Crunchy Granola

This is the 366th post in this space, which strikes me as a kind of blogiversary: that's a year's worth of posts, at the rate of one a day, which would be three times as fast as I actually wrote them. I've been reading some interesting posts about whether blogging has moved past its moment. My selfish reaction to those posts was to worry a bit about the fact that my own posting has slowed, fearing that I'd stopped posting and accidentally missed the end of blogging as we know it (rather like I seem to have missed the Last Time Curious Girl Got in the Beloved Sling).

I started blogging because I wanted to write posts like the ones I enjoyed reading. My bullet lists of late notwithstanding, I like blogging little mini-essays. I love the beautiful writing I see in other people's blogs, and I wanted an outlet for that kind of writing. I also loved the interaction--thank you so much for reading and commenting! The academic work I do involves surprisingly little interaction. Articles or manuscripts get reader reviews, and conference papers get responses, but published articles get oddly little conversation going, and it's not nearly so immediate. So I love the immediacy of blogging. I also love the freedom to write, the ability to write about some academic issues, some adoption issues, some food issues, whatever.

I didn't think this blog was rooted in a place, but since we've moved to Germany, I've found it hard to blog. And found it hard to do lots of other things, too (like find the darn second set of car keys, although I have found my other recipe binder, although not before I had to search out a substitute rollout cookie recipe which turned out to be fabulous.) As I said in the last post, and many of you kindly commented, moving is hard. It's lonely, sometimes, and I've been struggling with that loneliness at work in particular. On the whole, although I loved being department chair, I'm seeing now how much time it took up each week. I get so much less e-mail now, and there are so many fewer people stopping by my office on any given day. I'm glad to have that time back, but I've not always been using it well.

Tonight I realized, though, that the time is now mine, and I need to start using it. I need to write, and let the ideas flow from the words. So this is my new year's aspiration: to use my time, and to write words.

All of which is a rather navelgazing return to posting without lists, but it puts my aspiration on record. I don't know why moving has seemed to freeze parts of my brain, but this post is an effort to start the thawing process.

Plenty of things here, I should add, are working just great. I've been reading once a week in Curious Girl's kindergarten class, which is a hoot. I'm biking to work, and loving that. It feels good to live here (even with a frozen brain!). I don't mean to sound all gloomy and stressed out about the move--on the whole, it's been a good move. I've gotten a lot done at work, too, and have written my fair share of memos and e-mails to move my new program along. But I've got to get beyond this sense of frustration about ideas that don't quite get articulated. And somehow, a navelgazing blog post seems like the first step in the right direction.

And on another topic: many people reading here are also readers of Moreena. Annika is having her third liver transplant tonight, and Moreena is updating her blog this evening. Fingers and toes crossed, and much love going out to all the Tiedes.

I wasn't organized enough to participate in Robin's most excellent carnival on blog reader appreciation, but it's never too late to tell people you appreciate their presence and their words. So thank you, readers. I love my readers and commenters (and those of you who read and every now and again delurk). When I check my site meter, I'm even grateful for people I can see are reading and not commenting. You don't mind when I post less often, or more often, and you read through my various blogging moods: more academic for a while, more adoption for a while, more meme-y for a while. Thank you for reading. I read and write much of most days at work, but I enjoy having this space to write in a different voice, about different topics, with people who follow my random strands of consciousness over time.

With all that appreciation in mind, let me ask a question about comment setting on blogger. Aetako notes in the comments on punctuation that my comment settings are changed to prevent anonymous comments: I recently changed the comment settings from "anyone can comment" to "registered users--includes OpenID." I made that change because for the past 20 posts or so, every post I make generates four anonymous Chinese spam comments (at least, I assume it's spam b/c I can't read Chinese!). I got tired of deleting it. Although, come to think of it, the last post generated Chinese spam from a registered-with-blogger user with the userid "you," and I had to delete that, too. I don't know why my little blog attracts these 4-spam Chinese spambots, and I don't know why it bugs me that someone wants to attach spam to some older posts. So maybe I should just go back to letting anyone comment.

Anyone have strong feelings about this? I don't want to discourage people who want to comment here!

to say that I'm blogging in an airport! And I don't have much to say beyond that, but being able to say I airport blogged just appealed to me.

Airport blogging with content--now that's the next milestone.

I'm celebrating Delurking Day, late, by delurking on my own blog! Herewith, random bullets of delurking:

• Politica will be at a coastal university for several months in early 2008. She's getting ready for that. I'm in denial that she's actually going anywhere. I like having her home. I'm excited about the professional opportunities at Coastal U, but still, I like having her home.
• Because she'll be elswhere for a while in 2008, I decided it was good to do all my teaching this fall semester. It seemed like a good idea when I made the schedule. It's not such a good idea now that I'm doing it. Lots more people are teaching more classes than I am right now, but chairing a large department and teaching more than I did last year in a single semester? Not always so fun.
• I am trying to finish two papers this semester. I am trying to learn what I can from the incredibly productive new colleague we just hired, who has the most relaxed manners, longest cv, and most involvement with organized kids' activities of any of my professional acquaintances.
• So far, I have not been late on anything this semester. I may not be getting quite enough sleep, and I may not have much done early, but I am not being late.
• I am off to a conference next week, a conference a little out of my usual field, giving a paper. That is scary-exciting.
• I miss my blog.
• So, nu?
  

Elswhere's recent posts about moving to Vancouver have chronicled, in her typically smart and witty way, the search for a new apartment, the challenges of sorting and packing, and questions about things like moving trucks and boxes. Commenters have had lots of suggestions, and the other night, my subconscious pitched it, too.

I dreamed that Politica, Curious Girl, and I were walking down a city street. We came across a garage sale. "It's Elswhere's house! She's having a garage sale because they are moving to Vancouver." Elswhere came out to talk to us, and Curious Girl was fascinated by Mermaid Girl's toys. Elswhere told us all about Vancouver, while CG kept holding up items and saying "I want it! Can we get this one?" Politica said, "We're moving, too. We can't buy anything." I held firm with Curious Girl, but I couldn't help looking through Elswhere's collection of sheet music. "I can use this one when I'm teaching," I said. "I just have to buy this song about how wonderful it is to study the Liberal Arts."

So, Elswhere, I hope that helps: sorry we couldn't buy any toys, but I trust that one less piece of virtual sheet music will make the move go more smoothly. And I can't wait to get my seniors singing in our senior seminar this spring.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for those comments on my last post. If I knew you all in person, I would shower you with postcards from Politica's Ancestral Homeland and Place of European Conference, the two fine places we'll be visiting for the next few weeks. Blogging will likely be light (unless Curious Girl develops a sudden affinity for internet cafes), but Politica and I are heading off on our travels feeling greatly cheered by your comments.

So enjoy late July/early August, and I'll post postcards when I get back.

Thank you.

I've seen photos of Scrivener, and read posts of bloggy-meet-ups with him, so I know he really exists.

But still, I was really amused when I surfed over to 43 folders today.

Personally, my favorite feature of Scrivener is his intelligence+compassion+goofiness+eloquence.

Via Jody, Julie, Mel, Bardiac and others, here's a call to help a graduate student with his MLA paper. Scott Eric Kaufman wants to measure how fast a meme spreads, so to help him out, please mention his post and then ping technorati. Strictly speaking this seems more like a chain letter than a meme, but I am finding it interesting to see how each of the bloggers I've read has framed his experiment. I don't often do memes, but I like the way the genre of each meme reveals different things about the writers who do them. So far, Jody's story about Elba writing about being thankful for her cat (which she doesn't own, but can spell) is my favorite aspect of this meme. Now there's a story someone at MLA should be pondering.

MLA is the big literary conference, and also the conference at which many schools interview preliminary candidates for jobs. I'm not a literary specialist, so I've only ever attended MLA when I've been on the job market. Consequently, my associations with MLA are rather stress-filled. So a panel on academic bloggers seems like a good thing--much less stuffy and much more connected to issues in my own professional work than most of the work that will be presented. Reading blogs has actually gotten me thinking about literary scholarship in new ways, since many of the academic bloggers I read are literary types, and that's good.

So help out a graduate student get his paper done, and don't forget to ping technorati when you're done..

Another meme that Curious Girl totally enjoyed was Fancy Day. I'll have a picture tomorrow. It was totally fun. "Annika was fancy yesterday. Today is Fancy Day in Our State," Curious Girl was busy telling everyone who would listen. Remember, any day can be fancy day, so get out those clothes you're thinking you need a special event to wear.

"I threw away Pharoah," Curious Girl said to me at 6:15 a.m. on Tuesday, after informing me that the sun was PINK! and wondering was it wakeup time just yet. "You threw away Pharoah?" I said, somewhat groggily. "Yes, I threw away Pharoah, because he's so mean. I threw him away," and she gestured emphatically.

"You mean, in your head, in your imagination, you threw him away so you wouldn't have to think about him?" She looked at me with that sort of exasperated pity that four-year olds have much of for parents who don't follow their mental leaps. "No. For real. With the baby birdseed."

Ah yes, the baby birdseed. Tashlich.
which we did this year after the family service for Rosh Hashanah, using birdseed at the pond on the property. We'd talked all together about some things we might like to toss away: meltdowns, lack of patience, grumpiness. But CG took a different tack, and threw away someone mean, someone scary. Not a bad way to start the year, just tossing out the bad.

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Some bloggy maintenance, from Julie, who always knows her stuff: any bloglines readers should reformat the feeds you've subscribed to http://granolacrunchy.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full. That should keep you up to date--which assumes, of course, that there are posts here to be up to date on. Being a good department chair is making me a not-so-good blogger, but believe me, I've tons of posts brewing in my head. My big challenge as chair: keeping time to write (both academic stuff and blog stuff). And my current wonder about blogger beta: why won't my expandable posts work anymore? I miss them. And you probably miss them too, since I can go on a bit. The folds are nice.

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Back to the new year: I found the camera! (the first version of this post had no photo). I forgot to take the picture until we'd eaten half the loaf, so you have to imagine a full circle. But it sort of looked like Phantom's. I also can't find Phantom's post in which she photographed her beautiful Rosh Hashana challah--but as you can see, ours was similar, only covered in sprinkled colored sugar and cookie sprinkles. Curious Girl wanted to take challah to school to share with her friends, and when I said they could dip it in honey for a sweet new year wish, she wanted to put chocolate chips in it. "That's my good idea, to make a sweet year," she said. I wasn't sure chips in bread dough would work out, so we did the sprinkles on top. It was pretty tasty, but not so pretty after the first three days. We talked about why it was braided round (the year goes round and round, I was trying to tell her), and when I said, "can you tell when one year ends and another starts?" she said "I can!" How, I wondered. "Because we make round challah." (this was, I have to point out, the very first year of round challah, but it became an insta-year-detecting tradition). Very funny.

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So I'm late in wishing anyone celebrating a new-ish year a sweet one, but good wishes are never out of style, right? So good new year to you and yours; happy October to you and yours. Here's to a fall full of words for us all: I'm liking my new job, but I'm missing my blogs. So a call to renew some habits is quite timely for me.

If you have a blogger beta account, you can't leave comments on non-beta-blogger blogs.

An adoption post coming tomorrow, but for tonight, just a little whine about blogger beta, which ate several comments I wanted to post on other blogs tonight. Bummer!

Easily influenced by my bloggy pals, that's me. Julie's posts mentioning the new version of blogger got me to switch to the new version. (I must mention that among the Amazingly Useful things Julie provides on her blog, like her Firefox extension round up, or her sidebar with nifty things like how to make expandable blogger posts or style the Library Thing widget, Julie is also the only person I know who includes the occasional recipe-with-photo in her Flickr photo stream. Julie, you rock.)

I like the new blogger, especially because it has labels. I've been wanting to have labels on my posts for ages (but not enough to move to wordpress to get them). Labels are an easy way to browse a new blog. I've tried using technorati tags on some of my posts, but I haven't been consistent enough to make that work as a labeling tool. So I'm feeling pretty happy about this new feature, especially now that I want to start writing about a little wider range of subjects.

My only complaints so far: my sidebar widgets aren't all working properly, so I can't quite get my statcounter icon to display, and my Library Thing book covers have disappeared. And the "Previous Post" list seems to have gone from the sidebar. (And I can't find a version of Tab X that's compatible with the Firefox 1.5.0.6, an unrelated computer complaint.) So I have a few things to learn. But hey, everyone needs a new hobby when they get a new job, right?

I must find a way to work blogging and reading into my literacy and technology class for the spring. All this public writing! And public tweaking with technology, and moves to graphic organizers. It's an interesting turn, and one we in English departments are a little slow to embrace.