I'm back

Here I am in Deep South Town. In the past week, I have gone camping in the Great Smoky Mountains, moved into the new apartment, posted the course grades for the summer class, acquired some new plants and utterly failed to assemble a bookcase, attended New Faculty Orientation and a party at my chair's house, and, rather oddly, gone out drinking with the local Chief of Police. How was everyone else's week?

I have Internet access at home, as of yesterday, but for some reason I have utterly failed in my attempts to access any work-related sites. Only fun sites. I'm not as broken up about this as I probably should be, although I guess I should do something about it. I keep getting "Sorry, we could not find this page" messages about the majority of the web pages in the state university system, and my login for WebCT doesn't seem to work. (It is remotely -- REMOTELY -- possible that all of the state university sites are down, but I suspect something more sinister is at work.)

I have been assigned a Mentor. I am starting to think this may be a mixed blessing, as she is very nice, but our approaches to pedagogy seem to be ... somewhat at odds. She said Dire Things about the students' reading and writing skills, and then finished off by saying she no longer assigns papers in her 200-level lit classes because they were so awful. Well, dude. How are they supposed to learn to write papers if they don't WRITE any? (On looking at her syllabus, it appears that the students are reading about twice as much in my 200-level Brit Lit survey as they are in hers. Perhaps this is overambitious. Then again, perhaps it will encourage the lazy students to drop, and since I have a total of ONE HUNDRED AND ONE students this semester, mass drops would be a good thing.) Anyway, I'm inclined to ignore most of the Dire Things she said about student literacy, because honesty, I had colleagues who said the same things at New SLAC, and they weren't true for the most part, and the average ACT scores here are pretty much identical to those at New SLAC.

We have had some meetings about Assessment, and Assessing the Assessment, and Assessing the Assessment of the Assessment. I felt sort of guilty for playing Buzzword Bingo in the first one, but then it turned out that everyone else was doing much the same, except for a few people who are really earnest about Assessment. Anyway, it appears that there will be a great many more meetings about this topic. I am tempted to come up with some Anti-Assessment buzzwords. ("When you assess, you make an ass out of essment"? All right, maybe not.)

Classes start on Wednesday. I'm not ready.

Dust Bunny Sanctuary

Back in New SLAC Town to get moved out. The landlord is coming in a couple of hours, so I really do need to finish up cleaning the place, as well as packing everything the movers didn't take with them.

My God, I suck at housekeeping. This place should have a "Dust Bunny Sanctuary" sign on it.

It's strange being here again. It's just about the time when I arrived last year, when I thought this might well be Home For Life. Now I know it is just a temporary place. I haven't had all that many temporary places in my life, apart from Spanish City where I spent a scary and glorious semester as a wide-eyed nineteen-year-old, and English City, where I spent a summer shacked up with my long-distance boyfriend. I have been back to Spanish City, and probably will be back to English City, which is a major tourist spot; I don't think I will ever have any occasion to visit New SLAC Town again. And yet, for ten months or so, it was home.

Leaving temporary places is always a wrench. I walked across the campus on Friday; the summer stillness lay heavy upon it, and no one was there. Perhaps that's as well. It wasn't a talking-to-people sort of walk.

New faculty orientation is on August 7th, which is TOO SOON. Eeee!

right, so why did I let myself in for this?

My plan for the summer:

Today - June 3: Finish writing article and send it off. Finish syllabus for summer class. Clean out office. Box up ENTIRE APARTMENT. Possibly, put stuff into storage; possibly just leave it in the apartment, depending on whether the landlord will let me get away with not paying rent for July.

June 4-12: Go to Louisville to grade AP exams.

June 13-17: Drive to Parentland. Fill out paperwork for summer class. Finish prep for summer class, which is not precisely in my field and covers some material I haven't read since undergrad, and has three-and-a-half-hour class sessions.

June 23 - July 30: Teach summer class in Parentland. At some point, go to Deep South Town for a long weekend to scout out apartments. At another point, possibly go to a wedding. At yet another point, possibly return to New SLAC Town to let the movers in, if stuff is not already in storage.

July 31 - August 6: Drive to Deep South Town.

August 7 - New faculty orientation.

Now, the AP grading and the summer course are both things that I signed on for before I got the job offer at Misnomer U., and can't back out of now. By and large, it's just as well that I have a few sources of income for the summer, since the new place doesn't pay moving expenses, and the summer teaching will involve a lit class with a current enrollment of six students, which is the best kind of teaching. But still, aarghh.

And the moving saga continues!

Typing this in the library at New SLAC because as of Sunday I have furniture, but as of yesterday I don't have electricity. (Long story, involving the stupidity of the local power company and an apparent misunderstanding on the part of my landlord.) Good thing I didn't throw all those candles out before I moved. I actually did toast marshmallows this time, over the candles, because there really isn't anything else to do once it gets too dark to read or write, and if I remember nothing else from the Girl Scouts, I do remember how to make s'mores.

It's also about a hundred degrees out. Well, if I could live in a college dorm in southern Virginia without AC, I can do it again. (Of course, we DID have fans in college. Grumble. I tried sleeping with the window open, but it didn't really help.)

This sort of thing does give one renewed respect for one's ancestors, who got along not only without electricity, but without running water and matches and ice chests and all manner of things. And managed to write Beowulf and Hamlet while they were at it. (Well, OK, the vast vast majority of them didn't write anything of the sort, but after an evening of trying to write by candlelight, I'm very impressed that anybody did.)

Talking of Beowulf, I should probably re-read it before I have to teach it. More later.

more moving notes

-- There seem to be cottontail rabbits everywhere. Hoppity hop hop. I don't know whether it's a Midwest thing, a New SLAC Town thing, or simply a consequence of the fact that my coffeemaker is with the movers and I have to walk four blocks to the mini-mart to get my morning fix. Maybe I would have seen rabbits all the time in University of Basketball Town if I had been going out for seven o' clock in the morning walks on a regular basis.

-- The farmer's market here? Many different shades of awesome. Of course it's an hour-long train-and-bus ride or a thirty-minute drive into the city, and I miss being able to drive five minutes to the Next Town Over from University of Basketball Town on Saturday mornings and get my fresh tomatoes and pecan pie. They seem to be a bit less fussed about selling only local products than they were back home. At least, I don't think pineapples grow around here, but if the vendors are going to give me free samples of pineapple I am not going to complain. Also, I tried pork rinds for the first time, but wasn't particularly impressed one way or the other. (However, I had a Ren drama prof in grad school who suggested bringing in pork rinds the day we read Bartholomew Fair, and it's nice to know where to get them, in case I decide to do that in the drama class. Assuming that we do get around to reading Bartholomew Fair, of course [it's on the syllabus, but I think that will be the play we drop if we run out of time, because I'm nervous about teaching it].)

-- One of my new colleagues stopped by on Friday and invited me to Faculty Poker Night, a.k.a. Clean the Newbie out of Her Spare Change Night. Hmm. Clearly I am going to have to improve my game if I'm sticking around. (Dammit, why couldn't it have been bridge, or spades, or Trivial Pursuit?) Regardless, they seem like very nice people, and I do hope I end up sticking around -- I feel like I really lucked into this job, because if it weren't for the whole one-year visiting thing, it would be just about perfect. (There's a certain amount of survivor guilt involved, though -- I took Ph.D. comps in Ren lit with two other people, and I think I'm the only one with a full-time job in the field right now; one ran out of funding and has yet to finish his dissertation, and the other couldn't do a full job search last year because of truly horrible, tragic personal circumstances. And I can't shake the feeling that they're both more deserving people than I am; I'm a bit of a slacker, truthfully, and I didn't really get my professional stuff together until the job market scared me into doing something. Probably better not to think too much about this.)

Cripes, how did I ever get onto that subject? Right, well, anyway, I'm settling in, and the movers should be here with some actual furniture later today.

In New SLAC town...

So I moved out of the old apartment and flew to New City on Tuesday, bought a new car on Wednesday and drove out to New SLAC town, and now I'm camping out on an air mattress in an apartment with no furniture. I feel like I should be toasting marshmallows or something.

There's not a lot to do around here except take the metrotrain into New City, which is what I did today. I went to the zoo, which might have been something of a tactical error on a 90-degree day, but I didn't think about that until I was already there. Oh well. The penguin house was nice and frosty inside. And there was a baby elephant that was too cute for words. I got kind of lost on the way back, but it's all good because nearly all the buses go to one metrotrain station or another. I think I will go and see Major New City Landmark tomorrow and explore from there, unless the movers show up. I guess I ought to get a driver's license and register to vote and all that, not to mention checking out my new office, but the zoo sounded like more fun.

The new car is all bright red and zippy. I'm still getting used to her. The old one was a sedate old brown station wagon, which was probably -- to be honest -- more suited to my usual style of driving, which is distinctly old-ladyish.

Really weird being in a house with no books. I should get a library card, too (though I don't know how much good it will do, because the library in New SLAC Town is tiny. I've got a certain affection for tiny libraries, because there used to be several in the town where I grew up, and I spent a long hot summer when I was eighteen crushing on one of the librarians, but I hope there are some bigger ones affiliated with this one.)

More later, as I settle in.

mundanity

Went out for drinks with some of my former grad school cohort last night. Turns out I'm not the only one who's moving over the next few weeks. Would have been a pleasant night out -- beer gardens in the summer are always good -- except I had this is it, this is the last time running through my head all evening.

Also had my first anxiety dream of the season, which is a sure sign that the new academic year and the job market are only a few weeks away. In this one, one of my committee members flatly refused to approve my dissertation, only I'd somehow managed to graduate and take a new job without noticing that she hadn't signed off on it, and consequently landed in a great deal of trouble for academic fraud. It wasn't quite as good as the one last year where I was offered a job in a religious studies department and begged off because I didn't know anything about the subject matter, and then my mother, my advisor, my Impossibly Polished and Perfect Colleage, and (for some reason) J.R.R. Tolkien all came over to chew me out for turning down a perfectly good tenure-track job. That one was something of a lifetime high for my subconscious.

Ah well. Back to packing.

I am SO not cut out for this moving business

Step 1: Decide what kind of music you want to have on as you pack. This is an important decision, and should not be made too hastily.

Step 2: Decide what kind of beer you want. See above.

Step 3: What to pack? How about some plates and glasses? These will have to be wrapped up in paper, and packed in the box that says FRAGILE -- THIS SIDE UP. Unfortunately this box is crammed full of paper. Spend five minutes transfering all the paper to another box, then drag both boxes out to the kitchen. (Note that writing "FRAGILE -- THIS SIDE UP" on the second box would be cheating.)

Step 4: Wrap up some dishes in paper, put them in the box.

Step 5: Discover that seldom-used wine glasses have some kind of nasty sticky residue on them. Wash wine glasses.

Step 6: Notice that it is probably a bad idea to wrap them up in paper while they're still drying; also, have made tactical error because one of the glasses that should eventually be packed still has half a beer in it. Decide to sift through papers instead.

Step 7: Notice unpaid traffic ticket and incomplete mail-forwarding form among papers. Take care of these things.

Step 8: On way to mailbox, notice that it is raining. Stand on back patio and watch rain for a while.

Step 9: Back to papers. Discover notes and handouts from job talks last time graduate department hired Ren lit person, five years ago. Become seized with inexplicably strong desire to know what happened to unsuccessful candidates.

Step 10: Google candidates. (They both got good jobs. Also, one of them has the same name as a football player.) Also Google bottle of Italian dessert liqueur that you found in the fridge, to discover whether it would be a bad idea to drink it when it's more than three years old. Type up blog post while you're here.

Oh, this is more or less how I wrote my dissertation, too. No wonder it took four years.