Crunchy Granola

Collin Brooke's Rhetsy has a bit of the old school blog about it.  It's powered by TinyLetter, so it arrives by email, but each week's contribution has a few links, with some comments from Collin about what he finds of interest.  I like it.

He's called for lists of five, and that inspired me to dust off the old blog. It's August, and in northern New England, August is tomato time.  So what's on my mind?  Five ways to eat tomatoes.  (Although what I really need are 500 ways to eat zucchini.)

1. Slow-roasted oven tomatoes.  Yes, it can be hot in tomato season.  Yes, three hours is a long time to leave the oven on.  But these tomatoes are simply a taste of heaven.  I dream about these tomatoes all winter long.

2. Raw tomato sauce. Another Smitten Kitchen recipe description--she adapts it from Gourmet.  And I like her notion of simply asking people what recipes they adore. Trusting people who don't like to cook to find the most reliable recipes intrigues me.

3. Another raw tomato sauce, this one from the most unlikely of places: PMLA (104, 1989), the rather stuffy journal of the Modern Language Association.  When I first started graduate school, a requirement in the MA program was a proseminar for new students.  The proseminar professor brought in a recent issue of PMLA, showing us that a graduate student had published a piece in it.  He wanted us to know that publication was something we could do (this was back in the mid '80s, when graduate education was not professionalized in the way it is now; more graduate students publish more pieces these days.)  PMLA--which I never read anymore, having moved away from literature and the MLA--always reminded me of my imposter syndrome as I started graduate school.  But in 1989, this piece by Susan Leonardi captivated me: it opened with a recipe, and it referenced Nora Ephron.  That's my kind of literary criticism.  I keep this issue of PMLA on my cookbook stand, even though you really don't need to follow the recipe once you've read it more than once.  But it amuses me that I have a tomato-and-oil-stained PMLA in the kitchen.

• Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders are doing amazing work in Haiti and around the world.
• I followed the story of the BRESMA orphanage in Haiti (the children there all got airlifted out of Haiti, to the US, Spain, and the Netherlands). International adoption is complicated, always, but it's particularly complicated in the wake of a natural disaster. The BRESMA children seem largely to have been in the process of being adopted by non-Haitian families--but there are many children in Haitian orphanages who do have extended family in the country. There are warnings emerging about the dangers of child trafficking in the wake of the earthquake. I hope that aid organizations focus on what children really need--which is first, safety and shelter and food; secondly, ties to their home land and home families if possible. Some good analysis comes via O Solo Mama.
• Kristen Laine has a parenting/outdoors blog! If you liked American Band, head on over! Or if you like being outdoors with your kids, check it out.
• I've been experimenting with crusty bread at home, the no-knead kind made from dough that can be refrigerated for weeks. Very handy, and very delicious.
  

I have posts in my head--oh, so many posts in my head! Here's hoping that the winter season will afford a bit more chance for those words to wend their way to the screen. I think about you, oh kind blog readers in the computer. Belated wishes for a happy 2010 to each of you.

besides blogging in my head, that is:

• I performed surgery on a 29-year old stuffed koala whose job, at night, is to stay awake and watch over Curious Girl while she sleeps. CG cut one of his seams open in the midst of a big ol' fit, and then felt so horrible about that that she spent another half hour being hysterical about the fact that none of her animals would stay up all night with her because they all thought Ted the Koala should do it (but he couldn't, because he had been removed from her room to the Koala Hospital for a night of rest before the surgery)
• I had a conversation with CG in which she--rather worked up--yelled that she wanted to break my arm. (Fine to be very mad at me, I said, but not OK to try to hurt me.) Then she said that she wanted me to go to the hospital so that she and Politica could visit me there. (If I'm in hospital, of course I want visitors, I said.) Then she got hysterical in another vein because what if Politica said she couldn't visit me in the hospital and she had to stay home alone? what if she cried and I wasn't there? Anger, fear of abandonment, love, adorableness--almost seven is really rather amazing.
  
• I've been skiing every Sunday. I love the woods here. I think I will get in one more ski tomorrow.
• I've met a lot of faculty, and listened to lots of stories about teaching and learning
• I've walked through a sugarbush, listening to leaves crunch and mud slurp, smelling spring
• I've gotten our bikes all ready for spring
  
• I have been much missed by CG when I've not been at home, but much ignored by her when I am.
• I'm trying to decide what is special or unique about me, to answer a trivia question on a questionnaire for my college reunion this summer. For some reason, this question is tripping me up.
• I have bought two pairs of mud/rain boots (the first were too warm for warm weather) and listened to CG singing a little song she learned at school about how wonderful mud is. We're not in Old State anymore.
  

Good News

• Halloween in the new neighborhood was pretty fun. Curious Girl and the neighbor kids ran up and down the streets. She gleefully counted her candy: 64 non-chewy pieces!
• My Obama pumpkin looks mighty fine.
• Via Lesbian Dad, news of a challenge grant: philanthropist Tim Gill and his partner will match donations to No on 8 up to $100,000.
  
• I'm helping to plan a roast for one of my grad school professors. Turns out I like event planning.
• Cousins come tomorrow!

Bad News

• I remain increasingly concerned/obsessed/drawn into Proposition 8 coverage. No on 8 is polling slightly ahead of the other side, but past experience suggests we need a 10% advantage in the polls to feel sure of victory. This is going to be close. I liked it better when I thought this election was just going to be about Obama happies.
• A commenter on one of my recent posts pointed out the Halloween tactics some yes on 8 folks are using: giving out postcards to trick-or-treaters that are ridiculously misleading (telling children that "your mom can be a man" if Prop 8 doesn't pass: let's bring a little transphobia into the homophobia, shall we?). The commenter left a link to a pretty bare bones site, so I googled and discovered some additional evidence for the truth of it. Those singing children are a low, low, dirty, misrepresenting reality trick.
  
• Guest bedroom is so.not.ready.
• Younger cat ran out the door when some trick-or-treaters came, and when Politica ran to get him, he wouldn't come to her, and just growled. He could be anywhere now.
  

Good news

• That blogging adage is true! blogging about things really makes them happen. Younger cat came back!
• We have a lot of candy left over. Not sure whether that's good news or bad news. Anybody want some?
• Lesbian Dad is just a good, good blog. I'm channeling her this week for good reason. When you have time, click on over there and browse her archives. She's got a way with words--and at the moment, those words are flying for a righteous cause.
  

Good things:

• it's a good trip, when you arrive bearing apples, for friends whose refrigerator is full of apples, and they are happy.
• it's a good host who obligingly makes your child the apple butter and ketchup sandwich she asks for, and who then enjoys watching your child eat said sandwich
• it's a good sign when your new colleague comes into your office and says, "I don't think I've officially told you how happy I am you're here. I'm so happy you're here; you have a great temperament for this job."
• it's a happy sound, the sound of the canning tops popping sealed after two more batches of applesauce are processed
• it's a nice feel, warm fall wind

Um, challenging things:

• it's a hard thing when your child loses it for 20 minutes on the highway. I kept thinking, "I want a chocolate bar, I want a chocolate bar," and let her scream out her demons.
• it's hard to be six and almost-a-half and start thinking about your cat that is dying. Older kitty has chronic kidney disease. More news from the vet tomorrow.
• it's hard to be calm in the face of kid anger. Two nights in a row CG has lost it at bedtime, two nights in a row she's gotten hitting/scratching/spitting mad, and two nights in a row it's hurt my feelings. I need to not let it get to me, the better to mediate on chocolate.
• it's rather confusing to learn to communicate with new pediatricians. It's possible CG's doctor thinks she has asthma (which I don't think she does), and there is some seriously bad communication going on about what meds she's taking for how long.
  

Back to good things:

• it's a fun thing to walk into kindergarten and hear the teacher telling another parent about how much fun the class always has on Mondays because they are just so focused.
• it's a relief to hear a cough going away (even if the cough is the occasion for the poor communication above)
• it's a very happy thing to have a new computer on my desk at work.
  

• 45 boxes of books have the movers thinking our shipment will be overweight
• Overhead last night: "If you put your finger up your nose, you have to wash your hands before you touch the baby."
• Also overheard last night: "I think it will be fun to meet new people."
• The driver told me that reverends have the most books of anyone he moves. Reverends also have the lousiest furniture, he says, but that's OK because they don't seem to care about their furniture. But they do love their books. Songbird and Rev. Dr. Mom, any comments on that score?
• Curious Girl is registered for kindergarten. Her teacher's name is kind of fancy. And our new street address is on Ornamental Tree Variety Terrace. When I told her the teacher's name, she said, "Oooh, fancy! I guess Germany likes fancy words. Maybe Fancy Nancy lives there."
  
• I have about 60 thank you notes to write, which are clearly not getting written before I move.
• I just drafted the last report I need to write.
• The house looks a lot bigger with stuff moving out. As the movers take things, I'm discovering little chocolate easter eggs. A colleage had given me a bag for Curious Girl, and she found them and organized an easter egg hunt the other morning. We repeatedly divided them, hid them, and then searched for each others' eggs. Except she kept forgetting how many she had hid. Which is handy, because I'm a little hungry.
• Curious Girl and Neighbor Girl have opened a lemonade stand. Lemonade is free to movers, but they wanted $10 from me. I gave them .30 each, and they said OK. CG has been dying to have a lemonade stand, so I'm glad she's having one today.
  
• I'm having dinner with Mississippi Friend and Curly Haired Cousin tonight. I don't want to say good bye. I have really, really good friends here, and I am really, really going to miss them. I wish I could be more eloquent on this point, but I can't. This part sucks. At least we get to visit Historian Friend on the way to Germany (she's usually here, but is somewhere on the way, with her kids. Yay!)
  
• But I do want to get on with all this. At breakfast, CG said, "Yay! we're moving tomorrow!" It feels good, now, just to be getting on with it.
• Politica and contractors are making great strides on the house, which is getting nicer by the hour. I'm very proud of Politica for handling the house on her own.
• Let's hope valium-laced kitties are happy travelers.
• Elswhere is moving now, too. Let's hope we all have good moving karma.
  

We are really, truly moving. Politica is on the road; Curious Girl and I will be setting off in a week, taking the slow road to Germany. I'm running down the list of things to do before we go, and blogging all kinds of things in my head. As most of you probably can't read my mind, here's a glimpse at the mental blogging chez Granola:

• Jesus and the Jonas Brothers: a post about all the things CG is learning out there in the world with little help from me
• The Long Goodbye: what it's like to leave a place you've lived a while, with links back to a post by Elswhere in which she links to this amazing moving video of someone saying goodbye to his New York neighborhood.
• My Vulcan Resonator: a post about children, anger, and parental feelings. Musings and questions about how to be angry with a kid, how to help kids deal with anger, and what's the next best thing to the cone of silence when your kid is itching for a fight.
• Marriage Matters, and Lambda Legal is a wonderful organization. In June, Lambda filed suit on behalf of a woman whose partner collapsed on a cruise ship in Miami; at the hospital, she and their children were kept from their partner/mother for more than 8 hours, and after she died, both the county and state refused to release the death certificate to the family (despite the immediate faxing of the health care proxy).
  

For the Sixth Day of Four, written rather late, after a long and chilly day outdoors

I'm tired, and a hot bath with Curious Girl has soaked away both the mud from the park and any energy that remained when we got home two hours past her bedtime. So tonight, I leave you with posts unwritten, but four of them:

1. Four favorite exam questions (sometimes, I use language jokes on exams and ask students to write about the assumptions embedded in the jokes and what makes them funny or not)
2. Four books on the bedside table awaiting my attention
3. Four ways in which I am a Cat Person
4. Four suggestions from Politica for more lists of four (like four reasons red cars are particularly splendid

And a small shout out to Liz, who also had a little four theme going earlier in the week.

The Fifth Day of Four, a poetic day on which I am wondering, who are my four favorite poets? Adrienne Rich would surely be one.


Four: History

Should I simplify my life for you?
Don't ask me how I began to love men.
Don't ask me how I began to love women.
Remember the forties songs, the slowdance numbers
the small sex-filled gas-rationed Chevrolet?
Remember walking in the snow and who was gay?
Cigarette smoke of the movies, silver-and-gray
profiles, dreaming the dreams of he-and-she
breathing the dissolution of the wisping silver plume?
Dreaming that dream we leaned applying lipstick
by the gravestone's mirror when we found ourselves
playing in the cemetery.ppp In Current Events she said
the war in Europe is over, the Allies
and she wore no lipstick have won the war
and we raced screaming out of Sixth Period.

Dreaming that dream
we had to maze our ways through a wood
where lips were knives breasts razors and I hid
in the cage of my mind scribbling
this map stops where it all begins
into a red-and-black notebook.
Remember after the war when peace came down
as plenty for some and they said we were saved
in an eternal present and we knew the world could end?
-remember after the war when peace rained down
on the winds from Hiroshima Nagasaki Utah Nevada?
and the socialist queer Christian teacher jumps from the
ppppppp hotel window?
and L.G. saying I want to sleep with you but not for sex
and the red-and-black enameled coffee-pot dripped slow through
ppppppppp the dark grounds
-appetite terror power tenderness
the long kiss in the stairwell the switch thrown
on two Jewish Communists married to each other
the definitive crunch of glass at the end of the wedding?
(When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
We cannot choose what we are free to love?)

1993-1994


From DARK FIELDS OF THE REPUBLIC (Norton, 1995)

The Fourth Day of Four

Four o'clock is perhaps my favorite time of day. I like the morning, too, the sun coming in the kitchen while I get my pot of tea going, but 4:00 seems special. Particularly in winter, the quality of light around 4 pm is wonderfully purply blue, and it seems rich with possibility. 4:00 is just about time to be thinking about getting dinner, but not quite. 4:00 is after the fullness of the day, so it holds memories. 4:00 is early enough that there is still time to do one more thing. 4:00 is relaxed, holding the past, leaving time for the future.

This is a somewhat idealized view of 4:00, to be sure. At 4:00 these days, I'm likely to be stopping at the grocery after picking up Curious Girl from school, or checking my e-mail to see if something needs attention at work before I start pulling groceries out for our increasingly early dinners. But the notion of 4:00 appeals to me. 4:00 is teatime, time to pull out the china and have scone or cookie along with some Earl Grey or Darjeeling. My fancypants university had a wonderful tea every afternoon at our departmental library. Every afternoon, studying paused. A dime bought a cup of tea (and still does!), a nickel bought a cookie. Tea time brough a quiet buzz to the library, and groups would form around comfy chairs and couches, and then gradually, regular work would resume. I love tea time, that elegant pause in a day.

When I lived in Canada, the newspapers would always report who poured tea at showers or receptions. It's an honor to be asked to pour tea at a reception or shower, and many of the people I knew had tea carts in their dining room and tea sets on their sideboards. I loved having my own tea set out: just the sight of it made me smile, anticipating a nice slow afternoon when it might get used again. Curious Girl has her very own china tea cup, a gift from friends who visited Delft. She uses it on mornings when she wants to have tea (although hers is mostly warm milk). It's elegant, and it's fun. Lately she's taken to drinking with her pinky extended. "Like Snow White, in the movie, Mama. Do you remember that part?" (uh, no.) "Like this, see? It's tricky." Tricky, yes, but also fun.

So we drink tea, and talk, having a little bit of a 4:00 feeling at breakfast. Another part of that 4:00 feeling comes from tea things and the connections they hold. My tea pot is a gift from Politica, and another one I have was my grandmother's. I have china tea cups from a College Friend (who shared many an afternoon tea with me), and most of our mugs have a story to go with them--two I bought in England without Politica knowing, several we picked out at art fairs. When I use them, I remember how we got them, and that's good. (When I make my adagio tea, I remember Julie who introduced me to the company, and that's good, too; let me know if you'd like a gift certificate for the site and I'll send you one--they do a good job using social networks to promote them, and the tea is good.)

4:00, tea and scones, a time to sit, connect, enjoy the changing light. Even thought I don't have teatime everyt day anymore, just thinking about it brings it closer. It's a gift of four: time and possibility.

April 22 through May 3 are very special days around here, viewed through the eyes of a four-and-three-quarter-year-old, because we match. We all have a four. I am 44, Curious Girl is 4 (and three-quarters), and Politica is 40.

May 4, Curious Girl gets a 5, and we will no longer match. (Although in a few months, I'll match with her, turning 45, and that is a happy-making prospect.) In honor of these very special days, I'm going to use the experience of four-ness as an invention strategy, with a series of posts inspired by four. To open, I'll catch up with three sets of four, and we'll see how the series develops:

Four Things I Like About Being Department Chair
1. Curious Girl says that I am the apartment chair.
2. I get to work closely with our new faculty, who are just so much more accomplished and polished than I was when I left graduate school. That polish doesn't mean that they know their way around the institution or that they know everything there is to know about being successful, and I'm enjoying working with our assistant professors to help them make connections in the discipline and on campus. This is probably the most rewarding part of the job.
3. I get to think about what is not being done. This part will fade, I suppose, when I'm not a new chair anymore, but I like being in a position to think about the structures and systems of the department. I don't want to add a lot of work in the department, but I do want to know that the work we do is important, and that the work we do is the work we want to do. (There are lots of parts of university life that people do because they think They require it, when in fact, They don't.) I hope the department is working a little smarter, not harder, by the time my term as chair is finishing up.
4. I have a view. In my more than a decade at my university, I've never had a window. Now I have tons of them, and when I come back to the office after my night class, the downtown skyline twinkles. It's beautiful.

My Four Favorite Food Markets
1. The Adelaide Central Market
2. The Ann Arbor Farmer's Market (I know, the Madison market is supposed to be better, but I've never been to Madison...)
3. The organic dairy on the north side of the city which makes me forget I live in the midwest on a soft summer evening.
4. The produce stores in New York that have wonderful produce spilling out onto sidewalks.

Four Surprising Things
1. I was quite taken by life in west Texas when we lived there for a while.
2. I had no idea how one's first job was geographically predictive.
3. Imaginary people are really quite entertaining, and I think I will miss our imaginary baby, dog, big sister, and friends when they fade into reality.
4. When I was a child, I decided that I didn't like cherries. What was I thinking?!?! Now I am making up for lost time, and already looking ahead to the arrival of Queen Anne Cherries at our local market. The cherries won't be local, but they will be good.

Wishing all of you fourfold happiness as you contemplate your own fours.....

Number of days Curious Girl has cried, whined, and claimed it was because of having to stay up late to get me at the airport last Saturday: 3
Number of forms I have submitted to the academic dean's office in the last two weeks: 92
Number of weeks our job searches have gone past our schedule: 6
Percentage of searches that are more complicated than predicted: 100
Number of days Curious Girl has for spring break, not counting the two already past: 12
Number of days Politica and I have off in that period: 0
Number of playdates or babysitters currently planned: 0
Number of classes I will be teaching next spring, now that I know all of the above: 0

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OK, so that's all taking a rather negative view of things--hardly the way to start a post after all this silence. Welcome back, readers, to a view from the dark side. So let's try this again. More numbers:

Number of bloggers I met at Four Seas: 4+1 (Ianqui, Timna (and Almond Joy!), and J., whom I already knew but didn't know she had a blog), and then later, Bill, whom I had met slightly before, and Best Professional Friend, of course.
Number of walks in Central Park: 2
Number of good conversations with Best Professional Friend(s): zillions
Number of people at my panel, on the last morning of the conference: 23 (not bad!)

Best New York moments: just listening to people talk. The snippets of conversation on the street, the New York accents that sound like home, the words and the rhythms. I love them. I love that in New York, no one things I talk or walk too fast. I love the details on the buildings and the pretzels on the corners. I love the way beautiful things just pop up, even on a sort of dirty street--like the mosaic-covered streetlamp post Linda and I passed in the Village on Tuesday afternoon.

The funniest thing I saw were some people coming out of Bergdorf Goodman's, pushing their dog in a stroller. Second only to the party seated across the room from us one night when we stopped into a very fancy hotel's bar for a drink and dessert. A very wealthy couple of a certain age sat across the room, and we had fun trying to figure out who they might be and what they might be doing in the city. (I can't be the only one who makes up stories about strangers I can see but not overhear, right?) There was just something compelling about the combination of slick hair, big, big jewelry, and a sparkly short dress. (Curious Girl would have loved it.) I'm not explaining it well, but it's just not something I see much out here in the midwest.

The best deal: a hello kitty watch in Chinatown. CG was very excited about it. "It ticks all night long," she informed me seriously tonight. Amazing technology, those watches. She is even getting the hang of the hour hand.

I heard a very good panel on academic administration towards the end of the conference. The panelists were talking about academic administration as more than managing hierarchies. One framed the work of department chairs in terms of fostering institutional literacy (helping people understand how institutions work, why they work, and what they make possible). Another framed the work in terms of improvising relationships (especially the need to make quick shifts between being counselor, planner, advisor, teacher etc.). I've been thinking about all this in terms of the 43 folders post on multitasking and its problems. I've been struggling this semester with so many different kinds of tasks, tasks which involve paying attention to almost everyone in my very large department. I'm multitasking too much, and realizing that I need to be better at doing one thing at a time, then moving on (and training people to let me do that--one day before the conference, I was in my office, working in googledocs and a chat program with my co-authors. One of my colleagues came into my office and I had to rather sternly say "I need to finish this now before I can talk to you!" Granted, it probably looked like I was doing e-mail, not something in real time. If my door is open--which it needs to be a good bit of the time--I'm not in full control of my time. I like being in a big department, but it's wearying. Next year, I've arranged my teaching schedule so that I won't teach at all in the spring.

And for this spring, I'm trying to look beyond the bureacracy to remember what it is I like about academic administration, and trying to understand what's at the root of my weariness this semester. Next year, it won't all be new, and that's a comfort.

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It sure was fun to meet Timna and Almond Joy, J., and Ianqui. We got drinks and pastries at a coffee shop near the conference, and talked easily. I'd met Timna last year, and what a treat to meet Almond Joy, too. They'd done a little looking at colleges: I'd be thrilled if she decided to come here, but I don't think a midwestern comprehensive university is on her list of places to consider. Still....Ianqui and Timna do have something in common, which is that while they are both just as smart and funny in person as they are in their blogs, they are both a little shorter than I expected them to be. Who knew that writing styles have height? The blogosphere is very instructive aboiut writing that way. More seriously, it is such a pleasure to meet bloggers in person, not only to hear about some of the stories behind the pseudonyms, but also to get a more complex sense of the blogger. Not that one morning's meeting reveals any of us fully, of course, but the spoken voice is more complex and warm than the written voice. Ianqui and Timna have beautiful voices, and I'm glad I got to talk with them. Thanks especially to Ianqui who shlepped all the way up to our part of town!

Here's what we'll be making for Thanksgiving:

• mushroom filo pastries (from Moosewood Celebrates--they are totally divine and I'll post the recipe if anyone's curious, and carnivores never notice the tofu in the filling, which turns kind of creamy. yum.)
• cranberry sauce
• salad with greens and other things, probably brought by Pseudonymless Friend and her husband, who are the very best salad makers I know
  
• quinoa vegetable pilaf
• bulghar wheat rolls (unless we buy brioche rolls at the bakery)
  
• roasted pears
• pumpkin bread or pie
• cupcakes (if Curious Girl still wants them for dessert)
• wine (interesting suggestions in the comments to one of APL's recent bullets)
  
• sparkling juice
  

Linking to APL's bullets reminded me that she recently posted an accent quiz, as did Scrivener. (both observed some of the limitations of the quiz.) I teach linguistics sometimes (I don't identify as a linguist, but I have some linguistic training and come at linguistics in the borders among philology, linguistics, and composition), and thus take a particularly nerdy delight in Curious Girl's language development. I did take the online quiz (which, surprise! pegged me as a northeasterner, and had some odd comments about New York in relation to northeast.) I'd rather tell you a dialect story than post the code to my result, so here's some phonological fun for Friday:

I had a little bag of Q-tips sitting on the banister in the upstairs hallway. CG brushed past them, and they fell down to the first floor. She dashed down, picked them up, and said, "Mama! The coupons! The coupons!" A confusion only made possible by the fact that she pronounces coupon with a [kju]/cyoopon. I've noticed myself alternating the two pronunciations of coupon, so I guess she's learning and I'm influenced by what's a little more prevalent here (although these maps show both pronunciations pretty well mixed).

So there you have it, a menu, some phonology, and two bullet lists in one night! We're having duper fun here on a Friday night.

• Via Chichi Mama, a disturbing article about bottled water. I don't know much about the magazine it appeared it, but those photos of the children scavenging in piles of plastic water bottles make a beautiful case for the value of reducing and reusing before recycling.
• Curious Girl is on a big Madeline kick of late. We just found the movie of M's Christmas at a garage sale. In the book version, a rug salesman appears at the school after a big snow and some illness, and magic carpets carry the girls home for Christmas. In the movie, the girls are all sick, and a magical old woman arrives and cleans things up and then gets the girls' families to arrive at the school for Christmas. What is the point of making a movie from a book if you change the plot that much?
• I went to a lot of meetings today that involved a lot of announcements. Why are meetings involving announcements so popular? Shouldn't the total boredom that can result lead people to try other tactics? Or do some people think announcements are interesting?
• I facilitated one meeting today about the future of one part of our department. That was fun, and three different people volunteered to take some part of the leadership of next steps. I'll be responsible for making sure a timeline gets established, and for helping to outline what kinds of plans or outcomes are needed, but the people most closely involved with this part of the department are stepping up to do the more hands-on work. That's a good sign.
  
• I'm mightily amused by my results on this quiz as to my inner musical instrument:
  

  
  
  
  

  
  
  

  
  
  
  You're a Euphonium. Aww. SPEAK UP!
  Take this quiz!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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• Via Femiknit Mafia, a very smart and funny op-ed piece from today's Boston Globe about the gay agenda. Read it on her post and be prepared to laugh outloud while you discover just how it is that me and my people are taking over the country.
• I love language and language development. Curious Girl has started using duper as an intensifier because I sometimes use the phrase super duper. Today she told me that swimming was "very duper fun" and in the midst of that long crying jag she was wailing about her "duper favorite blankie" (which has since been found by Politica. Phew.) I think her language development is duper cool.
• Ianqui's relief about having somewhere to go for Thanksgiving makes me wonder what, besides turkey, people are planning to make for Thanksgiving. Our evolving tradition is to make mushroom-tofu stuffed phyllo triangles, a recipe I'm happy to share. Anyone up for a non-traditional holiday recipe swap? I started menu planning this weekend and am in search of a few side dishes. And sure, I could look in more cookbooks, but what I really love about recipes are the stories that go with them.
  
• Laura's post today on the centrality of teachers modeling learning got me browsing over at Alex Reid's blog, and I quite liked his post about lecturing, which reminded me a bit of the comments at Deb's recent post about audiocommenting. I have a lot of posts brewing about teaching, writing, and department chairing, so I'll push myself a bit in that direction with this little bullet point on the importance of considering what do students do when they are learning? It's easy to think about the content to be covered in any given course, but it's probably more important to think about what will students be doing in class. Practially, materially. So it's not enough to say "we'll be thinking critically about X." What are the activities, the steps, the moments of engagement that will produce, say, critical thinking, or flexibility, or whatever the more general goal is?
• The number of labels I just attached to this post seems ridiculously large. Oh well.
  

August hasn't been an easy month. Oh, it started well--my birthday was the 2nd, and that was fabulous, and then we had lots of fun with visiting cousins--but as the month as gone on, it's felt like a downhill slide. The department chair gig has been not-so-fun, and to anyone taking on a new job, I would NOT recommend that you start your new job with 2.5 weeks of no child care and several weeks of rotating houseguests while you are trying to unpack a new office and learn a new job. I've ended up feeling rather tired and grumpy. And my blogging time has been taken over by work.

But tonight, I say, enough! So despite the fact that I am looking over at two piles of work that need to be read in order that I may write letters of recommendation (maybe tonight? maybe early tomorrow?), I have decided that bullet points are just what I need. Herewith:

• Julie continues to rock, and now she's a hard-working writing teacher in addition to all the other things she does. Like share recipes. (You can click through on the photo for another photo + recipe, a genre which delights me.) I made this one last week, using soy sausage crumble instead of real Italian sausage, and green grapes. I skipped the roasting and did the whole thing on top of the stove. Very tasty.
• Curious Girl has switched schools, to a sort of fancy pants progressive school that runs up through 8th grade. She's in pre-K now, but I'm totally in touch with all the kindergarten angst in this corner of the blogosphere. She has a longer school day that starts an hour earlier, and she's left a school where she'd been with the same group of kids since they were infants. I miss it, and I haven't quite worked up the same degree of enthusiasm for fpps yet. But then, one week into the school we're missing, we were all stressed out about whether her teacher would accommodate her feeding tube. So I should give it time.
• We are turning into Frederick Taylor around here in our efforts to be on time for school. We have our lunches packed, in the lunch boxes, in the fridge, the night before. Wallets and phones tucked in our school bags (for me and Politica); stuffed animal and blanky tucked in CG's school bag. Clothes laid out the night before. Curious Girl does not like being late--and she doesn't like being rushed, either. So getting out the door is a subtle process, to say the least. But it does amuse me that CG bounds out of bed and says, "Mama! the sun is wearing pink!" every morning.
  
• I am discovering my petty side at breakfast. Yesterday I was not happy about the fact that CG stopped eating the breakfast I'd served for us when Politica came down and fixed herself something else. Things are always tastier off someone else's plate in my family, so I should understand. But it's a different vibe having the three of us around for breakfast, and I'm not always making a graceful transition from my two-person mornings.
• While I am still a devotee of Adagio Tea, where you can make lists of friends and then compare what your friends are ordering, I just got a great shipment from Upton Teas. Their not-nearly-so-nicely-designed website has a cool feature: it recommends new teas based on your past orders. So that was fun. Upton has good blends (Adagio only sells single varieties).

I'm off to visit my parents this weekend--woo hoo! Labor Day at the beach!--but next week, life should be better. One big deadline to meet next week and I think I'll start liking my new gig a lot better.

In the meantime, I wanted to put a post up here just to say that yes, I'm part of the blogging slowdown that Phantom and Scrivener have described in some recent posts; I've not been reading online so much, and I've not been writing so much. And I miss you. So happy labor day (for North American readers). See you next week!