Of ice and eagles

I should have known there was a reason no one had parallel-parked in that last remaining space near my building, but I pulled in anyway and then I tried to straighten my car out and discovered the problem: ice! I spun my brand-new Christmas tires briefly before deciding that my car was straight enough, and then I left it there in hopes that the ice will melt before I leave for home. With a full day's work ahead of me and temperatures rising into the 50s this afternoon, I'm hopeful.

Stopped by the Devola Dam yesterday afternoon and this morning to see bald eagles, which are present in abundance. A member of the local birding group reported seeing more than 40 eagles along a stretch of the Muskingum River over the weekend, including many juveniles congregating below the dam. And indeed there they were, a scrum of scraggly adolescents hanging out on the ice and occasionally taking wing, but the position of the sun made photos difficult so I just enjoyed the spectacle. The Muskingum is still icy in many places and my own little creek is totally iced over, but that will change soon.

February already! I'm collecting the first set of major papers in one class tomorrow and giving the first exam of the semester in another next Monday. So far classes are moving along pretty well, although my Place class let me know yesterday that they found Wendell Berry impenetrable (just one poem!), and about half of my American Lit Survey students failed to show up to discuss "Daisy Miller." If Daisy were an Instagram influencer trying to establish a personal identity amidst an unforgiving and judgmental society, my students would have plenty to say, but all we have to work with are words filtered through the perceptions of clueless observers, and where's the fun in that? 

This week I've been recommending to everyone Kate DiCamillo's YA novel The Magician's Elephant, which I devoured in about an hour of luminous delight. The impossible plot is conveyed with striking realism, and in the end a snowfall becomes a sign of hope and a promise of comfort. I accept every single impossible thing that happens in the novel, including the snow, but when I look out my window later on, I hope to see some melting ice so I can get my car moving. If the thaw doesn't come soon, someone's going to have to get out and push.  

Arrangement in gray and black

No snow in the forecast this morning and yet there it was all over the road and getting thicker by the minute. 

The sky was black. The snow was white. The road was shades of gray.

Yesterday I attended an event for which the invitation specifically called for "professional attire," but jeans and boots and sweaters were the order of the day. Only a fool would wear a skirt and heels when the parking lots are dotted with icy spots and hard chunks of snow, and road salt walks into the building on all our shoes, dulling the shine on the parquet floors.

My jeans are black. My shoes are white. The floor is dull and gray.

Frank X. Walker is Black. His book Affrilachia collects poems about the African American experience in Appalachia, including one called "Fireproof" about church people who, like fire ants, swarm in response to distress, working together to rebuild their beloved sanctuary after an arsonist burns it down. Their souls, says Walker, are fireproof in the face of hate. I nearly choked up teaching that poem today to students who keep coming back eager to learn despite Covid cases and quarantines and tech difficulties and their entire lives being disrupted. 

My mood was black. They made my day. 

My day is cray-cray-crazy. Another finalist for the botany position will be here today, another opportunity for me to walk a botanist across campus to the next appointment and point to the big piles of snow and say, "In the spring that will be a pollinator garden." Sorry, botanist! Nothing growing here today! 

(The snow is white. The sky is gray.)

And in between the cray-cray-craziness I have to obtain a Covid test because I may have been exposed by a close contact, although probably not, but I was in the same room (unmasked) with the person but not for more than ten minutes, or maybe twenty, or maybe less, and we're not exactly huggy people so I don't know if we ever breathed the same air so who knows? I'm positive that I'm (probably) negative but only the test can tell for sure.

My fears are dark. That's all I'll say.

Making tracks

In the winter woods, sunshine hits the snow-frosted tree limbs, causing a steady dripping on the snow below and leaving behind a filigree of ice on the tree. All sounds are muffled: brittle oak lives shifting in the breeze with a sandpapery sound; water from a drainage pipe dripping onto creek ice with a metallic clink; boots brushing through soft snow saying shh--shh, shh-shh. 

I didn't go to campus today, obviously. Didn't even try. Yesterday's snow was more abundant than expected so coming home last night was an adventure that I didn't really feel like repeating today, and I don't have classes today anyway so why bother? True, I'm missing my office hours, but in the grand scheme of things, office hours are not worth risking one's life for. So I'm working from home and spending some time enjoying the snow, which is much prettier when you don't have to drive in it.

 

 

 

Can't live the life of the mind without lunch

I found ice in my hair when I got in the car this morning, which suggests that if I must scrape the ice off my car when the temperature is in the single digits, I ought to dry my hair first. But I survived that little adventure, just as I've survived the epidemic of yawning in my classes today. Judging from my impact on students, I could make a bundle marketing today's lectures as a sleep aid.

But instead let's celebrate surviving the first week of classes despite heavy weather, increasing Covid cases, and extra activities associated with my service on a search committee. By the time I'm done this evening, I will have been on campus for twelve solid hours, and here's a dilemma: if I teach at 8, 9, 11, and 1, meet with a job candidate at 10:30, and attend the candidate's presentation at noon, when am I supposed to eat lunch?

When I finally got to it--after 2 p.m.!--my lunch was pretty special: leftover lasagna, which I made from scratch yesterday afternoon. Anyone who goes home after a hard day's work and then puts together a big pan of lasagna ought to be showered with gold stars, applause, and fireworks, but my reward for yesterday's hard work was the opportunity to finally sit down this afternoon at my desk and enjoy a steaming hot lunch of leftover lasagna.

 

 

 

 

Between comfort and joy

On the same day we learned that my husband's cousin's wife had been hospitalized with Covid, we also learned that a colleague's horrible deadly diagnosis was not cancer after all. For more than a month he'd been living with a death sentence and then the tsar told the firing squad to put down their guns, and he couldn't have been more relieved.

Taken together, these two bits of news should have averaged out to make it a meh kind of day, but extreme news doesn't work that way any more than extreme weather does: if today is freezing and tomorrow is boiling, I'll feel it deeply both times. 

Yesterday I had coffee with the colleague who received the reprieve; he described the whiplash effect of the shifting diagnoses, and he's delighted to be out and about personally thanking all the people who helped him and his wife deal with the impact of his surgery and recovery. It was a joyful meeting, full of hope and cheer.

But also yesterday, the cousin with Covid died after three weeks in the ICU. She was always the fun one, full of life and energy and gossip and interesting ideas for outings, so it's hard to imagine her stilled and silenced. Her husband, of course, is devastated, as are other family members and friends. I'm sad and distracted and angry at this stupid virus, though it's hard to know what to do with that anger.

Covid has required us to get comfortable with case counts and death rates and big scary numbers, but when the numbers hit home, they still hurt. It's as if we've all been standing in front of the firing squad for the last two years, uncertain whether the guns are aiming our way. Some will receive a reprieve, but for others, the reprieve will come too late.

So what can we do? I'll reach out one hand to congratulate my colleague on his new cancer-free life and I'll reach out the other to comfort those mourning the loss of a beloved family member, and somehow I'll hover between the two extremes, feeling both deeply and doing my best to carry on.

   

When travel is for the birds

As I look at the snow piled high on the driveway, I thanked my lucky stars for a Monday holiday, a husband who loves to get out on the tractor and push snow around, and a house well stocked with food. Snow day! I'll have to get my car out of the driveway tomorrow, but today it can sit there looking like a snowdrift until the cows come home--or the cowbirds, as the case may be.

As soon as we had light enough to see outside, I opened the bedroom window and hunkered down with the camera to see what kinds of birds would visit the feeders. That window serves as a natural bird blind, partially concealed by vegetation and far enough from the feeders so that I don't spook the birds. At first I saw the usual mixture of winter birds--juncos, woodpeckers, chickadees, a lone titmouse--but then suddenly a black wave swooped down from above and colonized the feeders.

Darn those starlings I thought, until I looked closer and saw that they were not starlings but cowbirds. The dim light made their brown heads hard to see, but the size and shape and coloration all said cowbird. I've never seen so many together, at least 50 attacking the feeders or perching in nearby trees. A few gathered on the front porch and looked in the big picture window, lured, presumably, by the mass of green plants just inside. They scattered when I closed the window, but they've come back for a few more visits. I'm not a fan of cowbirds but I'm not sure what I can do to keep them away--I can't go slamming windows all day long.

I could have gone to campus today for some Martin Luther King Jr. day events, if I could see my driveway. The sheriff's office tells us to stay off the roads unless travel is absolutely necessary, and I'm happy to comply. On a day like today, travel is strictly for the birds.

 

 

  

Dispatches from the first day of class

Twenty minutes until class begins and I am SOOOOO looking forward to seeing a room full of freshpersons on a cold dark January morning!!!!!  Except the room won't actually be full because who wants to take an 8 a.m. class? And one student will be on Zoom because of Covid quarantine, so that means I have to remember to turn on the camera, turn on Zoom, check the microphone, share the screen, and include the quarantined student in class discussion....How about if I just give up and go back to bed instead?

And now here we are in the middle of class and the Zoom link doesn't work inside Moodle. It worked fine yesterday! I can open up the Zoom link outside Moodle, but all I get inside Moodle is an error message. Nice! I have to email the Zoom link separately to my quarantining students and try to figure out the problem later. 

Am I allowed to refer to our Zooming student as quarantining? Does it violate the student's privacy? I've announced that the class Zoom link isn't intended to accommodate students who  just don't feel like getting out of bed and walking to class, but it is available to those with valid medical excuses, like a need to quarantine because of Covid, so even if I don't mention that Zooming students are in quarantine, their classmates will surely figure it out.

Everyone writes on the first day of class, not for a grade but to give me an idea of their writing and thinking skills. My first-year students are writing about a personal goal and some obstacles they might face in reaching that goal, and they're pretty united in wanting to improve on their academic performance from last semester (I clearly have some repeat customers in this class) while about half of them say they want to be their best self, in those exact words. If I were Oprah I might be able to help them with that, but all I can promise is to try to help them become better writers, which might come in handy if that best self ever needs to communicate. (At 8 a.m., I'd be happy if my second-best self showed up.)

About a third of the students on my roster didn't show up for class at 8, which is a bit alarming, but the 9:00 class did better--perfect attendance, plus an extra who wandered in a bit late. We later determined that he's on the waitlist and I was happy to admit him to the class, since I suspect that the amount of reading and writing on the syllabus will scare away a few students.

And if the reading doesn't scare them away, the writing might. What a horrible person I am to make students in a literature class look at a work of art and write a paragraph or two about what they see! I don't let them see the name of the work but you can view it here. When we meet again next Wednesday, we'll look at the work again and discuss how to start analyzing an  unfamiliar cultural artifact, and I'll try to discourage the secret hidden meaning approach to literary analysis. "The meaning isn't hidden," I'll tell them; "It's right there in front of your face, but sometimes you have to look at it a little sideways before it clicks."

Back in my office--two classes down, two more to go, but I could use a nap already. I'd like to wander down the hall to visit with a colleague, but she's on sabbatical this semester and so keeps not being there, lucky her. Who's going to step in and take care of my emergency chocolate needs? If the Professional Development committee had known how much I rely on this colleague when I desperately need a bite of chocolate, they never would have approved her sabbatical. 

But it's time for my 11:00 class, which seems crowded. How did 20 students get into a course limited to 18? Good thing I made extra copies of the syllabus!

It's my first time teaching the new sophomore seminar course so I spend a little time explaining to students why we felt the need to add this course to the general education curriculum: It's all about scaffolding. The sophomore seminar will reinforce the skills students learned in their required first-year courses (information literacy, writing, public speaking) while building a bridge toward the junior core class, which I'm teaching this afternoon. 

The sophomore seminar is supposed to be an interdisciplinary approach to a big question, so in my class (My Happy Place) we'll examine what connects people to specific places by reading and responding to place-based literature alongside some history, psychology, and science. Fun? I hope so, but then an English professor's idea of fun may not be the most reliable gauge.

Lunchtime, and yet another reason to be glad my husband has moved back home from Jackson: the man can make a sandwich! Homemade ciabatta bread, sliced turkey, cheese, and mustard--if that sandwich can't power me through my final class, nothing can. (Though a little chocolate right about now wouldn't hurt.)

Last class of the day! Five bright young English majors wondering why they're required to take a class called The Ethical Author. This is my dessert class--my end-of-the-day reward for all those 8 a.m. composition classes. Right now my English majors are writing about the role poets would play in their ideal society, a question that will loom large in our readings for the next couple of weeks. What is literature for, anyway? I'm eager to see what they say.

But mostly I'm happy for the chance to sit down and shut up. By the time I've gone over four different syllabi, I'm tired of hearing the same sentences come out of my mouth over and over, so I've changed things up bit: "I live in the woods, where we communicate by whispering messages into the fuzzy ears of woodland creatures. If you can't reach me after hours, you're talking to the wrong raccoon."

And now they're done writing so my teaching day is over. I'll take care of a few things in my office before heading out, and the really good news is that I don't have to make that 90-minute drive to Jackson every Friday afternoon but instead I can head straight home, where the most pressing issue this evening is whether to call that new squash-and-sausage dish squasage or sausquash. 

I miss teaching when I'm not doing it and I never feel more alive than when I'm with students, but at the end of the day, I'm worn out. Next week I'll be back in the classroom trying to add some new twists to the same old song and dance, but until then, it's squasage time!

(Though I really could use a little chocolate. Help?)

Flights of fancy in the midst of the mundane

A friend texted to encourage me to "have a glorious day on campus," but I spent the morning sitting in meetings full of administrative PowerPoint followed by a long, lonely session with the photocopier. Glorious is not the word.

On the other hand, I finally picked up a package that's been waiting in campus mail--a new mug and a bunch of tea sent by an old friend. The mug is kind of special; it's called Fowl Language and it features pictures of birds with names that sound a little off-color: the dickcissel, the rough-faced shag, the blue-footed booby. Very cute, and it was comforting to camp out next to the nice warm photocopier with hot tea in my new mug while zillions of syllabi rolled through the wheels. 

This mug is the fourth bird-related gift I've received this Christmas season; also under my tree were three books with pictures of birds on the cover. I have not yet begun reading A World on the Wing by Scott Weidensaul with its flock of migrating birds on the front, but I'm about halfway through On Animals by Susan Orlean, with a spare front cover adorned by a single adorable chicken. Chickens play a large part in the essay collection, although guineas, turkeys, and pigeons also make an appearance, plus donkeys and mules and lions and a killer whale and I don't remember what else. Despite some distressing details on animal extinctions and cruelty, it's a joyful reading experience.

And I read right through Ann Patchett's new essay collection, These Precious Days, with a painting of her dog on the front and a pileated woodpecker on the back. Those paintings play a role in the title essay dealing with an unexpected pandemic friendship with an artist; another essay called "Covers" explores the vagaries of book-cover design, with interesting examples from Patchett's experience. I had read many of these essays before but they play well together as a collection, and the book as a whole made my mind take flight.

Another Christmas gift finally arrived this morning--a new set of tires for my car--so I'm a little less nervous about taking flight on the wintry roads. I have a few more boxes to unpack at home and a few more details to prepare for my classes, but when I'm surrounded by so many charming birds, how can my day be anything but glorious?

 

 

Click and breathe, slowly

As much as I complain about my slow internet connection at home, I appreciate its advantages. Here I sit on my comfy sofa constructing a new course page on our course management system, the last bit of Moodling I need to do before classes start next week, but I have a ton of documents to upload and each one takes a while. At the office I sometimes click-and-scroll so quickly that I make myself dizzy, but at home I click on "upload" and then wait a minute or two or even three while it loads. Meanwhile, I look out the window at the bluejays visiting the feeders, juncos jumping around in the snow, sunlight glimmering on frosty trees, and I relax until it's time to upload the next document.

Back in the dial-up days, uploading a document in 60 seconds would have felt like a miracle, so I'm not complaining. And I appreciate the way my son-in-law reconfigured our antenna setup so my slow connection is significantly less slow--not so long ago I wouldn't have been able to upload documents at all. But mostly I appreciate an excuse to slow down and take a breath between clicks. Some days I have a need for speed, but it's nice to spend a lazy Saturday sitting at home and looking out the window while my documents slowly upload.

A time to hunker

My inbox is full.

My gas tank is empty.

My house is crowded with boxes but less crowded than it was a week ago, and it will be even less crowded today after I make the first of several trips to the Goodwill store.

My eyes are tired from a quick road trip to North Carolina to see Dad, who is doing great despite everything, but now I need to unpack and get back to work. 

Classes start a week from today and if I'm not quite ready, I'm well on the way to being ready. 

A winter storm is coming this afternoon and my Christmas gift of new tires has still not arrived so I don't trust my car in the snow. I arrived on campus at 7 a.m. and I intend to get a pile of work done before noon today and then grab some groceries, deliver a pile of boxes to the Goodwill, and get home before the snow starts falling. 

For the next couple of days I'll be hunkering down, unpacking more boxes, and putting the finishing touches on syllabi. At some point I need to get my brain back in active mode, but for now I'll mindlessly scroll through my inbox hitting delete delete delete. I want an inbox as pure as the driven snow, as long as I don't have to drive on that snow in my car.

The joys of winnowing

Yesterday I looked out my big picture window and saw the back end of a U-Haul blocking the view. Today the truck is gone, having disgorged its contents into my house, my son's apartment, and the Habitat for Humanity Restore, where our excess furniture will find a new home, provided that someone out there wants a 30-year-old particle-board computer desk or a wobbly side table.

We still have a huge task ahead of us, emptying boxes and rearranging the contents of cabinets so everything fits, but just at the moment I'm letting it all sit. I woke up in the wee hours with shooting pains in my shoulder from all the lifting, so today I intend to focus on less strenuous tasks, like thinking about beans. Where are we going to store all the varieties of dried beans we kept in the pantry at the Jackson house? The one cabinet here that still has space is susceptible to mouse invasion, so I can't put anything down there that's potentially gnawable, if that's a word. 

My favorite part of the process of combining two households is winnowing out duplicate items. We now have an excess of cake pans, so let's toss out the old dented ones! I can't tell you how delighted I am to get rid of a broken floor lamp and an ugly table lamp and replace them with the newer, nicer ones from the other house. Too many coffee mugs? Let's take everything that features an advertising logo and throw it in the Goodwill box.

Or one of them. We have three boxes full of things to take to the Goodwill, and we're not nearly done yet. Anyone need a microwave? I'm keeping the newer one but the old one still works. I'm not getting rid of the extra iron, though. Given the volume of ironing my husband does, it's only
a matter of time before our iron wears out. I'll keep the other one as a backup.

We probably could have made some money on some of the things we gave away, but who has time for a yard sale? Let someone else get some use out of my old worn-out stuff and I'll put my time to better use, like thinking about beans and drinking tea and enjoying the unobstructed view out my front window. At some point all these boxes will have to be unpacked, but for the moment I think I'll just sit and enjoy the absence of trucks. 

 

 

Boxed in and matchless

From where I sit in the living room the view is more eclectic than usual: a weight bench next to an empty bookcase next to a barren Christmas tree next to a pile of boxes, because yes, we spent Boxing Day boxing things up so we can reunite our two households into one, although I'm a little worried about where everything is going to fit. Who needs two crock-pots or three cheese-graters or several superfluous floor lamps? I foresee some visits to Goodwill in my future.

I spent most of the afternoon packing up the kitchen and I feel it in my back and shoulders. The easy stuff is done, so the kitchen island is piled high with all the things that don't fit well anywhere, and I don't want to think about where they're going. When I look at the pile I'm tempted to burn it all, so it's a good thing I can't remember where I packed the matches.

Last year I spent Christmas vacation painting the entire interior of this house and this year I'm packing everything up, so this house has certainly given me a whole-body workout. I will miss the kitchen (except for the ovens with their incomprehensible controls), but more than anything I will miss our neighbors and Lake Katharine, which has been my reliable happy place through all the insanity of the past three years of commuting between households and that one bizarre semester of online teaching. I know Lake Katharine and our wonderful neighbors will call me back to Jackson for occasional visits, but I can't think about that until we get outta Dodge.

More packing and cleaning tomorrow, and then we'll pack up the truck on Wednesday and head home. If everything goes according to plan, by Thursday I'll be sitting on a different sofa in our own house contemplating a view very much like the one I'm seeing now--piles and piles of boxes that need to be unpacked, and not a clue as to which one holds the matches.

That's my jam

When life gives you fancy jams--make thumbprint cookies. Especially if life is demanding that you pack up every single item in the fridge and move it across the state a few days after Christmas so you're motivated to empty as many bottles as possible.

And if life gives you a few blessedly free hours before the arrival of the son and the holiday services, why not do some online training for the new course management system, even if it is Christmas Eve? Because I'm an academic and that's how we roll.

This won't be my most memorable Christmas ever--that would be the one when I had to cancel a massive Christmas Eve party to deliver my daughter a month early via emergency C-section--but it's certainly unusual. Because of the timing of this move, I will have to take down the Christmas tree and pack up all the decorations in the next couple of days, maybe even tomorrow evening. 

On that fateful Christmas of 1986, when I went into the hospital not expecting to deliver my daughter for another month, we weren't able to take down the Christmas tree for a full six weeks, by which point the seven-foot-tall had dried up and dropped every needle. This year's tree is small and artificial and won't take long to undecorate, but it seems wrong to pack away Christmas so quickly.

But we'll be happy to pack on the pounds, thanks to three kinds of Christmas cookies, lots of lovely fruit, and a great big ham in the fridge. Because that's how we roll, that's our jam, that's my kind of Christmas.

 

Kitchen confusion, with capers

Yesterday I found treasure in the freezer: two quarts of frozen blackberries from our summer bumper harvest. I'll bake a blackberry pie for my husband's birthday tomorrow, which will be suitably celebratory while also clearing some food out of the freezer in preparation for moving.

I've been taking stock of what's in the pantry and fridge in hopes of eating as much as we can so we'll have less to pack up and move next week, but it's not easy. We'll be eating a lot of canned soup and we may even break into the instant mac and cheese I keep on hand for the grandkids, but the pantry also offers all kinds of ingredients that won't mesh well into a meal: capers, alfredo sauce, almonds, butternut squash, and lime jello. What am I supposed to do with that?

I also need to strategize on packing up the kitchen things, but I've already made some serious errors. We have a bunch of local jellies in the fridge that would work well for thumbprint cookies, but I never brought the stand mixer back from our other house after Thanksgiving so I'll be working with a flimsy hand mixer, which makes cookie-baking much less fun. I can't pack up the pie pans and rolling pin until after the blackberry pies, and I can't pack certain pans and dishes until after Christmas dinner. 

At some point before next Thursday we'll need to switch over to paper plates and get everything in the kitchen packed up and ready to go, but choosing the correct moment will make a big difference in our quality of life over the next two weeks, which explains why my brain is working overtime to solve these logistical problems. I wake up in the wee hours nearly every morning with an urgent need to solve a piece of the puzzle, which makes me a little cranky the rest of the day.

I've lived in limbo so many times that I ought to find the place familiar and comfortable, but every time I stand on the bridge between dwellings, I feel a desperate desire to jump off. But instead I think I'll bake a blackberry pie, which will remind me of one of the things we'll miss most about living in Jackson: the big patch of blackberry bushes just behind the house, a reminder that even the most challenging situations offer opportunities to find treasure.

Something old, something new

The other day I watched my daughter cut some shimmery red velour and sew it into a beautiful Christmas dress for my youngest granddaughter, who wore the dress the next morning in her preschool Christmas program. From fabric to dress in just a few hours! I may have had that kind of energy in my younger years when I annually sewed matching holiday outfits for my kids, but these days I'm happy to watch the young people get creative.

This time of year my husband likes to wear the holiday ties I made him from the same fabrics I used for our children's festive clothes. Ties get less wear than children's clothes and he's never going to grow out of them, so they'll be around a while longer. My daughter, on the other hand, used leftover fabric from her daughter's dress to make new Christmas stockings for my husband and me, since ours are so flimsy that they can't even be hung up any more. As much as I value holiday traditions, I won't be sorry to see those old chintzy stockings go and replace them with stockings decorated with a chickadee and a chili pepper.

On my Christmas tree I can see some of my late mother's delicate porcelain ornaments hanging near twirly plastic ones my daughter produced with a 3-D printer, a lovely juxtaposition of old and new. Today we're looking back on the day 39 years ago when my husband and I tied the knot and drove off into the sunset in that 1970 Dodge Dart, while we also look forward to the day two weeks from now when we'll move out of the Jackson house and reunite under one roof back at Hogue Wild. 

Old and new, past and future come together at the holidays. We might not have known where the journey would take us when we hopped into that Dart 39 years ago today, but we gained something new at every turn in the road, and it's delightful to see the next generation continuing some of our traditions while always bringing new things into our lives. Here's to the next turn in the road!

 

 

Adventures in Customer (dis)Service

After my latest foray into fighting debit-card fraud, I had to go out for a therapeutic haircut--and instead of just getting the usual cheap trim, I actually asked the stylist to shampoo my hair. Because I was just that angry.

Faithful readers will recall (read it here) that two weeks ago I learned that some moron had swiped my debit card number and charged hundreds of dollars in lottery tickets in a town I've never visited. As long as ten days ago I thought the whole situation had been cleared up, but what a fool I was. Since then I have had several tense exchanges with people at my bank, both in person and on the phone, and I have learned a number of interesting lessons:

1. If the phone system in the Customer Service department regularly disconnects callers who get put on hold, it's time for some truth in advertising--call it Customer Disservice. 

2. If you tell the clerk that your old eyes can't handle tiny print and politely ask her to explain what you're being asked to sign, she will sigh deeply and treat you like an imbecile.  

3. The reason my new debit card that was supposed to arrive by mail last week has not yet arrived is that (and I still can't quite believe this) the person responsible for ordering the new one just...didn't. No reason. It just didn't happen. But if they order a new one today, I can have it in hand by the end of next week! Or they can put a rush on it and have it delivered by Federal Express tomorrow! Provided that I'm willing to stay home all day awaiting the delivery, and provided FedEx doesn't pull one of its previous delivery stunts (like putting the package in a plastic bag and tying it to the bridge at the end of my driveway because they can't be bothered to drive up the hill)!

4. I never thought I would be the kind of person who would name-drop the bank's CEO and promise to mention the teller by name in a letter of complaint, but push me far enough and you never know what might happen.

In the end the bank agreed to get my new debit card issued by tomorrow and allow me to pick it up in person at the bank. By the time we'd reached that point this morning, though, I was in no fit state to concentrate on any of today's campus tasks, so I hied me on out to my regular cheapo haircuttery and got my usual trim PLUS a soothing shampoo. I'm gonna wash that bank right outta my hair--as soon as I get my new debit card.

Final exams: the gift that keeps on giving

People keep telling me it's just a number, and I guess they're right: Today I'm only one day older than I was yesterday, but 60 feels centuries older than 59. Then again, twelve years ago when I was undergoing cancer treatment I wasn't sure I'd make it to 50, so I guess I should rejoice over becoming a sexagenarian.

For more than 20 years I've regularly spent my birthday preparing for final exams, proctoring final exams, or grading final exams, and this year is no exception. A student is sitting in front of me taking a make-up exam right now, and I'm giving two more final exams later in the day, for a total of seven and a half hours of proctoring (provided that students take the whole exam period, which may not happen). And then I have a search committee meeting today to interview a candidate, and I'll finish the day with a celebratory supper with my son and some colleagues at the local Indian restaurant--socially distanced, of course. I don't want to create a superspreader event on my birthday so I felt a little guilty inviting people to eat out with us, but we can spread out at separate tables and still enjoying being in the presence of wonderful people.

I ought to be grading during all those hours of proctoring, but I've been grading papers all week and I'm tired. What I need is a face mask that makes me look wide awake while I sleep in front of the classroom. Now that would make a great birthday gift! Except I'm afraid my snoring would give it away.

A nice surprise at my department's holiday lunch.

 

Of hats, masks, and splendors

Last night at the community performance of Handel's Messiah I noticed a group of teens wearing unusual headgear--floppy knit hats with floofy things hanging from them--but I did not scoff because (a) the hats weren't any more ridiculous those I often wore in public during my own ridiculous-hat stage; (b) these adolescents' presence at a long baroque musical event more popular with the white-haired crowd is something to celebrate; and (c) in addition to ridiculous hats, they wore face masks, which is more than I can say for many others. 

Masks were required for the event, but many in the crowd interpreted "required" loosely. Way up front I saw a group of about a dozen Mennonite teens covering their heads with tiny white bonnets and delicate white scarves, but not one of them was wearing a mask. Maybe it's a religious thing? Mennonites are supposed to avoid personal adornment, but a plain drab mask doesn't seem like much of an adornment. (Neither does a ventilator, but let's not go there.)

It felt really good to be out amongst people enjoying the kind of performance that provides an emotional boost at the start of Advent. I kept thinking of the hymn we sang in church Sunday morning, "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear," which looks forward to a time "When peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling." That's just what we all need right now: a bunch of ancient splendors being flung about as we run around with arms stretched out to catch them. 

I caught some splendors the other day from my amazingly talented Jackson neighbor Judy, whose hobby is making beautiful quilts for family, friends, and strangers. Yes, she's the sort of person who entertains herself by crafting hand-made quilts to donate to needy children she'll never meet, but this time she'd made a quilt featuring 60 friendship stars in honor of my upcoming 60th birthday. I wrapped myself in that quilt and felt surrounded by love. I wish I could walk around wrapped in that quilt all week long, but it's a little unwieldy and I would hate to drag such a splendid gift in the dirt.

Instead, I propose that we all put on our most ridiculous hats, crank up the holiday music, and run around catching splendors wherever they are being flung, because what's the point of flinging splendors if no one's around to catch them?

I love the backing fabric just as much as the pieced top.

 

Remarks on unremarkability

Final day of classes for the semester but who has the energy to celebrate? Today my students are submitting papers, viewing the last bits of films, and preparing for final exams, but all I want to do is lie down and sleep for a week or two, which is not consistent with the need to grade all those papers and proctor all those finals.

This has not been the most exhausting semester ever: I haven't been trying to teach while competing for a tenure-track job in my own department or undergoing cancer treatment or serving as faculty chair, nor have I been shackled to Zoom while teaching during a lockdown. It has, on the whole, been a pretty unremarkable semester, with a few difficult spots but no more stress or heartache than might be expected of a normal year. Last year, surviving a full semester under pandemic conditions felt positively heroic; this year it's just business as usual.

But how do we celebrate business as usual? Congratulations on having a mostly unremarkable semester! Hope your next semester is even more unremarkable! I'm just not feeling it. What this semester needs is a theme song:

Call me unremarkable;
call me so forgettable;
and it's unregrettably true
that business as usual won't fit in this meter--boo-hoo!

Yeah, that's bad, but not bad enough to be memorable. Just unremarkable, like this semester, which appears to be winding gently down, going out not with a bang but a yawn.  

Since when do Mario and Luigi work at my bank?

After spending half an hour on hold with my bank's fraud detection division, I had one question: How am I supposed to have confidence in your competence when your hold music sounds like the Super Mario Brothers theme?

But I didn't ask that because I had more pressing issues: How did some moron get access to my debit-card number, and how many lottery tickets did he buy with my money? If he wins the jackpot, do I get a cut? How long will my account be frozen? When will my new debit card arrive? And how am I supposed to get access to my funds in the meantime?

Two days, four phone calls, and one lengthy visit to the bank later, I still don't have all the answers, and a bank clerk informed me that my situation is not at all unusual. Apparently this kind of thing happens every day, but this is the first time it's happened to me so I think I'm allowed to be a bit befuddled. 

I mean, how do people get access to funds when an account is frozen? "They have multiple accounts," said the helpful bank clerk, which sounds like a grand idea that I'll be certain to pursue as soon as I get access to my funds. Meanwhile, I guess I can just stop spending money.

But will the hundreds of dollars that moron spent on lottery tickets ever get refunded? I have to make one more visit to the bank to sign some papers so they can pursue the fraud further, and then it's a waiting game, accompanied by the kind of hold music that makes me wonder whether Mario and Luigi can be trusted to rescue my treasure.