that have been picked that very morning and then drive home and cook the ears within a few hours of being removed from the cornfield. Brilliantly yellow, sweet, and crisp, they taste like summer and sunshine, and even if there are only two people at the table, a dozen ears won't last long.

That's life (and death) in the slow lane

I wonder how many times the checkout clerk at the grocery store has to listen to the same complaints about the weather? Nothing but hot hot hot all day long, and once you've covered the heat, you can move on to the humidity.

I've been watching the bottlebrush buckeye finally start to bloom and today I decided to go outside and see what sorts of pollinators I could photograph--but first I had to stand around and wait for the camera's lens to adjust to the outdoor temperature. The minute I stepped out the door, the lens fogged up. 

Only a few of the bottlebrushes are blossoming, so I stood near a cluster and waited for the pollinators to come to me. No hummingbird moths so far although I saw one this morning at one of our flowerpots on the porch. I did, however, enjoy watching a zebra swallowtail flit from one flower to the next, never alighting anywhere for long. I saw some wasps and bees but didn't hear the incessant buzzing sound that surrounds that bush when it's fully in bloom. A day or two from now it'll be alive with buzzing things.

Meanwhile, some of the denizens of our demesne are no longer alive and buzzing--or clucking, as the case may be. A raccoon ravaged the chicken run the other night, escalating the ongoing man vs. raccoon war. The chicken run has been reinforced and raccoon traps have been distributed. Current score: a half dozen missing or dead chickens and one deceased raccoon.

Finally, our son returns tonight from his two weeks in South Africa. I asked him to smuggle out a giraffe but how would he fit it in his carry-on bag? He'll be exhausted after spending the better part of 24 hours in transit, but it will be good to see the social butterfly coming home to roost. 

 

I'm melting, I'm melting!

The problem with working in overly air conditioned offices is that stepping outside the building feels like walking into a solid wall of heat. Yesterday I was carrying heavy things across campus and I honestly wanted to lie down and melt into the pavement--much easier than trying to breathe in that heat.

But I felt more sorry for the very competent and highly qualified job candidate who gave a fine presentation yesterday. We'd been warned in the morning that the College would try to save energy by cutting back on the air conditioning in the hottest part of the day--exactly when this visiting candidate's presentation was scheduled. 

The room was crowded. 

The candidate was wearing a long-sleeved dress shirt and tie.

The presentation, as mentioned, was excellent, but I was distracted by the progress of the sweat marks slowly spreading down this poor man's shirt. By the end of the hour he looked as if someone had doused him with champagne in premature celebration--but the fact that he performed so valiantly under hostile circumstances suggests that he's equipped to endure the trials of administrative service.

I, on the other hand, am preparing to endure the trials of administrative gobbledegook. This morning I'm presenting some committee-constructed prose to the Powers That Be and steeling myself for their responses. Earlier in this process, very passionate people told me, "If you take out the phrase 'liberal arts,' you'll destroy the College," while others said, "If you include the phrase 'liberal arts,' you'll destroy the College." Can't please both of those parties, and it's wearing me out trying.

But at least I don't have to present this prose in a sweltering room. In fact, given the indoor conditions in campus buildings, I'd better take a sweater. 

Summer is icumen in

This is the forest primeval I thought as I walked carefully through the mud into our upper woods this morning, except it's not the forest primeval--it's just a little fringe of woods at the edge of the upper meadow, with the early light filtering through the pines in a way that made it look lovely, dark, and deep.

The mud was deep and slippery thanks to recent frequent storms, but it ought to dry out this weekend as the heat wave hits. I made it to the Farmers Market before 9 a.m. this morning but still had to retreat to a shady spot to chat with a friend. Hot hot hot! Our electricity supplier has warned us to expect brown-outs as everyone who wants to keep comfortable cranks up the AC.

But it felt good to be out and about this morning. I saw a flicker and some hummingbirds, heard the kingfishers down by the creek, visited the chickens and admired the sun shining through sycamore leaves. Now, though, I'm staying indoors. After a long wet spring, the summer sun has come to stay.

 

The wild columbines make these lovely seed pods.

Sentinel beneath the birdfeeders.

That beeping stinking blasted ARGH

Everything is upside-down this week: My house is eerily quiet while my building on campus is abuzz with incessant beeping. I'm supposed to be at home doing whatever one does while builders tear a bathroom down to the studs, but instead I'm in my office trying to get a little work done despite the annoying alarm that keeps sounding for no apparent reason. What happened?

To no one's surprise, the bathroom project has been delayed. I knew the whole process seemed to be moving too smoothly! The tub is on backorder and won't arrive until late next week, but the grandkids will be here for two weeks starting July 1 and, given their predilection for playing in the filthy creek and working in the garden, we will need two functioning bathrooms during their visit. So the bathroom renovation has been rescheduled to begin July 14, at which point I'll be on the highway driving the imps back to their own house.

You will recall, however, that I spent a ridiculous amount of time last week clearing EVERY SINGLE STINKING THING out of the kids' bathroom, but now I'm going to need to put many stinking things back in there. Not all. In the process of cleaning, I located a stash of old curling irons and some other things we really don't need, which will be going to the Goodwill. I will put towels and soap and so on back in there, and someone is going to have to put up that blasted shower curtain--but not until I buy new hooks. I refuse to wrestle with those horrible old hooks ever again.

Meanwhile, my husband has been wrestling with the incessant issue of raccoon visits--this time in broad daylight. The squirrel baffle doesn't deter them at all, but at least this time the raccoon didn't disassemble the birdfeeders. We have two new feeders out there that may be more difficult for raccoons to open--or maybe it's just a matter of time. 

Given the raccoons' manual dexterity, maybe I'll ask them to put up the shower curtain. It's time the raccoons contributed something to the household.

Go ahead, make yourself at home.

  

And in other news....

Because it's Friday and I need a break between cleaning guest rooms to prepare for grandkids and clearing EVERY SINGLE STINKING THING out of the bathroom to prepare for demolition day, here are some news items you may have overlooked: 

According to the History Blog, some folks were digging at the site of a Roman fort near Hadrian's Wall and unearthed "Footwear of unusual size." (No word on whether any rodents of unusual size were skulking thereabouts.) How unusual? Men's size 13, which suggests that if my son had been living in Northumberland 2000 years ago, he'd have found appropriate footwear. This "honker of a leather sole," as the article calls it, "may be the largest one in the Vindolanda Trust's collection of more than 5,000 shoes." I'll be Imelda Marcos is green with envy.

Meanwhile in Ohio, the Cincinnati Enquirer informs us that some local dude was just driving down the road minding his own business when a cicada flew in an open window, startling the driver. His frantic attempts to remove the cicada led him to lose control, veer off the road, and hit a pole. According to the police, "the suspect fled the scene." 

I've endured mice and spiders in my car without catastrophe but I'm not sure how I would respond to a cicada. A rare Antarctic squid would be another matter entirely: National Geographic reports that a three-foot-long very colorful squid never before seen alive swam into a submersible's camera range around 7000 feet below sea level. The "elusive cephalopod" was previously known only from bits that got snagged in fishermen's nets, and squids are, in general, not known to sit for photos: "Deep-sea squids have good eyesight and usually avoid the lights of a research vessel," reports NatGeo, and one scientist added, "'We want to see them, but they probably don't want to see us most of the time.'" 

I don't know about you, but I could watch the video of that "elusive cephalopod" all day long--certainly more fun than clearing out all the miscellaneous items that have accumulated under our bathroom sink for the past two decades. (Have you had a good look under your bathroom sink lately? Yuck.) 

Also, The Elusive Cephalopod would be a great name for a garage band.

A blast from the past at the end of my road

A long time ago in a used-car lot far, far away, a man tried to sell me a Thunderbird. 

I didn't want a Thunderbird. I just needed a small used family car to replace the Honda Civic wagon I'd totaled, although saying I had totaled it suggests some culpability on my part. I was just driving, slowly, on a village street in Nicholasville, Kentucky, with my small daughter strapped into he carseat in the back, when a 17-year-old girl driving a borrowed Firebird ran a red light and smashed into my car. Not my fault!

But nevertheless I bore the responsibility for finding a new car as quickly as possible while my husband was immersed in final exams for his seminary classes. So while he crammed and studied and scribbled, I hauled our toddler daughter across multiple used-car lots in and around Lexington, Kentucky.

This was in the late 1980s, when Martha Layne Collins was governor of Kentucky, suggesting that a majority of voters believed that women could do serious work independent of their husbands. However, a majority of used-car salesmen in and around Lexington did not believe that a woman encumbered by a toddler was capable of selecting a used car without her husband's approval: Why don't you come back when your husband can come with you, sweetheart?

I told every salesman the same thing: I was looking for a used minivan with the lowest mileage we could find within our meager budget. "I've got just what you need," said one salesman before leading me and my squirming toddler over to a used Thunderbird convertible, pale yellow and pristine but not by any means a minivan.

Recently someone parked a used Thunderbird convertible at the end of our road with a big "For Sale" sign on it, and every time I see it I think of the clueless salesmen who thought he could talk me into spending a pile of money on the extreme opposite of what I'd asked for.  I didn't buy it then and I'm not buying it now, even if it features a red leather interior. But every time I see it, I think of that salesman and hope he'll eventually work his way out of Sales Purgatory, where salesmen who can't listen desperately try to sell worthless garbage to customers with empty pockets. 

 

Why cry over spilt quilts? Or: another day, another cancelled grant

Every day in my newsfeed I see something that makes me want to shout or scream or cry, but instead I turn my head away and go back to my work feeling helpless. This story, though, stopped me in my tracks: "Canceled federal grant may mean 1,500 historic quilts won't be preserved," by Chloe Veltman on NPR. Of all the horrors filling the airwaves, why cry over quilts?

Quilts are utilitarian: Scraps of fabric are recycled, pieced together, and sandwiched into layers to keep a family warm at night. 

Quilts are history: Fragments of worn-out clothes get preserved in the pieced-together quilt top. In Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use," treasured family quilts contain "scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty or more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell's paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra's uniform that he wore in the Civil War."

Quilts are art: Over the centuries thousands of quilters--mostly women--devoted precious time and skill to bringing a measure of beauty and color into their households. A well-pieced an intricately stitched Lone Star pattern doesn't warm the body any better than would a mishmash of scraps, but its beauty warms the heart.

Quilting is democratic: Anyone with access to fabric scraps, needle, thread, and patience can put a quilt together, although having a quilt frame and a group of friends to help with the hard parts can be a boon. Quilting thrives within a community where the elders pass their acquired knowledge down to the rising generation.

In "Everyday Use" Walker introduces a mother of two daughters with very different attitudes toward the family's quilts. The educated, sophisticated daughter, Dee, wants to nab the family's quilts and hang them on her walls to bolster her authenticity and impress her friends, but her damaged and backward sister, Maggie, wants the quilts to keep her and her future husband warm at night. However, Maggie is willing to surrender the quilts because, as she says, "I can 'member Grandma Dee without the quilts"--and besides, she knows how to quilt. She can always make more.

Walker allows Maggie to win the argument, keeping the quilts for everyday use. This may feel like a travesty, because, as Dee reminds us, using the quilts will only destroy them, and they would be far more valuable hanging on a museum's wall. But throughout the story Walker distinguishes between the outsiders, who plunder a community's items of worth and beauty, and the insiders who keep folk-art practices alive by passing their skills down to the next generation. Walker's sympathies lie with the quilters more than the quilts.

But those quilts! What happens to old quilts when the quilters have died off?

"Because quilts are for everyday use and stored in people's homes," writes NPR's Veltman, "they're easily exposed to mold, insects and other destructive elements that cause the fabric to degrade over time."

To counter this degradation, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is putting its stellar collection of historic quilts through a complex and expensive process. Many of the 3000 irreplaceable quilts created by African American quilters, some dating back to the 1860s, must be carefully cleaned, disinfected, and stored or displayed, a preservation process involving "treating them with carbon dioxide gas for about a five to seven week period" 

This process will cost $1.6 million, but it will safely preserve the quilts for future study and display. BAMPFA received federal grants totaling $460,000 and had already treated about half of the quilts before the grant was terminated. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, which administers the grant and has been gutted by recent government cuts, wrote that "your grant is unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency's priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and IMLS programs." 

And what are those interests? I'll let Veltman explain:

An IMLS statement said the agency is redirecting funding toward programs that "serve as a symbol to their communities of American greatness, ones that spark the imagination of children and provide an outlet for younger generations to immerse themselves in the inspirational story of our founding, ones that impart a renewed sense of pride and inspire the virtues of patriotic citizenship..."

I don't know about you, but a collection of beautiful quilts attesting to the tireless efforts and skills of often unknown and marginalized quilters would serve well as a symbol of American greatness, and perhaps it would even spark children to imagine how they could use their own skills and resources to beautify their communities. 

But that kind of inspiration no longer "serves the interest of the United States," apparently. What does? More statues? More exaltation of loud and powerful men while other quiet contributions to culture go unremarked?

I am reminded of the collection of embroidered shawls stashed away in a trunk in Salman Rushdie's novel Shame. While powerful men in the novel take violent action cement their power in the new nation of Pakistan--or Peccavistan, as it sometimes appears in the novel--one marginalized woman sits silently embroidering the stories of the men's perfidy on fifteen shawls. No one fears or respects a powerless woman who simply sits embroidering shawls, but she observes the men and records their deeds in a history that remains hidden at the end of the book.

But what if someday someone were to open the trunk? The shawls are still there waiting to reveal another side of the nation's story.

And that's how I view these historic quilts. They tell stories too long overlooked of hard-working people who pulled together scraps and fragments to surround all of us with warmth, truth, and beauty. If that's not a foundational American virtue, what is? 

Confusion, kerfuffle, and kestrel

Our local newspaper presented the following conundrum of a headline on the front page the other day:

Confusion on sensor
plane's abilities delayed
response in Ohio train
derailment, report says 

Confusion is the right word. I've read the whole article and I still can't quite parse the headline's meaning, but here's a hint: the main verb is delayed and its subject is confusion.

Confusion reigned at my house yesterday when a box full of air fryer appeared on our front porch with no label or indication of where it had come from or what it was doing there. Later in the evening a neighbor called to ask whether an errant air fryer had entered our ken. It was needed for a bridal shower (?) but someone had dropped it off at the wrong house. Mystery solved, and I no longer have a big ol' box of air fryer on my sofa. (We kept the air fryer comfy during its brief sojourn.)

Meanwhile on campus, a massive kerfuffle has arisen over, among other things, errant boxes, asbestos abatement, and flooring. Massive amounts of money are being poured into replacing old floors and removing asbestos from the old science buildings. Faculty members have been asked to remove everything from their offices, labs, and classrooms all at once--with no designated location to stash all that stuff. A pile of boxes got dropped off in one department office but they were intended for faculty in both buildings, so people were scrambling to locate their promised boxes. Good thing our science departments get along well or we could have ended up with an all-out science war, with the chemists constructing incendiary devices while the biologists lobbed bits and bobs from the cadaver lab and the physicists created a black hole to suck up all the boxes and detritus piled in the hallways.

Finally, Facebook tells me that I took a photo of a kestrel giving me the side-eye eight years ago this week. (Good thing I've outsourced my memory functions to Facebook or I'd never remember anything important, like the fact that I encountered the kestrel along the side of a road on the perimeter of The Wilds and that it looked stunned, as if it had been struck by a car, but flew off after I'd snapped a few pix.)

I see this kestrel every day--in a photo on our bedroom wall and on my phone's lock screen--and for years it has served as my profile photo on our college email system, because why not? I'd rather look at a photo of a kestrel giving the side-eye than of me looking like, well, me, and besides, it confuses people in a not unpleasant way. If we must live with confusion, let's make it the non-unpleasant kind.

No diners for the feast of words

It's not so much the immense waste of time I resent. I mean, I've mastered so  many different ways of wasting time that this new one is just a drop in the time-wasting bucket, so to speak. No, what I resent is that from the start of this project a little voice in a distant corner of my brain kept telling me that it was all a big boondoggle unlikely to come to fruition--and yet I still allowed myself to get sucked into the vortex and devote hours of work to making it happen. 

Which it won't. Happen. As I should have known all along. And this is why people don't volunteer to do things, said one of my colleagues, and I concur.

But is all that time spent in preparing for an event that will not now occur really wasted? 

Years ago (and I know I've told this story before) when I was an adjunct at another institution, I spent some time on campus photocopying syllabi a few days before classes started and several colleagues asked why I was there. "I didn't think you were teaching this semester," they said, but I insisted that I'd been hired to teach a British Literature Survey class. Someone must have alerted the Dean because I arrived home to find a message on my answering machine saying oops, sorry, forgot to tell you we're not allowing adjuncts to teach literature classes anymore. I called at once and pointed out the injustice of failing to inform me that I wouldn't be teaching the class until I'd already done all the preparation, and the Dean told me, "Don't worry, you'll be able to use that work in some other class."

My time hadn't been wasted, she insisted, but in fact I never did use that work in another class because the topic was outside my area of expertise. Still, perhaps the exercise in assembling a syllabus and lesson plans for the course served me well elsewhere. All I knew was that I was out of a job and stuck with a pile of photocopies representing a mass of wasted time.

Nothing we do for children is ever wasted, insists Garrison Keillor, and I'm happy to substitute students for children. But what about non-students? What about the course (or program or, I don't know, summer creative writing day camp for high school students, if such a thing might exist) that gets cancelled at the last minute due to lack of enrollment? It's hard to feel good about preparing a hearty and delicious feast and then having no one show up to devour it.

But on the other hand, I now have a bunch of unexpected free time next week. I ought to find someone meaningful to do with that time, but somehow it would seem more appropriate to simply let it go to waste.  

Flat, fixed; or, another great reason to shop close to home

In the waiting room at my tire place I was chatting with a stranger about how long it's been since our cars had last suffered flat tires. Seems like in my youth road trips and outings were regularly interrupted by flat tires, dead batteries, defunct alternators, cracked radiators, and rusted-out mufflers. Where are the car repairs of yesteryear?

Facebook tells me that I brought that car home exactly two years ago. In that time I've had to take it into the shop for routine maintenance and three (!) recall notices, but not once have I needed any non-recall repair. I don't remember the last time I had a flat tire, but I can recall several times when AAA visited campus to do minor repairs on previous cars--flat tires, dead batteries. Each time I had to wait two to three HOURS before they even arrived. I used my AAA membership much more frequently back when I was driving old clunkers, but now I don't remember the last time I called them--which is great because their hold music is terrible. Trust me--I've heard a lot of it.

Today I was in the tire place because I'd been running some errands over my lunch break (from campus meetings) and suddenly heard a ka-thunk, followed quickly by a dashboard warning about tire pressure, followed by a loud hissing noise from the left rear tire, so I drove three blocks to the place where I had just bought all four of those tires just over a month ago. I could feel the tire softening as I drove. By the time I'd parked, it was no longer capable of performing the primary function of a tire.

I don't know what I ran over but the hole was too big to repair. So I had to buy a new tire, and of course I wanted one to match the other three (expensive) tires because they were practically new. But here's why I appreciate my friendly local tire place: I didn't fuss or complain or even ask for a break, but the owner spontaneously offered to cut the price in half since I'm a pretty loyal customer. They installed the new tired and got me back on the road in under 30 minutes.

I'm just glad I was close enough to drive to the shop before the tire went completely flat. If I'd had to call AAA, I'd still be on hold.    

Chicken Run

From our bedroom window we can look down the hill to see the chicken run in the lower meadow, but at that distance the chickens look like waddling blobs. Up close they're more handsome. At first they resist coming out from under their coop, but finally they emerge to scrabble toward the feed bucket and nudge each other out of the way to get to lunch. Soon a kingfisher chattering past sends them all scurrying for cover. They've nothing to fear from the kingfisher, but I hope they know enough to hide from hawks. The chicken run should protect them from earthbound predators, but we rely on their instincts to protect them from the hawks.

  

Excavating the family landfill

The donation door at the local Goodwill store stands open and the attendant waits to help me unload my car, but I'm afraid to open the hatchback lest I trigger a landslide or tsunami or pyrochlastic flow of dusty bags bulging with discarded stuff. Honda claims my HR-V has 24.4 cubic feet of cargo space, and I've crammed every inch of it with a shifting mound of detritus threatening to bury me alive--all of it removed from just one closet.   

Granted, it's a big closet, but it doesn't get much daily use. Years ago that closet turned into the place where we stash things we can't just throw out lest someone needs them someday, and over time the closet turned into a family landfill seasoned with mouse droppings and fluffy bits of insulation that float down whenever the access panel for the attic gets opened.

Until this morning it was almost impossible to set foot inside that closet, which is a problem because of our impending bathroom renovation. Yes, we are finally exiling the purple toilet, sink, and tub, tearing off the shiny plastic wall panels, installing usable storage, and replacing the improperly vented ceiling fan that insists on sprinkling fluffy bits of insulation all over the bathroom every time we turn it on. (Both the hall closet and the purple bathroom are in the older part of the house, where mouse droppings and fluffy bits of insulation are persistent elements of the decorating scheme.) Workers will need to access the attic to install the new ceiling fan, but they can't do that without climbing the Leaning Tower of Fluff-Covered Detritus in the hall closet.

So this morning I got to work excavating every layer of that closet, vacuum at the ready to suck up all the fluff and droppings. I found old clothes I'd bagged up to take to the Goodwill, old clothes I needed to bag up to take to the Goodwill, old clothes that could have a chance at new life for someone committed to regular dry-cleaning bills, and even a few old clothes that sparked enough joy to merit giving them a wash and returning them to my closet.

Also hats--sun hats, cowboy hats, Santa hats. Old paint cans with solid lumps of paint at the bottom. Two nonfunctioning CD players. Adapter cords that don't fit any of my current equipment. A hefty camera tripod and a video camera that hasn't been out of its carrying case for at least 15 years. Wrapping paper, gift bags, red velvet bows. Decorative gifts given by people ignorant of our household aesthetic--always a tricky issue because what if those people shop at the Goodwill? How will they feel if they recognize the items I've regifted?

Things I kept: Three jackets and three nice shirts. The paint cans (because the Goodwill won't take them.) The video camera (because someone who shall remain nameless is convinced that he'll use it someday.) Boxes of framed pictures and certificates I don't want to throw away but don't have room to hang on the walls. A few puzzles and games the grandkids might enjoy. A tangle of kites and a giant bubble wand. Dozens of empty hangers.

Now the hall closet has enough open space to make accessing the attic a breeze. Fluff and droppings are gone (for now) so I won't be embarrassed every time that door gets opened. The vacuum is full of yuck and dust, as is my nose. And my car didn't disgorge the entire mess at my feet when I opened the hatch, so I rewarded its hefty cargo space with a celebratory vacuuming.

The grandkids have always liked the purple potty and will be sad to see it go, even though it frequently fails at the chief task it exists to perform. As for me, I'm delighted at the prospect of a renovated bathroom, and if the price I have to pay to achieve that goal is a hall closet excavation, then let's get to work. 

Need a purple tub? I've got you covered.

A short cut to the AOA department

Summertime and the living is easily on the way to driving me bonkers. Fun weekend with the grandkids! Lazy Sunday afternoon nap! Monday mowing and cooking and sitting around reading--perfect! And then comes Tuesday.

Don't even get me started.

Today I have been running from pillar to post while trying to wrangle mounds of pettifogging claptrap standing in the way of a grant project. It's an exciting project--five-day Creative Writing day camp for local high schools students funded by the Department of Job and Family Services--and I'm working alongside some very creative and energetic people. 

But! 

I have to reserve rooms, but another organization has reserved EVERY ROOM in my building for three out of the five days of our camp. So I have to find space in another building, except I'm not familiar with room numbers in all our buildings so I have to walk around looking at rooms to see if they'll suit our purposes, and then I have to walk back to the administration building to confer with the room-reservation guru, who fortunately keeps a well-stocked candy dish on her desk. (Or, maybe, unfortunately.)

The grant was approved last week and the camp starts on June 9, so we need to buy some supplies; however, I can't submit a purchase order or use the College Amazon account until an account number is assigned to the grant. Unfortunately, the grant paperwork has not yet made its way to the person in charge of assigning an account number, so I have to email the grant-writer and all the grant-approvers to try to unclog the pipeline and get the paperwork flowing smoothly.

Further, at our planning meeting this morning I assembled a list of about a dozen questions that can be answered only by the people who normally inhabit three offices whose doors today are tightly shut and locked. Out of the office, apparently. I mean, it's as if these people had lives or, I don't know, summer vacations. Let's hope they're watching their email.

My plan was to spend one long morning on campus taking care of every little pettifogging detail, but all those dead ends and closed doors mean I'll have to come back and try again another day. Next time I'll head straight to the Department of Aggravation, Obfuscation, and Angst. All roads lead there eventually, so why not take the short cut? 

Locking through

Between Writing Wednesday and a heavy rainstorm yesterday I squeezed in a quick visit to the Muskingum River lock in Devola, where I enjoyed a casual lunch while watching the Valley Gem sternwheeler make its way through the historic lock. 

The lock-and-dam system on the Muskingum River dates back to 1836, though the structures have been renovated several times over the years. The locks are among the oldest hand-operated locks in the nation still in use and measure 35 feet wide by 160 feet long, which is barely big enough to contain the Valley Gem. 

I watched the lockmasters strain to push the large iron levers to open the upstream gates and let in water, which slowly raised the sternwheeler to the upstream water level. Crew members released the ropes and kicked the boat away from the side of the lock so it could make its way out the upstream gates and on up the river--straight into a sudden shower.

When I'm surrounded by technology so complex it seems magical, it's encouraging to see a geriatric feat of engineering prove its worth. Actual human beings turn the levers that move the gears that open the gates, and it's all visible right before our very eyes--not a hidden algorithm anywhere. The locks that originally opened the Muskingum watershed for commerce and transport now support tourism, but seeing the sternwheeler chug through the locks and up the river reminded me that human ingenuity has mastered a lot of knotty problems--and that's just the kind of insight that floats my boat.

Write write write--but why?

This is it--the first Writing Wednesday of summer break. I'm sitting in a library classroom tapping on my laptop alongside two faculty colleagues, three of us in all--a small start perhaps attributable to some problems in communication. I faithfully followed new campus procedures for getting the word out but somewhere there's a glitch in the system. Three people! Better than none, I suppose.

I have spent two hours writing, although perhaps "writing" isn't entirely the right word. I have revised my Agnes essay to include info about that historic hurricane and sharpen up some phrasing; now I need to decide whether I want to call my brother and ask what he remembers about our family's encounter with the worst natural disaster in Pennsylvania's history. And then I need to figure out where to submit the essay. Literary magazines are closing and possibilities are shrinking, so I'll need to do some serious research.

And then I opened the folder containing the larger project I started during last summer's Writing Wednesdays. I'm happy with the first chapter and I'd love to submit it somewhere as a stand-alone essay, but again, where? It's too personal and not theoretical enough for an academic journal but too steeped in literature for a casual outlet. Where are the hybrid publications where an intelligent person can combine close reading with practical classroom experiences? (Asking for a friend....)

I haven't looked at the rest of the project since last August and so I was surprised, both by how ambitious it is and by how fragmented. I see some lovely sentences and paragraphs but an awful lot of gaps and brackets. I'm reminded of the seven-page single-space notes-for-a-memoir document we discovered among my father's papers after his death: whenever he seemed to be getting close to a really interesting part of his life, he would write ETC. Now it's too late to ask what all those etceteras were eliding.  

And that's the conundrum about this writing project: as I near the end of my teaching career, I feel the need to pass on a whole bunch of etcetera lest it perish with my passing, but it's hard to write when I don't know have the first clue who might serve as audience. Writing these essays is either an opportunity to pass on some important insights or a massive, thankless waste of time.

For right now, though, it's therapy. Putting down words, imposing some order on the chaos, feels like an accomplishment. And that's why I look forward every week to Writing Wednesdays, even if, in some sad dark corridor of my mind, I fear that every word I write takes me closer to The End.

Settling into summer break

I know I've settled into summer break when I'm halfway through the morning but still can't be sure what day it is, or when you ask me how I've spent my day and my response is, "Um...give me a minute."

Sunburn on my forearms from weed-whacking and mowing this morning, crick in my neck from sitting on the back deck staring up toward the top of the tulip poplar tree, camera at the ready, in case that oriole comes back, except it has a remarkable ability to appear only when the camera is inaccessible. True story: I was sitting in the living room reading when I felt I was being watched, and when I turned and looked out the big picture window, I saw an oriole perched on a potted plant looking right at me not two feet from my face. Where was the camera? In the car, just behind the oriole. 

I've seen an oriole (possibly the same one) flitting about the top of the maple tree out front and then flying away the minute I picked up the camera, and there it was again this morning at the top of the tulip poplar out back--twice!--but I sat out there with the camera for 40 minutes hearing it sing from a tree halfway down the cliff but never seeing it within shooting distance.

Big bowl of quinoa salad in the fridge--something I always make at the beginning of summer break for reasons I don't even recall except that it's cool and lemony and makes a great lunch out on the deck on a lovely spring day, especially when orioles are singing (but not posing for photos) nearby.

I saw swallows, turkey vultures, and a red-tailed hawk, but no oriole. Didn't see any goldfinches and wondered where they'd gone--we used to have them all over the place year-round but lately it's a nice surprise to see even one. Saw two male hummingbirds fighting over a feeder, but no oriole. Saw mourning doves, red-winged blackbirds, a phoebe, but no oriole--but every time I started to pack up the camera to go inside, the oriole would sing tantalizingly close but still out of sight.

It's out there still, I'm certain, and I'm sure at some point I'll be unable to stop myself from going out to stalk it some more, camera in hand. Because that's what summer break is for. Sure, I'll have to get my act together to plan some meetings and write some reports in the next couple of weeks, but while I'm still bouncing back from the busy semester, I'll enjoy some long lazy days that don't require me to remember their names.

Don't diss the diss

Yesterday I was all smiles after a total stranger came up to me at a meeting and said, "I've read your dissertation." Today I'm trying to figure out whether it might have been a mistake or a little white lie or an elaborate prank. 

I mean, has anyone outside of my dissertation committee ever read my dissertation? Decades ago I presented some bits of it at conferences and I published a piece of one chapter in a journal, but my dissertation exists primarily as a printed document in my house and in a regional university library--only the abstract is available online. It would take a significant effort to read my dissertation.

But the person I bumped into at this meeting had been talking about a stretch of old-growth forest she visits with her classes, and I recalled that I'd visited those woods close to 30 years ago so I could take some photos, one of which ended up in my dissertation. The stranger said she'd cataloged everything that had been written about that stretch of woods and that my dissertation was part of the collection, which at the time sounded plausible, but now I'm not so sure.

So I dug out my copy of my dissertation and took a look, and sure enough there's the photo of the woods in question accompanied by exactly one sentence labeling the photo and naming the woods. That's all. There's maybe one more obscure mention of the woods within the document, but it's not mentioned in the abstract or the title, nor does it play any significant part in the argument. So maybe someone (who?) might have been reading my dissertation (why?) and stumbled upon that brief mention of those woods, and maybe that person passed the reference on to the scholar I met yesterday, but the odds for that scenario seem vanishingly small.

We were in a room full of happy people at the time and it didn't occur to me to give the stranger a quiz to verify that she had done the reading, so I just beamed at the possibility that some total stranger had actually read my dissertation. Except maybe she didn't. Maybe she's confused. Maybe it doesn't even matter. But I appreciate the brief glow her words inspired as well as the excuse to hunt down my dissertation, which I'm sure I haven't looked at in twenty years. (The argument remains sound, but goodness gracious I used a lot of semicolons.)  

Applause all around

I came out of Commencement Saturday with sore hands from applauding so much, and then I wanted to walk right over to the peony patch and applaud some more. How could those tight little buds burst into such massive gorgeous blossoms so quickly?

I'd like to ask the same thing about the students I clapped for as they received their diplomas. (Well, their diploma cases--the real thing comes later, after grades are submitted. Which reminds me of a great line from the Commencement speech: when he graduated from Marietta College in 1970, our speaker's diploma case contained only a bill for $2.48 for library fines--"And I don't remember ever checking out a book." It was a great speech and when I get the link I'll post it.) 

It seems like only yesterday that these bright-eyed students came toddling into my first-year classes wondering what the word syllabus might mean, and now here they are tottering across the stage on platform shoes and out the door toward jobs and adventures and real life. Go, you! Here's a round of applause!

And how did I celebrate my sudden burst of freedom? With birds and wildflowers, of course, and by diving into a good book. I have some projects around the house that need attention and my summer campus meetings start tomorrow, but right now I'm spending every spare moment doing as close to nothing as possible. Go, me! Here's a round of applause!