A Very Long Week

I spent this week in student conferences for my 1301 classes.  Some sixty students later, I'm tired!  We've been over their papers, checked in to see how things are going, and once again, I find myself shaking my head at some of the things these students have gone through and are going through.  I've had students in the hospital, students whose children have been in the hospital, students who have been evicted, who have had their books and computer stolen, who aren't sure they can keep their financial aid, etc.  I think I sent five of them over to retention services this week (which I'm sure DN appreciates, as I gave all of them her business card). 

The rest of this week has been spent doing additional things.  I've been trying to read about assessment and get through a ton of materials I have about assessment, and I've been thinking about what I might write for Emerging Dialogues, which is an online journal/newsletter (I'm not entirely sure what to call it) about assessment that our director of assessment is an editor for.  I actually didn't have any meetings this week, though, which meant that I was able to spend my Friday at home with the girl.

But by the end of the week, I've been able to get other things that have been on the back burner done.  I'm writing an article on the Anatomy Act of 1832 (which allowed corpses that had been 'abandonded' at workhouses to be sent to medical schools for dissection.  Previously, there had been such a shortage of bodies, people were grave-robbing to get them, but this law meant that poor people had their bodies donated to science, whether they wanted it or not), and I was actually able to do some research on it this week.  I've even been able to sit down and edit a couple of chapters of my book! 

Speaking of book news, I've pretty much abandoned the sequel as it is and am starting over with it.  My main character just wasn't...well, honestly, enough of an asshole.  He wasn't as nice in the first book as I was writing him in the second, and that doesn't just change overnight.  That's something we've got to see happen gradually.  But as far as the first book goes, a friend of ours is going to design the cover for me, which I'm very excited about.  Now to just talk to my brother about putting me together a website...

My sister-in-law spent a good portion of the week in the hospital, thanks to her gallbladder, which has since been removed, and I know she's glad to be back home with my brother and my niece.

And tragedy struck near my hometown, when Officer Daniel Ellis of the Richmond, KY police department was ambushed and killed.  The entire community has just been shocked by the whole affair.  My alma mater is hosting the visitation and funeral and has suspended classes (at all campuses, no less) from Tuesday night through Wednesday afternoon to accommodate the proceedings.  They know precisely who was responsible for the whole thing--the man is in custody and will not be leaving...ever--but all I can think about is his poor wife and his little boy. 

Among other things, it makes you feel gratitude for what you have, particularly the people you have.

It's a grey, rainy day here in the Coastal Bend, the kind of day that makes you want to snuggle up with a book and a blanket and the baby--the kind of day that looks like it out to be cold, but is really just sticky and humid.  Right now, she's on her activity mat for tummy time and fussing about it, but she's getting good at holding her head up, and she could already pretty much hold herself upright when sitting.  And if you don't watch her while she's on her tummy, she will scoot herself right off her mat.

We taught her how to mimic us sticking our tongues out, and this week, she's started initiating it, sticking her tongue out first to get a reaction out of us.  And KC is so very, very close to laughing.  It's like she has the facial expression, but hasn't quite managed to get the sound out.  She's also had some better nights where she only woke up once--and then we've had other nights where she was up every two hours (and wasn't that fun with twenty some conferences the next day.  Gramma took her the next night so Mommy could get some sleep).   

She was also Wonder Woman for her first Halloween and was absolutely adorable.  She's growing like a weed, too.  She's outgrown her 0-3 clothes, not because she's fat, but because she's so tall.  Last week at her two month appointment, she was 23 1/2 inches long (and 11 lbs and 4 oz.).  My girl is growing and changing every day, and I look forward to what's next.

Week 2.13...the week that would never end. (But did so pretty happily.)

Guys, I've got news for you.  Last week was kind of rough.

It was rough in the way that a day spent outside in mosquito country is rough.  A hundred little things that all line up to make you miserable. 

Sunday: We'd just gotten back from San Antonio, where we'd had a blast.  We went to bed, only to be woken a few hours later by what was perhaps the single most frightening (non-tornadic) thunderstorm I've ever been in.  The lightning was incredibly intense, and the wind just buffeted the house.  Dear Husband got up, unplugged the computers, came back to bed, rolled over, and went back to sleep.  I, on the other hand, laid there awake for an hour while it stormed.

Monday: I got to my office to an email from one of my students.  This student has had a very, very difficult time this semester, and is one of the ones that I've been constantly remembering in my prayers.  Life just got a bit more difficult for her.  Say a prayer for her. 

I went to see maternal-fetal medicine, and the doctor was incredibly...un-reassuring?  Certainly, he was not someone whose bedside manner was one that I appreciated it, and I was very grateful that he, at least, will not be delivering this baby! 
But I got to see Mogo, which was awesome.  This was the anatomy scans, so I got to watch her for almost forty-five minutes while they took almost a hundred pictures.  She kept her little hands in front of her face most of the time, but I could see them flex (and count all five fingers), and she already has big feet.  (That's Mommy's girl.)

Tuesday: I had to confront a student over a plagiarism case.   This is the second instance with this particular student, and said student was quite angry with me for the zero I gave the paper.  After all, unlike the first time, there was no copy/pasted material from elsewhere.  However, there were no in-text citations, and given that this was the second time? 

Tuesday also saw an email to the entire faculty list-serv from a disgruntled (former) student that I would really, really, love to parse down for you, but which I really can't.  Suffice it to say that I feel jaws were dropping all over campus, and it's possible someone may end up getting sued for libel.

Furthermore, Tuesday had another horrible storm that morning.  This flooded the garage again, despite the "fix" of a gutter that the landlord installed on the back of the house.  That's how hard it was raining, but it also managed to be raining sideways.  I ended up excusing absences for all of my students who couldn't make it to class, as the weather was that bad in spots (and I had students emailing me that they were flooded in, complete with picture documentation.)

Also, Tuesday let me know that we were going to have to register the Jeep in Texas...and therefore pay taxes on it.   Again.

Tuesday also saw me with another student who is having some issues.  I spent more than two hours with him in my office, in retention, and in counseling.  It was difficult.

Wednesday: We discovered that the garage had flooded.  I also had a terrible batch of papers turned in and many of them did not pass, which is always disheartening--but most of those that didn't pass didn't pass because they didn't follow the instructions.  (Thursday, I was informed by one of my students that he never gets on Canvas for anything.  I wanted to bang my head against the wall.)

Thursday: Plagiarism student informs me that he is intending to appeal his grade, and then spends the rest of the week pestering me for information about how to do so.  *pulls hair out*  Student has until tomorrow to get it in, as five business days are the limit. 

I also had a meeting Thursday afternoon, which went just fine, but I've come to the conclusion that people do not need to state the obvious.  Yes, I'm getting more and more pregnant by the day.  That does not mean that you need to draw attention to my expanding waistline in a room full of my colleagues.  

A new teaser for the new Star Wars movie dropped Thursday, which made me feel better.

Friday: I slept in.  I just gave up and slept, which believe me, I needed.  I finally dragged my butt out of bed about eleven-thirty, and that was when my week *really* got better.  I'd just finished eating something when my Gran called me to tell me that she and Bud were in San Antonio and would be in Corpus in about three hours.  (She said she'd called then to surprise me to make sure I wouldn't rush about doing things to get ready for them.  I ended up just managing to do all of that in a shorter amount of time.)

So Gran and Bud came by, which was the highlight of the week.  They've been on one of their adventures across the country, so they came in, Bud played with the kitties, they got some grapefruit off the tree.  The neighbor came over--because I know he just couldn't stand it that someone was over here and he didn't know who they were--and mistook Bud for my daddy.  Also, Mama, I've sent your Alamo magnets home with Gran. 

Gran and Bud had also brought six cartons of Ale-8, just in case they made it down here (they weren't sure that they would), so I now have 144 cans of Ale-8 left, as of today.  That ought--with any luck--run me through to the end of my pregnancy.  We went out to eat at Harrison's Landing, which had been recommended to me by a student, and is right by the Corpus Christi Yacht Club out in the marina.  It was very nice!  I had a summer salad that was to *die* for--I've never had feta that was that good.  DH had amberjack fish, which was interesting.  It was pretty firm, which I like better than a flaky fish.  (And Gran and Bud were there, so there's proof that I tried it.)  Gran had shrimp.  There were four on the plate, and that was all you needed.  These shrimp were almost the size of salad plates.  And Bud had fish and chips (only with onion rings)--fried catfish, which he said was also good.

They managed to get out of Corpus before the storms came through.  We spent part of that evening with a tornado watch down here and some nasty storms.  There were some weak tornadoes, but they all either went north of us, right between Corpus and Victoria, which was where they were staying, and one south of us.  They had to evacuate the Fiesta de la Flor festival downtown - this was a big festival celebrating the life and music of Selena, the pop star.  She was from Corpus Christi and was murdered here as well.

Saturday, DH spent the day cleaning out the Saturn, in preparation for selling it. He and his boss are taking it to the mechanic tomorrow to get it checked out.  Trust me, cleaning out that car was going above and beyond the call of duty. 

Sunday, we overslept and didn't make it to church, and given the week we'd had, I don't know that you can blame us!  But Sunday was also my parents' 31st wedding anniversary.

And today, I had so much to do, I didn't get this blog entry out in the morning.  But I can say that I am, for about five minutes, caught up with my grading, and I have a journal interested in an article I'm working on, so I have until July 15th to send it in.  I imagine that this is going to end up with me spending a day at TAMUCC using their library, since Del Mar doesn't have a lot of library resources (we're tiny---comparatively speaking--and you don't have a lot of really serious research going on here). 

So that has been the past week.  I'm really hoping that it calms down this week.  I see my regular OB tomorrow (and I should have even more new baby pictures, as they told me at the beginning that I would have a 20 week ultrasound--with video!--and believe it or not--I'm 19 weeks along.)  I have two and a half weeks of school left before I finally get a break, and believe me....after this week, I could use one.

Week 2.10: Spring into Summer

Much to the chagrin of family and friends who are living where it is still snowing, we went to the beach yesterday. It was still a bit brisk (I took a hoodie), but it was otherwise quite pleasant.  After church today, we sat out by the bay, which was even nicer.  While there was no sand, it was warmer because the breeze doesn't come off the bay as strongly as it does the gulf.

I'm writing this as I wait for the dryer to buzz.  The house has hit its mid-semester mess, and frankly, we have a lot of work to do in our living room to make it liveable again. Dear Husband is doing all the heavy lifting (both literally and figuratively), and frankly, I feel a bit useless.  I get a little dizzy if I stand for too long--my classes are beginning to get used to me teaching sitting down most of the time--so he's certainly doing things like washing dishes, and he mopped all the downstairs this week too.  He's a good husband.

Last night, UK played Notre Dame in a real nail biter.  He watched about two minutes and went upstairs, and I watched until the end of the first half, at which point, I couldn't deal with it any longer, and figuring that no pregnant woman needed to be that stressed about a basketball game, turned it off.  DH actually went to Walmart not long before the end of the game so he wouldn't be obsessively checking the score.

I had conferences with all my 1302 students this week, and while I've said this on my Facebook this week, if you have even thirty seconds, pray for one of my students who is having a very, very rough time right now.  Conferences with 1301 students takes place this week, and I have some midterms to return to my British Lit class (they turned in papers last week too, and they were also very nice.  I was pleased).

But we're getting closer and closer to the end of the semester.  My 1302 students turn in their annotated bibliographies on Monday, and I, personally, am crossing my fingers that none of them forget a major component to it, as they don't get to revise and turn things back in after they've been graded anymore, so failing the assignment would be a big blow to a grade if they forget something.  I've been trying to stress reading the instructions, but I don't know how much of that is actually going in.  I told them that if they needed me to look at an entry, I would, but I've not had a single email, which isn't particularly encouraging.  On the other hand, maybe they've all figured this out perfectly and aren't having the least bit of trouble with it!  (I just checked, and only one has been turned in thus far.  Nope, not encouraging at all.)

In other news, I had two committee meetings on Friday--the program review committee, which meets every week now until the end of the semester, and the department development committee.  The program review is going very well, I think--what we're learning is that, yeah, we're just as awesome as we thought.  :)  In all seriousness, while the department is doing a good job, I think we're going to have some recommendations that will mean that we do an even better job moving forward, and the department development committee came up with a lot of great ideas for colloquia and things that we can discuss together as a faculty to also better serve our students.  I find this awesome, too, because it's nice for us to know that we have a plan to continue improving, and that's really helpful.

I had a check up for Mogo this week, and all is looking good.  Her little heart is just beating away, and I am starting to feel her move a little bit.  This morning, we made it to church for the first time in a while (and isn't it a lot easier to have Palm Sunday in a place where there are actually palm trees, rather than snow!), and one of the first things the priest said was that "Now we'll have a Baby Jesus for the Christmas pageant!" I also felt Mogo kick the hardest I've felt--there was no denying that it was, in fact, a kick--when the organ started up this morning.  I laughed.  I couldn't help it, because right after that first note, wham!  Apparently, she likes church.

The last bit of news is that it's time for Camp NaNoWriMo.  To keep people writing throughout the year, National Novel Writing Month (November), gets a boost during April and July (I think it's July), where people can set their own word counts and go from there.  I've signed up with a daily word count of 500 words, and we'll see if I can make it.

I've just heard the dryer buzz, so it must be time to end this post.  We're hitting the busy point of the semester, and this may be the last day I have without grading piled up on my desk, so I'm going to enjoy it.

Week 14: Busy, busy, busy!

If there is one consolation to living in Texas and not in Kentucky, it's that gas prices hit $2.57 a gallon yesterday.  I filled up my little car for $27.  I can't remember the last time gas has been this cheap.  Sometime in the mid-2000s, I would guess?

There has been a lot going on in Stewartopia this week.  I should start with the turkey.  Dear Husband put it on with a pork shoulder, and while the pork shoulder turned out lovely, the turkey was a bit...crispy.  So what was salvageable from the turkey will go into the soup pot, and DH smoked a turkey breast and two chickens (because if you're smoking one thing, you might as well go ahead and do some other stuff with it).  The turkey breast went to the registrar's office yesterday for their Thanksgiving bash.  I was invited along, which was lovely, and I got to meet DH's co-workers and help them gang up on him, which he so appreciated.


Also on Sunday night, I typed the words THE END on my novel!  It's about 53,000 words right now, so I have some things I want to add when I start revising, but I'm very happy with the results thus far.  It's not my first book--I wrote three as a teenager (all of novel-length, and all truly terrible and derivative, but that's how we learn to write as kids).  And if you count fanfiction, then I've written seven.  But this is my first, honest-to-goodness, adult novel, written for adults as an adult.  And naturally, I immediately started the next one!  I'll come back and revise Chosen at the beginning of next year, probably, as I have several people who are reading it, and I'm looking forward to their feedback.

Monday was positively nasty.  We had a gale come through early that morning, and I woke up with a migraine about three a.m.  At seven, my head hurt so badly and I was so dizzy, that I called off my classes and went back to bed.  As of right now, we're waiting on another cold front to come through in two waves and bring us some nasty weather, but so far, my head seems to be all right.

I started Little Women with my American Lit class on Tuesday.  Only two people had read it before, and they had both read it in high school! I was completely flabbergasted by this.  Mom gave me Little Women as a child, and I ate it up.  My students also seem to find it as a slog to get through, which has confused me greatly, as I chose it particularly because I thought it would be an easy, pleasurable read for them at the end of the semester.  Many of them are actually reading it along with an audio book on YouTube to help them understand it.

Thursday and Friday brought something new to me.  I'd never truly appreciated the work that goes on behind the scenes in a department before.  Even having served on the Lower Division Curriculum Committee, I don't think it prepared me for this level of work.  To comply with the new mandated assessment protocols (partly state and partly SACS accreditation), we've had to put together new program outcomes.  That necessarily means that we have to ask - well, what's our program?  We have a group of developmental classes, first-year composition, and sophomore literature courses, and first-year comp is complicated by the fact that many of our students don't have to take 1302 (and 1302 is not a pre-requisite for our sophomore lit courses, which is not our doing).

So as a department, we've had to put together new program outcomes - program being defined as what someone with an A.A. in English, transferring to another school, should have when they leave.  (As in, are we preparing them to complete a B.A. in English with the foundations we've given them.)  That's taken several weeks of discussion online.  We voted at the department meeting on Wednesday, met Thursday to distill what was voted upon into the bite-sized chunks needed for SACS and then got together again on Friday to put them into a curriculum map and decide where we would assess each program outcome.

Don't get me wrong.  I like assessment--I may be the only person in the department who does, which makes me fear that I'm going to end up being the go-to person for it.  I like looking at what we've done, identifying where we're doing well and where we're not, and then taking steps to make our program better.  I think that sort of self-reflection, both on a personal and a departmental level, is incredibly important if we want to serve our students.

At the same time, I'm also seeing a bit of friction between new and old philosophies.  Is this the state interfering in our classrooms again? (Yes, in some ways.)  Shouldn't we have the freedom to teach our subject however we see fit?  (Within reason.)  I think there's some fear that any kind of strictures put on our program, either by ourselves or by the state or by SACS, will end up depriving us of some of our academic freedom.

This has been a bit of an adjustment from MTSU, where we had a solid, laid out curriculum for first-year composition which everyone was expected to abide by, and the curriculum was put out in a manner that was heavily informed by a number of experts in the field of composition and rhetoric and which followed recommendations set out by the Writing Program Administrators conference, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and the National Council of Teachers of English.  Our curriculum is informed by these things, but it's not standardized between all of the instructors.

Next week is Thanksgiving.  We are not going home--we don't have enough time, and the cost is prohibitive.  Instead, we will celebrate here.  We've been invited to the joint Thanksgiving celebration on Wednesday night with our church and the local synagogue.  The celebration is now in its 80th year, which is pretty awesome.  DH is looking forward to time off, as he's been working Saturdays as they try to catch up in the registrar's office, and I'm looking forward to time off just in general, though I will have a bit of grading to do over the holiday.

I also read the new Jan Karon book - Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good and was delighted by it.  I hate that I've finished it, but I know it's there for me to go back to any time I want.  Youngest Brother had a liver biopsy on Friday morning that went well, praise God, so now we wait on results and pray.

And I think that's it for the week, but that surely is enough.  Next week is blessedly short and should be relatively restful, and with any luck, I might actually get some of this house straightened up!

Week 13: Warm? In Winter? Whatever.

Everyone who told me that Corpus Christi was going to be warm in the winter lied.

Now, to be fair, it is apparently unseasonably cold for November, and really, for the middle of November, a low of 32 isn't that cold, speaking in absolute terms.  (Though parts of the coast have been experiencing gale force winds, which makes it feel a lot colder than it actually is.)

That said, I've been terribly amused by people out in their heaviest winter jackets, gloves, scarves and hats, particularly when the high gets up to around 50.  

What did not amuse me was Thursday morning when Shane and I had finally had it with this cold nonsense, (having been toughing it out as "northerners") and he turned on the heat, only to find when we got home Thursday night that there was, in fact, no heat.  Fortunately, for all the problems that we have had with this house, our landlord is very much on the ball about fixing things.  The problem was that the thermostat was not communicating with the furnace, and in about twenty minutes, the repairman fixed it up and we had heat.  That said, afternoons have been quite pleasant as they've been hoodie weather, but about two days with no heat has left me with a cold.  I've also rather enjoyed the bewildered looks I've been getting from natives when I walk in with a light jacket.  Still, the cats have even been cold, as evidenced by this picture of one of my brats who jumped into the dryer while I went to go find a laundry basket.

I also did something very daring.  

I bought a bikini.  

Don't look at me like that.  It was 70% off.  And, to be quite honest, I'm sick and tired of people assuming that body types like mine can't pull one off.  Apparently, I can, if my husband's reaction was any sign.  It does help that it's a fifties retro-looking bikini with the high-waisted bottoms, so I look a bit, I think, like a pin-up girl. You know, with a different face and bad hair and no lipstick. (No, I'm not sharing a picture.)  But if anyone doesn't like it, well--I have a few words to say to them, and they can't be repeated in polite company.

Granted, I'm not going to be able to wear it until next summer, as it has definitely gotten too cold to head out to the beach.  But honestly, I was kind of thrilled.  I've not had a bikini since I was like...four.

I also bought my husband's Christmas present this week.  He's dying for me to tell him what I got him, but I won't.  And in an effort not to repeat The Great Waffle Iron Incident (in which he came home, looked at the wrapped box and said "It's a waffle iron, isn't it?"), I've had his present shipped to my brother's house in Kentucky.  

You know.  Again.  (It worked last year!  He had no idea I'd bought him the Back to the Future trilogy on BluRay.)  

School this week has been fairly easy.  There have been a couple of things that again, I can't talk about, but fortunately, we have a very supportive faculty community.  We've also had some interesting things going around the faculty listserv this week, which has been cringe-worthy at times and hysterical at others.  The snark is strong in this college.  I sat in my office and cackled at some of the emails that were sent.  (I may have also dipped my toe into the faculty listserv, sent out an email that was...strongly-worded regarding some issues with one of the regents, and cringed afterwards, but it was received rather well, which was a bit of an ego boost and made me feel a little more solid on my footing in the college.)

Dear Husband has had to start working overtime--more than usual.  Today is Saturday, and he was gone all day to work, though at least when the college is closed, the registrar's office is able to get work done without interruption.  Then he came home and made pancakes for his poor, sick wife.  Tomorrow, he is going to smoke a turkey, which means the entire neighborhood is going to smell good.  (And our neighbors will be jealous, but it is for the Thanksgiving luncheon for Student Services on Friday, so they can't have any.  Also, I got the thing for .88 a pound a couple of weeks ago.  I was thrilled.)  DH did get paid yesterday for the first time, which made him very excited.  

There's not too much else to tell. I've played some of the new WoW expansion, when I can get into the queue, as naturally, its rollout has been plagued by technical problems, but why anyone would expect differently, I've no idea.  I've not written too much this week, in spite of starting off strong with National Novel Writing Month, but I am very, very close to the end of my novel, so I'm pleased with my progress anyway.

By the way, I took this picture of Ding earlier today.  I think she was contemplating murder.

Week 12: It's Week What?

It's been a fairly uneventful week in the Stewart household, all things considered.  The usual has gone on--grading, students excelling, students being problems, sending in drop forms, reading a ridiculous amount of email, more grading, student appointments, and trying to start writing a new article.

If there's one thing I've learned about why community college professors seem (and I qualify this statement because it's not entirely true) to publish less than others, it's because the resources for scholarship are much harder to obtain.  While Del Mar has access to EBSCO--and therefore the MLA International Bibliography--getting the articles are much more difficult.  We have no access to JSTOR or to Project Muse, which makes things problematic.  I can use the library at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, but I have to go there in person to do so, which is not terribly helpful when I'm trying to work in my office.

But my writing focus over the last week has instead been on National Novel Writing Month.  NaNoWriMo is now on its ninth day, and in those nine days, I've so far written 11,319 words.  That means in the last week, I've effectively written twenty percent of my novel.  Considering that I started working on it over two years ago, that's quite bit for just the last week.  I've also managed to outline the rest of it, so I know exactly where the rest of it is going.  If I sit down and really work at it, I think I could probably have it knocked out by the end of the week.

This may also be in part because DH is going to have to start working on Saturdays for the foreseeable future. Not the Saturday after Thanksgiving, thank goodness, but probably otherwise through the end of the year.  That's both good, because of the overtime, but bad because that's less time I get to spend with him during the week.  But if there is one excellent thing about working at the same place as your husband, it's that you get to see him during the day at times.  We get to have lunch together on Mondays and Wednesdays, which is very nice.  Next semester when I don't have a mid-day class at lunch time, we should be able to eat lunch together every day.

The landlord came this week and replaced our disposal, as it was leaking quite badly, and installed a gutter on the back of the house in hopes that it will stop the water seeping into the garage when it rains.  We'll get to see if that works later this week, I think, as we're expecting another cold front to come through the Coastal Bend on Tuesday.  But the cold front should bring highs of 50s to 60s, so it will finally start to feel, perhaps, like fall.  I don't know that we'll ever get to heavy coat weather, but I'll take hoodie weather.

All Saint's Day was a beautiful service last week at church with two baptisms at the 10:30 service.  In the meantime, our Sunday School class has been continuing our journey through the Book of Common Prayer.  Our priest has been doing a great job leading us through the BCP, and it's amazing how almost all of Episcopal theology can be found inside it.

What may be the most important thing that I've found has been about the difference between sickness and illness, and healing and cure.  When you've faced chronic illness, either yourself or with a family member, it's difficult to deal with the spiritual nature of it.  One thing that's always made me angry has been the idea that we must not have sufficient faith for my mother to be cured of her lupus (or for that matter, any of us with any other illness).  What I've understood in the last few weeks, both in Sunday School and by reading Father Westerhoff's book, is that I'm not wrong.

Whenever the Garth Brooks' song "Unanswered Prayers" came on the radio, Mom always stopped after it to remind us that there are no unanswered prayers--sometimes the answer is just no.  After twenty some years, it's become quite clear to me that our prayers for the cure of my mother has been "No."  I don't know why.  But that has been the answer.  It's not that I doubt God's power to cure my mother, but after twenty years of praying, I'm pretty sure that's His answer.

So I've stopped praying for a cure to my mother's lupus.  Instead, I've started praying for healing.  Father Westerhoff explains that illness is something in the body or mind going wrong.  Sickness is the attitude we have towards it.  A cure is the fix for the illness.  Healing is the cure for sickness.  And if there's one thing that's stuck with me from Father Westerhoff's book, it's this - "Disease is not a 'cross to bear'" (118). Furthermore, he says, "No one suffers from a disease as God's punishment for sin" (117).

It's comforting to hear and read that.  When you learn this, you get to let go of so much.  Healing is instead acceptance of God's will and learning to walk more closely with Him and in his ways, no matter what illness we have.  And that includes when you have a mental illness which can so closely connect with sickness that it's difficult to disentangle them.

So it's been an enlightening week as I've been thinking about that.  Today we talked about living a holy death, and the takeaway was that we die the way we live.  My great-grandfather Elza lived a peaceful life in God's will, and from what my mother has told me, his passing was also peaceful.

I won't say that Sunday school didn't bring up a lot of feelings this morning either.  I may have shed a few tears, and Father Philip was very kind and came and checked on me, both after Sunday school and after service this morning to make sure that I was okay.

I continue to be amazed at how wonderful Corpus Christi is being for us. "Body of Christ" indeed!  Our lives have been enriched by work and by church, and we continue to find ourselves drawn into a community of wonderful people.

It may not be Kentucky, but I think it'll do.

Week 10: A Quandary

I despise paper mills.

To me, there is no more egregious case of plagiarism than from a paper mill in which you had to actually pay for the paper.  And I still am often boggled by those 'academics' who write for paper mills or who ghostwrite papers, theses and even dissertations.  The Chronicle of Higher Education published a story two years ago entitled "The Shadow Scholar," which gave an inside look at those who actually write for paper mills and the pervasiveness of the practice.  But there's a certain sense of desperation for money.

So I'll let you guess as to what I've been dealing with.

This means that I'm having to go back to my chair with this problem and ask for advice, and there are some other concerns as well, but I feel like my chair has had to do nothing but hold my hand this semester.  Could there possibly be another professor in the department who has had as many problems as I have this semester?  And I realize that to a certain extent, it's probably not unusual for a new faculty member--especially one starting their career--to be in close contact with the chair, but I just cringe when I send my chair an email, even with a head's up.

I suppose this is part of negotiating the territory as a new faculty member and starting your career--not wanting to be too much of a bother, but trying to still figure out the lay of the land.

That said, I've been grading some 100 papers for conferences this week (and yes, I'm stalling, shut up.)  My 1302 classes wrote their project 2 about good and evil, and they have been pretty uniformly excellent so far.  But I just finished reading one by a student who has thought that she was a bad writer.  She works so hard, takes so many notes, asks questions, but thought she was a bad writer, and when I told her that idea was bullshit, she cried, because no one had ever told her that before.  (These teachers in high school who tell their students that they are bad writers are ones that should be publicly flogged.  There's no faster way to make someone afraid of writing and to completely dislike the process.)  Her paper was completely fantastic.  Absolutely superb, to the point where I'm sitting here almost in tears because I am just so damn proud.  For all the frustrations that I've had so far this semester, you get papers and students like this one, and you know, you just know, that yes, you are making a difference.  This paper is full of confidence and clarity, and I am just so proud, I could burst.

I discovered politics on the college-wide scale with a series of emails that went around the faculty listserv this week, and holy cow.  When you get to grad school, you get introduced to department level politics, but the college-wide political mechanisms were an eye-opener.  Once again, I'm certain that my policy of keeping my ears open and my mouth shut (okay, I know I don't always do a good job of that last one, but until I get tenure, my mouth is staying shut) will serve me well.

And of course, this week Dear Husband joined the staff at Del Mar!  We carpooled on Wednesday (he had to go to the other campus on Thursday, and I don't go in on Fridays anymore), but both Wednesday and Thursday, he was able to come eat lunch with me in my office, which was incredibly pleasant.  He's glad to be there, and I think they're glad to have him, though I got a call from him yesterday morning when he was processing drop forms in which I was chided for forgetting some information on one.  I will endeavour to do better.  (At least I have someone who will just sigh and fill it in for me!)

I've not yet managed to keep to my goal of doing some academic research/writing every day during the week.  But any new habit takes some time to kick in, but I will keep you updated.  In the meantime, my novel writing is going quite well.   I have a little over 34,000 words (you can keep up with the word count with the meter at the bottom of the page), and that is one thing I've actually been able to keep going.  It's amazing how much creative writing you can get done when you're no longer working on a dissertation.  I've written more on this novel in the last two months than I did in the two years I was working on it beforehand.

Dear Husband's birthday was this week, so I made him a Guinness chocolate cake, bought a truly massive ribeye steak, and made dinner last night.  He still had to cook the steak himself, because I wasn't confident in my ability to do so, but I fixed everything else.  He was a happy boy.  And now today is St. Crispin's Day, so we spent part of this evening while I was grading watching a compendium of different actors (including a really adorable three year old) delivering the famous speech from Henry V.  We've decided that Kenneth Branagh is the best.

So it's been a busy, but very happy week here.  Tomorrow is the newcomer's luncheon at church--to which I received a personal invitation from a fellow parishioner who also works at Del Mar this week.  We're quite looking forward to it.  We haven't been to church in two weeks, unfortunately.  The week before last, there was no Sunday school, so we didn't set the alarm, figuring that the cats, per usual, would wake us up before church.  The cats, naturally, decided to sleep in.  And last week, I wasn't feeling well, but it will be good to get back tomorrow.

Mid-week update!

We had such good news this morning!  Dear Husband starts work in the registrar's office tomorrow, and it is such an answer to prayer.  My classes all got to get extra credit for showing up today--I'm that happy!  (They also the Come-to-Jesus talk, but that's entirely different.)

In the meantime, Canvas was down this morning, so I've had to lengthen the deadline for their papers to be in--when I'm having conferences with them starting Thursday!  I'm getting ready to be inundated with papers to read and give feedback on.

The book buyers are driving me crazy.  If I didn't think it would be incredibly rude to put a sign on my door that says "No book buyers," I would.

I've also decided to devote 15 minutes of each work day to writing for my own research.  I've been reading a book about academic progress and writing for journals, and the one thing that I've always seen in common with really productive academics has been the ability to write every single day and to protect that writing time jealously.

I have a lot of things to do, as far as grading, lesson planning, etc., but even 15 minutes a day is something doable, and it's not taking so much time out of my day that I feel guilty about using it.  So we'll see how that goes, and I'll keep you informed.

Book Review: The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Jansma, Kristopher. The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards. New York: Viking, 2013.  Hardcover. +272 pages. $26.95. Release Date: 21 March 2013.

Full Disclosure: I received an advance digital copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.

---

"THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS follows the worldwide travels of a deliberately unreliable narrator and his two friends: Julian McGann, a brilliant but troubled collegiate literary rival, and the high-society Broadway actress Evelyn, also known as the girl who got away. Struggling to define themselves as individuals but inextricably bound together, the three chase love, success, and each other from jazz clubs in Manhattan to a writer’s colony in Iceland, from the mountains of Sri Lanka to a wedding on the lip of the Grand Canyon. After the trio has a disastrous falling out, the narrator weaves an intricate web of fiction around himself that allows him to dodge responsibility—but never fully escape it.   It is only once he is able to put aside his fictions and confess his own role that he is set free.

 As much a coming-of-age story about a young man and his friends trying to find their way in the world as an exploration of the nature of truth, Kristopher Jansma’s THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS will appeal to readers of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and David Mitchell’s The Cloud Atlas, with its elegant study of the stories we tell to find out who we really are." - Viking Press Release

---

I remember the first time a book reached out and, to use an Internet colloquialism, punched me right in the feels.  I was a teenager reading a book called The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff, and when I was finished, I put it away, but the book stayed with me.  Six months later, I read it again.  Six months later, I read it yet again.  Each time, it kept making the emotional impact.

In graduate school, I recognized that feeling again when I picked up A.S. Byatt's Possession for a class.  I didn't have the luxury of putting it away, thinking about it, and picking it back up again months later; I had to sit down and write about in depth about it and pick apart the paradoxes and the tangles of plot.  I lived and breathed Possession for a semester until it infused my soul.

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, like these other volumes, is one of those books that takes up residence right behind your breastbone and settles in, molding itself and wrapping itself around your heart and changing you, perhaps in a subtle way, until you are no longer quite the same person you were before you read it.  In the same way that Possession was about reading and literary study, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards is about writing.

Viking noted, in their blurb to me, that this book and its narrator follows Emily Dickinson's lines to "Tell the truth, but tell it slant."  It also reminded me of a remark attributed to Mark Twain: "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story," and something I've heard my father say: "In a room full of storytellers, the first liar never has a chance."

Simply put, this is a story about telling stories.  And it's intensely clever about doing so--at the beginning of the book, there's a note that asks the reader to contact "Haslett & Grouse Publishers" if the reader believes they are the author of the book.  I admit, I completely skipped over that--as most people would, I think--until I read a question and answer with Jansma.  The author's note is beautifully written, and I remember thinking, as I read the note, how much I would like to read that story, of how Jansma had lost his first novels.

It wasn't until I was well into the book that I realized the author's note was by the fictional narrator.  I paused, went back to the author's note, and read it again, suddenly realizing that I was reading the story I'd wanted to read, only that I'd made the cardinal mistake of literary criticism--one of the first things you learn not to do--to conflate the narrator and the author.  What's more--I'd been intended to.

---

I've spent two weeks contemplating how to write this review.  There are so many insights about writing as a profession, from the adjunct professor to the professional plagiarist to the world-class novelist (writing from the perspective of a writer for a paper mill was particularly inspired, I thought, and as an academic, I've always wondered about that thought process).

That is not to say that the book is perfect.  There is a break at the midpoint of the novel that keeps the book from being seamless in its narrative that causes an abrupt shift as the reader struggles to catch back up with what's going on and tries to figure out if the characters now appearing are the same characters as before; if there is a main weakness in this novel, this is it.

This book, will, very simply, take more time.  I'm going to have to live with it, come back to it and re-read it, think about it, and yes, perhaps write about it some more, because it is a book that is worth being written about, if only to figure out where, in this postmodern morass of lies and fictions, the germ of truth is (if there is one) that I, as the reader, will choose to believe.

A-

On Writing

I was in a professional development seminar yesterday, taking notes, when something hit me.

I love to write.

I don't mean the intellectual activity of writing, though I love that too. No, I mean the actual, physical act of writing, of putting pen on paper and watching ink spill forth. Of even sitting at a computer screen, tapping at keys and watching words simply appear like magic. I suppose it's what makes a brand-new notebook special--what makes a brand-new notebook with a pretty cover even more special.

What caused this? It wasn't the professional development seminar. Though it was informative, it didn't have anything to do with this physical act of writing, and I was taking notes on the idea of voice in non-native speakers' English when it struck me. Now, part of this, I feel certain, was the fact that Cengage had a book rep there, and he had given me a pen.

I love these pens.

I got two of them last year, and was upset when they didn't last me all the way to this year.

I might have more than two right now.

Actually, I might have a lot more because I was tempted by their shiny brilliance every time I went by the table. (To be fair, he left a BUNCH for anyone to take after the seminar was over, so I don't feel bad about having a bunch, since everyone had a chance to get them and had left by the time I got there and snagged them. And now I will have them for a LONG time. Buahaha!) And I would totally buy these pens if I could figure out who made them, but my perusals of the office supply aisles have been for naught.

Anyway, something about the tail of a cursive 'y' caught my eye, and I stopped for a moment to simply appreciate the act of writing. I really do enjoy writing, especially by hand, though I'm never terribly happy with my handwriting for long, because the faster I go and more excited I get, the less beautiful my handwriting becomes.

It reminded me of an E.L. Konigsburg book I read when I was a kid: The View from Saturday, which won her a second Newbery Award. In it, one of the main characters is taught to use a fountain pen. The fountain pen--refillable, mind--is extolled as the most virtuous of pens, rather than the soulless ballpoint so in use today.

Personally, I've always been a ballpoint pen girl myself, though I've been picky about what kind. I love Bic pens, but not the crystal ones. I'm a fan of the RoundStic pens. I enjoyed Sharpie pens for a while, as the logical, less messy follower to felt-tip pens, though they were not fast enough for me to take notes in class. SnarkyWriter gave me an InkJoy, PaperMate's new pen (which is being featured on their website's front page right now), and I found that not having to press down on the ball resulted in quite a bit of mess, and I had ink all over myself. Mostly, I've used their Write Bros. pen.

But I've found that many of my favorite pens have come to me from various places. I have a KEA pen (the Silver Dyna Pen), and another one also emblazoned with the KEA logo (a variation on the Arctic Frost). I've several Clic Stics from a variety of organizations, and two Tri Stics with my alma mater's Continuing Education logo that I love dearly. In my pen jar, I've also several of the aforementioned Round Stics, Sharpie pens, Write Bros. in various colors, a PaperMate Mystix in orange (which I believe they've quit making). I've also a purple Pentel Energel that I use sometimes for grading, though I'm not a gel pen person.

But my favorites are always the ones I pick up. Working in a pharmacy as an undergraduate, I picked a number of pens from drug reps. I have a pen from a Marriott hotel, one from a Drury hotel. I've a blue pen I think my father bought. I've my Cengage pens. And like anything else, my tastes will change. It may be that by next year, I will no longer want the Cengage pens, and at that point, they will drift out into the world, thieved and given away. Pen karma.

But what matters is finding THE pen for the moment...and then finding that perfect curve in a word and smiling because it's just so fun.

Book Review: A Dash of Style

Lukeman, Noah. A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation. New York: Norton, 2006. Paperback. +201 pages. $13.95.

I should, up front, note that this book did not cost me $13.95. Rather, I got a free copy of it from the local Norton rep. I'd looked at the back and thought that perhaps this book might give me some good ideas for teaching grammar in my composition classes. The book is mostly designed for creative writing classes, but I thought that I could perhaps adapt some of the exercises for my comp classes.

I doubt that I will do this however. There are some brilliant pieces to this book and some not-so-brilliant pieces. Here's the rundown.

The Good:

As a creative writer, the sections on quotation marks and paragraph and section breaks were great. It helped underscore some concerns I've had about my own writing recently--one, that I was incorporating too much dialogue and not enough introspection and other actions. Lukeman identifies an over-reliance on dialogue as a problem with pacing, and while I'm happy with the first chapter, as far as dialogue goes, I'm much less happy with the second chapter.

The section on paragraph breaks may end up getting copied and taken to my students, because many of the lessons there can be applied to academic writing. This is really the only section of the book that I think can be adequately applied to a composition classroom, rather than a creative writing classroom. It also helped with some thoughts I'd had about changing viewpoints between scenes. While I'll still use section breaks to delineate a break in time and place--in the morning at the gym to the afternoon at the library--I'll stick with one point of view per chapter if possible.

This flipping points of view has always been a problem for me, and it was something I didn't notice until several years ago when my friend Carmen was kindly betaing a short story for me and pointed out that I was switching points of view between paragraphs. It was something I'd never really picked up before, and I am so grateful that she pointed it out to me. It's a lesson that I've kept in mind ever since (so thank you, once again, Carmen!). Lukeman suggested that I not flip point of view even between scenes and save that for chapters instead. I think he's probably right.

The Bad:

The first sections on the most often used punctuation marks: period, comma, and semi-colon, felt a little unnecessary. Here's the thing--if you're going to be a creative writer, there's one thing you should be doing.

Reading.

I'm not saying that Lukeman is downplaying this point--he's definitely not. What bothers me about this book is that it seems to have two audiences in the newbie creative writer and the experienced creative writer. The first half of the book, focusing on these base punctuation marks, is for newbies, and I can't help but feel that newbies would be better served by reading examples of what they want to write in order to pick up punctuation rules than they would this book. The second half, which goes into colons, dashes (which I overuse, I know), parentheses (lookit here), and the aforementioned quotation marks and paragraph and section breaks (and I do think referring to paragraph and section breaks as part of punctuation was freaking brilliant). There's also a brief chapter on less used punctuation marks--exclamation points, question marks, ellipses, brackets, etc.

This was what I found useful. The stuff about periods, commas, and semi-colons I found heavy-handed and too much for an experienced writer, but I felt that latter half of the book would overwhelm a newbie. But if you're using it as a reference book? That's different, but it's not set up as a reference book, which makes it odd.

The Ugly:

If you go to the book's website, you'll find that there's a list of the universities that use A Dash of Style in their creative writing programs. My objection here is really to the way that creative writing is taught (though Lukeman is complicit in this).

Creative writing is taught in American universities as "literary" creative writing. Genre writing is looked down upon by the academic establishment, unless you are so lucky as to be in a program like mine which focuses heavily on pop culture, and even then, I can't speak to the way creative writing is taught. What I do know is that at some universities (I have heard of several through some of my friends), creative writing is expected, oddly enough, to conform to some academic notion of non-conformity.

Horse hockey. Genre writing can be just as influential, if not more so, than anything that will end up in the canon in fifty years. Harry Potter is never going to end up in the "literary" canon (nor would I argue, should it. For example, it ignores many of Lukeman's punctuation rules!), but to ignore the impact that it has had on the last two generations of readers would be idiotic. The same could be said of Twilight as a cult phenomenon, despite all of the objections that I have to it.

Lukeman is complicit in that all of his examples are drawn from literary fiction, and the general tenor of the book suggests that he's expecting his readers to write literary fiction. Well, some of us don't. Some of us write genre fiction very happily, and one thing that Lukeman fails to acknowledge is that some of these genres have conventions of their own. He's so busy focusing on how some writers have distorted the use of certain punctuation marks (Hemingway used emphatic periods! Joyce exiled the poor defenseless quotation mark!) that sometimes I felt that standard conventions were getting overlooked. This is probably not fair, because he does make note of the standard ways some punctuation should be used.

Anyway, back to my point. We need a more expansive definition of creative writing (perhaps one that recognizes that all writing, academic, fiction and non-fiction is creative?) both in and out of academia, and books like this aren't helping.

Everything else:

All this said, it's a good book to read. I wouldn't use it in a beginning creative writing class, I don't imagine. (Of course, I would rather not teach a creative writing class at all.) But it's interesting, and it has some good reminders for more experienced writers. And I would very much like to pick up one of Lukeman's previous books, The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying out of the Rejection Pile. But I'd like to know what Lukeman, as a literary agent, tends to buy himself first. If he's not buying genre fiction, then I don't know that all of his advice would work.

A Dash of Style: B-

The Help

My mom has started reading Kathryn Stockett's The Help and is planning on going to see it this weekend. She's loving it, and as I mentioned this to my boss today, she remarked that she had also given a copy of it to her mother, and that they were going to see the movie together this weekend.

Anyway, between that, seeing the commercials, and hearing interviews on late night talk shows, I've been interested, and Mom says she'll loan her copy to me. It was this that caused me to click on a link about the book from Yahoo! tonight about the 60 rejections Stockett had before someone finally bought the book.

Despite the fact that I have yet to send anything out--I actually find this encouraging. I can't really tell you why, but I do. Any ideas?

Quick Update

I finally managed to finish The Ambassadors for class--I have to start Edith Wharton's The Reef tomorrow. Before dinner, I picked up Anne Bishop's Shalador's Lady, which I've had for a while but haven't had the time to read. Spare minutes to read--unrelated to school--have been very rare, so I've been treasuring them over the last several days, not to mention treasuring the fact that I seem to have gotten over my reading slump that hit mid-May.

I won't go into a long review, but Shalador's Lady was excellent. I've always appreciated Bishop's world, which is a universe unto itself, and the novelty and detail does much to keep a reader's interest. It was definitely an A read. Checking out Anne Bishop's website, I discovered that she had just released Twilight's Dawn, another collection of novellas in the Black Jewels universe (following the first collection, Dreams Made Flesh).

And my brother had given me an Amazon gift certificate for my birthday....

So I ordered Twilight's Dawn and the first Linnea Sinclair's Dock Five novels, Gabriel's Ghost (as well as a cross-stitch pattern book, but that is neither here nor there). I could have bought Twilight's Dawn for my Kindle and saved two dollars, but to be honest, I didn't want to. Reading a real, physical book is so much better than an e-reader, and two dollars wasn't enough for me to give up the real book. So I'm looking forward to those being here in a few days.

---

In other news, I had been contemplating a long post about writing, in general, but the more I think about it, the more I draw back from writing about writing. Odd, I know, considering that I'm a writing teacher, but I wasn't planning on talking about academic writing--I was going to talk about fiction writing.

But I keep not writing about it. I suppose I should just make myself write about it--force myself to become more comfortable talking about my writing process...but I can't. Anyone else have this problem?

I don't like this at ALL.

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

My guess is that my overuse of the dash has been responsible for this travesty, but out of four different texts pasted in, I got James Joyce for three of them. I got Dan Brown for the first one, so I'll be happy with Joyce, I guess. Still, I maintain that of all the people I know who have claimed to have read Ulysses, I believe only one of them.

In other news, I'm finished with Yeats! That does not mean all the work is over; on my agenda for today is a 15-page journal review of College English which examines the trends in composition and rhetoric research.

But since Yeats is over, I've had time to read not school-related books, starting with, of course, Kim Harrison's White Witch, Black Curse. Read: Rachel Morgan getting herself into yet more trouble. Apparently, witches do like the Amish and shun members considered deviant. This is going to put Rachel into a world of hurt, and I'm looking forward to Black Magic Sanction and how she deals with the long-term consequences of all of that. Also, I was kinda disappointed in Marshal for running scared when she did get shunned, but I suppose that, to a certain extent, Harrison is putting forth a very realistic portrait of the modern woman's search for love. Con men who keep turning up like a bad penny, seemingly upright guys with no spine, backstabbing ghosts, faithful vampires... Seriously, though, I think a lot of women will recognize the underlying issues with some of these men and why they couldn't work out. And some of them will likewise recognize some of the good things--Kisten may have been a screwed up vampire, but he loved Rachel unconditionally (after all, he went up against Cincinatti's vampire leadership for her).

Besides that, I also treated myself to The Brazen Bride. It's marketed as a romance novel, and...um...it fits the category. I've read almost all of Stephanie Lauren's books. They're well written, decently researched (she writes Regency romances) and always feature some really interesting characters that you remember when you've put the book down.

I feel that I should point out, in my own defense, that my next statement is made because I am trained as a literary critic to notice things. I notice patterns, things people like to do the same, etc. Stephanie Laurens generally likes to include three sex scenes in her romance novels. They usually take place in the latter half of the novel, and they follow a very particular pattern.

In some aspects, the title of her newest novel is entirely appropriate. Brazen is the word for it, because as I read, my first thought was...Wow, this is a lot of sex. So, to confirm, I went back and looked at one of her other novels. Yup, three scenes. Went back and looked through The Brazen Bride. Eight. Almost all of which were in the first 150 pages.

O.o? What? Seriously? Eight? I got halfway through the book and started wondering if there was a plot anywhere. There was, but the plot that has been driving this quartet of books was almost non-existent, and the hero losing his memory seemed contrived, as if she was trying to avoid having to deal with those chasing after him from India to England.

It was well written, don't get me wrong, but I prefer my romance novels to, you know, actually have a plot, and I was enjoying the plot of this quartet. And I am very much looking forward to reading the final book of the set, The Reckless Bride, when it comes out in November.

I've also added Holly Lisle's Talyn to the reading list, thanks to my favorite Snarky Writer, who loaned it to me. I've got Black Magic Sanction checked out from the library, and I have plenty to read in any case. I need to get back to Through the Looking Glass as well, so I can knock that off my reading list.

But schoolwork (that's due tomorrow) comes first. Here's hoping the cats don't go completely insane while I'm trying to do this. They've already made my morning interesting.

Rain and other random thoughts

I had been irritated this morning to find that we were expecting (yet more) rain in Middle Tennessee today. Yesterday was hot and sticky, over ninety degrees, and I'd been looking forward to my apartment complex opening their pool today.

Today, the weather is cool, and the sky is a pearly grey, and the rain is falling. It's not a heavy rain--the kind of gentle rain that you must think plants look forward to, the kind that you could go out and dance in.

I have...not been reading. I did get (most) of my schoolbooks for summer in the mail yesterday, which was nice, but I haven't opened them yet. Instead, I moved some furniture around into what I hope is going to be a more work and writing friendly setup (it involved putting the computer in such a spot that I have my back to the television). Then I spent some time last night competing with a friend on Write or Die (she won with 597 words in ten minutes to my ~460). Still, I put 900 words down last night, which is not too shabby, and I have a few more scenes sketched out in my head to hopefully keep suspense going a little better.

My plans for the afternoon involve eating lunch, watching Firefly, and sewing. It's only May and the Christmas presents are far from done (this would be last Christmas), but my friends are fortunately not only very cognizant of the semester I had, but also my ability to procrastinate and don't mind. I would ideally like to be able to finish the binding on one quilt today--hand stitching it, and then to machine stitch the binding on the other one tomorrow. Then if that gives me time to actually quilt on one I'm making today, that suits me just fine.

I'd also like to do some more laundry and dishes, neatening up the house before I leave for St. Augustine on Thursday. I always remember cleaning house being an important part of pre-vacation plans--that way you came back, happy and exhausted, to a clean house.

In other good news, my impatiens survived a week with me gone and being thirsty and are bouncing back quite nicely.

Auction

We went to an auction today in Richmond, and I'm not sure I've ever really seen quite such a dichotomy--perhaps quite so many dichotomies--in action at one time.

This particular auction was an estate sale for a woman named Anna Marcum. She was elderly, of course, and from some of the items in the sale, one could tell she'd been in poor health (they sold a hospital bed for about $12.50, I think). The first thing I thought going into the auction was how very sad it was, seeing all of this poor woman's life laid out for public consumption.

Perhaps I shouldn't say that she was a poor woman. My great-grandmother wanted everything of hers to be sold an estate sale, and most of it was. But I still couldn't feel quite right sitting there and watching everything be sold to whomever came in.

A good number of the potential buyers were junk dealers, and there was quite a bit of junk, probably accumulated from the garage. There was also quite a bit of very nice furniture, most of it cherry, a collection of amber Depression glass, and some beautifully handmade quilts.

The woman herself was dead, but there was a flurry of activity around. The auctioneer's voice seemed to never stop, going on and on and on, amplified by the speaker system, and his assistants yelled out to alert him to each bid. People milled about, young and old. One child, still unsteadily walking, toddled around, taking in the noise and the sights.

Part of what struck me was also the dichotomy between rich and poor. This woman had lived during the Depression; that was obvious. Part of this was from the Depression glass; her quilts also showed their age. Though they'd been well taken care of, they were made of the printed fabric that came in feed sacks, and then had been painstakingly hand stitched--stitches so close together than the fabric was puckering in places the way that those old quilts did. Of all the things that I saw there, the only one that I would have bid on was a double wedding ring quilt, but it very quickly rose to $225, which was well out of my price range.

Despite this display of Anna's own economical ways, I could also see that by the end of her life, she was comfortably well off. Some of her furniture was dated; it resembled the furniture that belonged to my father's mother that my great-grandmother kept until she died, veneered stuff that had a curved upper edge to it. Most of her furniture, however, was good quality cherry, the kind that had been bought and made to last and be passed down and used by generations to come. Her sofa and chairs were upholstered in a fabric print that went out of style in the early 80's, but you never would have known that it had ever seen anything more than slight use--my guess is that it was her good living room furniture, the kind that never got used except for company.

There was also a collection of sports memorabilia, UK basketball related. There were two or three scrapbooks, filled to the brim with pages and pages of painstakingly clipped articles about UK basketball stars from the 1940's. I don't know if these were scrapbooks kept by Anna or her late husband, but whoever it was would have been voting for Richie Farmer in the gubernatorial election (if he runs), simply on UK nostalgia alone. The handwritten scores didn't look written in a particularly feminine hand. Still, they were important enough for Anna--who didn't seem to be particularly pack-rattish--to keep for sixty years.

In the midst of this, my fiance came to see me for a brief moment before he had to run off to other things. He picked me up and took me to lunch, and we sat in the Richmond Mall parking lot, sitting on the tailgate of the truck and ate.

It was strange to see all of these things put out, laid out on tables. My mother came away with two small drop-leaf cherry end tables and one of the quilts. It's a quilt I'm not sure I'm going to ever want to use, though. I have no doubt that it was stitched together with as much love as any of the quilts my great-grandmother made, probably pieced on the treadle Singer sewing machine that was in the auction (much like the one we have from my great-grandmother's house). But that love was not for me, and I don't begrudge it, because there is plenty of love in the ones we have.

I have other thoughts, but they are probably best unwritten right now. They are too close and too personal to display for the public, much like some of my things. Though I realize that my belongings are just things, I do not know that I could handle them going elsewhere--though most of those are things that belonged to my old people. Mamaw Retta's hope chest, Mamaw Ree's dresser and the glass dish that holds the marbles from our house, the books that belonged to my dad's mother that I got from Mamaw Fannie's house. I have two small figurines from my Mamaw Puzzle, and I have the cup and spoon that my Papaw Doug would take his coffee in. Mom let me take two framed prints that Mamaw Ree had given her. I suppose the one quilt I have finished, or some of the paintings I have created, or the Willow Tree figurines my parents and fiance have given me are the few items I would not want someone else--outside of my family and friends--to own, the few items I truly care about that are solely mine, have only ever been mine. (And my guitar.)

Perhaps Anna had it right. Perhaps she saw clearly what I cannot--a transient life and things that are not as important as memories.

***

On one final note, my word count is up to over 11k. Despite the reflective mood I've been in, I've been getting a lot done.

Storytelling

I had my wisdom teeth taken out last week, which naturally was an adventure. I'm going back Wednesday for a followup, but until then, I've been recuperating around my house, generally pretty well medicated. Standing up requires a little more effort than I'm used to. As long as I stay sitting, my vertigo isn't too bad.

So during the less psychedelic moments I had Friday, I managed to move my computer over to the couch, one piece at a time, very slowly. That way, if I feel like I need to fall over, I can, right on to the couch, and the cats can get up on the couch with me and take care of me.

I should also send out a huge kudos and thank you to my favorite snarky fantasy writer, who not only drove me to and from the oral surgeon's office, but who also babysat me all day Thursday (and cleaned up cat puke at one point that day too). On top of this, when my oldest cat started having seizures Saturday morning, my friend came and got her and took her to the vet for me, as there was no way I could drive. (The cat seems to be just fine, however. Not real sure what was up--waiting on bloodwork to come back from the vet).

But while I've been recuperating, I've been thinking about storytelling. Part of this is because I have a paper to give at Slayage the first weekend in June on Firefly. My particular topic is how Malcolm Reynolds is a Campbellian hero. Secondly, I've played a lot of Star Trek Online this week, and I've been rather impressed with the way that story lines that were not quite resolved in certain series are being woven into the game. In some ways, the game is retconning a lot of fan explanations for plotholes into the greater franchise universe.

I've also been brainstorming ideas for the other Star Trek game I play, Kepler Station. We've got some interesting plot lines coming up, full of intrigue. I've also been plotting out a book of my own. Not quite ready to give details on that yet, but I'm hoping to actually start putting words down on the page today, beyond the detailed synopsis I have in my notebook.

I wish I could say that I had some grand insight into storytelling, fueled by pain medication and jello, but I honestly don't. The best that I have is a statement about how much fun I have brainstorming plots. It truly is my favorite part of writing fiction--deciding where a story is going to go, how some actions have consequences, how characters will react. I tend to write scenes in my mind well before putting them down on paper, almost envisioning them as a movie in my head. I like it so well, in fact, that I almost hate actually sitting down to write, because I'm having so much fun otherwise.

But every time I read an article by writers about their craft, they always stress discipline. I suppose that means I should quit procrastinating and get to writing. Looks like it's time to break out the Write or Die program.