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.