I Never Write, I Never Call

I obviously haven’t been writing posts. I have a couple thousand unread posts on Bloglines. I wrote my monthly baby update for the family when Zeb was 7 months old, but never got the photos done until it was time to write the 8-month update. I haven’t been writing in my journal or in my update file or on the blog about myself or my son, and they way my memory is these days, I could very well forget any and all of his milestones.  Also, I am way behind on writing  thank-you notes for Z’s gifts. On the other hand, I have managed not to fall behind on grading yet, which is good, even if we are less than a month into the semester (and writing this post when I have papers to grade isn’t going to help me keep up).

We moved more than a month ago, but we are still not unpacked. Every time I tell somebody that, they say something about the boxes they never unpacked that are sitting in the garage after all these years. I’m not talking about those. They are sitting in the garage. I’m talking about my office, my husband’s office, and the living room: in other words, a lot of books. Part of the delay is that we need to buy new bookshelves. Another part is that we want to anchor the bookshelves we have to the wall so that Zebediah does not die a horrible death by pulling over a shelf full of literary theory, or computer science, or science fiction, or fiction-from-the-region-I-study.

On the other hand, we have a new house, with only one story, so I can cross father and / or son falling down the stairs off my list of worries. Also, no more carpets. This was also a TFD-related requirement. I would have thought a soft carpet was better for people with a movement disorder that can cause falls, but I learned in the support group that hard floors are better because it is easier to trip on carpets.

Time for bed, or for grading, or–most likely–for the baby to wake up.

Random Bullets of Back to School

• It’s hard to believe I have been at my university for almost nine years. Since I haven’t taught in a while between the sabbatical and the not-quite-maternity-leave, the time snuck by me.
• In those nine years, this is the first time I’ve started the semester on a Monday. Usually the fall semester starts on a Wednesday and the spring semester on a Tuesday.
• Language class: It is the fourth time I have taught this particular class. And the fourth different textbook. I have taught a different class in the sequence more often, and had plenty of opportunity to get familiar with its textbooks over the years.
• Literature class: So far, I do not see significant improvements in the new edition of the anthology I use for the survey. At least they waited ten years to put out a second edition, unlike some of the language textbook publishers. Out of 21 students on my roster, 20 attended the first day of class, and there were no students who had added after the list was printed. I don’t think I have ever had a roster that accurate before. The language classes had a more typical pattern of missing and extra students.
• It’s hard to write syllabi after the baby goes to bed when the baby decides that he was really just down for a late nap and is now ready to play from 10:00pm to midnight.
• If you decide that one day per week should be free of classes so that professors can work on their research, does it really make sense to hold meetings on that day, just because nobody has class conflicts?

Moving

I don’t know when my online access will be up at the new house. It depends on how long it takes my IT guy (Mr. Luo) to set up a wireless network.

It will be nice to have a little more office space, although for some reason I decided the smaller office formerly known as the breakfast room was more aesthetically pleasing than the larger office (bedroom). I’ll miss my husband interrupting me to read aloud from some blog or another that I don’t even care about, as well as the opportunity to tell him about posts on the much more interesting blogs I read. I won’t miss the sound of my husband banging into the filing cabinets every time he gets out of his desk chair. We are trading coziness and togetherness for elbow room. I’m sure it’s a slippery slope to a McMansion in our future.

Meanwhile, I think we are more than half-way through our packing, with 14 hours to go before the movers come.

I’m a little worried about myself, because I am rather anxious over the fact that I do not have time to clean the new house before we move in. The painters didn’t finish till this afternoon, and I couldn’t really take time to clean today when we still had to pack. It’s not that I’m an obsessive cleaner, really. It’s mainly that it is so much easier to clean when there is no furniture or boxes in the way. Or maybe I am turning into my stepmother, or one of my old cleaning-maniac roommates.

Procrastination, Holiday Edition

My husband said we had to stop packing at midnight so he could construct my gift.

I’d managed to order his from Amazon in time for delivery on Dec. 24, but only because I got him something that I had wanted to give him last year, only to discover the local store didn’t have it and it was to late to get it online.

In other shopping news, we continue to do our part for the holiday shopping statistics. Aside from us buying the house, I was out on Christmas Eve day purchasing a refrigerator and packing materials. (If I’d bought the fridge earlier, I could have had in in black, to match the stove and dishwasher that conveyed with the house, but in order to have it delivered by the time we move in, I went with white.)

Also, how much more in the spirit of both Christmas and spending can it be than to hire a carpenter?

Merry Christmas, to those of you who celebrate it.

Homeowners

We closed on our new house a couple of weeks ago.

At the time I started writing this post, a couple of days after closing, it didn’t seem quite real yet.

I hired a chimney sweep first. It made me feel all Mary Poppinish. He wore a chimney sweep hat, which distracted nicely from his old t-shirt (from my university!) and jeans. His two assistants didn’t get into the Victorian vibe.

We found our mailbox by the method of trying the key in every box in the set. Don’t get me started on mailboxes (Mr. Luo says, “really, DON’T get her started) but this is the kind where the little locked mailboxes for a bunch of houses are all in one place.

Homeownership has already changed us. Despite the fact that the small lot (teeny-tiny backyard) was a selling point for us, we perused at length a brochure about local plants that I picked up at the library. Hey, it was partly written by the Botanical Center Named after Famous Recently Deceased Former First Lady, and who can say no to her?

I have not quite decided whether the tub in the second bathroom is damaged and in need of replacement or just not well scrubbed. I got it a little cleaner today while waiting for the chimney sweep. I can’t be the only person in the world who uses some elbow grease on a tub, can I? Based on a sample of my husband and the seller of this house, yes. (It’s at times like this that I worry about turning into my step-mother.)
I’m glad I did a lot of de-cluttering before Zebediah was born, because I don’t have time for it now. We haven’t even started packing. Since we have the apartment until the end of the month, we were waiting till the things that need fixing are done before moving, but now our moving date seems very close.

Conference Travel

By the end of yesterday evening, I had memorized the 16 digits of my credit card, plus the three digit code on the back.

Five of the six times I typed it out were to pay for various aspects of a conference in the spring, so I haven’t become some kind of online supershopper (besides, those people wouldn’t be typing in their card number every time).

Rumor has it that our department suddenly has a lot of travel funds this year, so that we will be reimbursed for all of our conference travel, not just part of one conference, which has been the norm in the past. They won’t reimburse my husband’s travel, of course.

I don’t normally register for the conference, book a flight, rent a car, and reserve a room immediately after getting notice that my proposal’s been excepted, but we had problems with the hotel reservation for this conference last year because I waited until the last minute. I think I felt that arranging anything ahead of time would be jinxing the pregnancy (that was my trip at 34 weeks). The registration and hotel booking were also more complicated last year because of the location. (I don’t normally rent a car for a conference either, but there are some special circumstances.)

Mr. Luo needs a hotel with a fitness room to do his physical therapy. In the U.S., this isn’t such a problem, because you can get down to the level of someplace like the Comfort Inn and they’ll have a little room with an exercycle in it. For foreign conferences though, it means we need a fancy, modern hotel. No quaint converted monasteries. Twice we’ve stayed in places overseas without any fitness facilities and it did not work well for Mr. Luo.

On our recent trip, we stayed with his parents when we visited them, and in a fancy hotel when we went to see the other relatives. I don’t think about it much when I stay in a conference hotel, but I felt a bit guilty staying at an expensive hotel for personal travel (and no conference discount). We were in town for a very short time and had an early flight out, so I decided we should just stay by the airport. Due to a scary night in a Howard Johnson at Newark once when Continental stranded me, I decided that I would stay at nicer places for any future airport hotel sojourns. And I figured at some point, we’d be tired and have a tired baby and want to be able to eat in the hotel. So, I had my reasons, and my husband agreed, but it still seemed wasteful. I don’t think any of our parents would have stayed in at this hotel, even with an early flight and a baby. And shouldn’t buying a house make us more frugal?

At this point I am wondering if it would be less boring to write about my hair. And yet, I publish…

A Couple of Things That Make Me Feel Old

1. Music from my youth playing in the supermarket or other such places. I always wonder how annoying it is to people who are fans of music from a more recent decade. I should note that anything I recognize from my high school years has to have been very popular, since I didn’t listen to the radio much, so what I remember is from dances, parties, and the radios in friends’ cars.

2. Seeing a “vintage 80s” dress for sale on Etsy.

What Obesity Epidemic?

Junkfood science weighs in on the issue.

Time for a Checkup

Last night, when writing my paper proposal, I had to take my glasses off in order to see clearly. Also, I apparently could not tell the difference between the bullets icon and the indented quotation icon when I posted at 3:00am.

I’m fairly sure that this has more to do with the deterioration of my lenses than my eyes. Why do I always let somebody convince me to get the anti-glare coating? And didn’t I get some kind of scratch-resistant lens? I am fairly careful with my glasses, but they seem permanently smudged and scratched.

On the other hand, maybe once one needs bifocals, it is a slippery slope and my prescription is no good after a mere year and a half.

The first time an optometrist mentioned bifocals, I was horrified. Also, since it was the inappropriate optometrist, I particularly trust his judgment, so I ignored him. By the summer of 2006, when a different optometrist declared I definitely needed them, I just thought “oh, so that’s why I’ve been having trouble reading.” It hadn’t even occurred to me to hold a magazine farther away to see if it would be easier to read. I had been blaming the glare or the font. When I Googled bifocals, I found out that, at 40, I was right on schedule.

Random Bullets of Three A.M.

• Counting on nap time or nighttime to get work done is a bit like counting on office hours to get work done.
• Or perhaps worse. My students are more consistent about avoiding office hours unless we schedule a conference than Zebediah is about sleeping.
• That said, it was a glorious day when he started napping in bed instead of on my lap or while being carried, so I’m not really complaining if the naps last anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours.
• By the way, isn’t the whole point of office hours to be available for unscheduled time with students?
• Part of the problem seems to be professors at our university who tell students not to bother them during office hours.
• But maybe I’m just not interesting enough anymore. When I was younger and teaching in Old Colony, students came by just to chat in English and ask me about song lyrics. And we didn’t even have scheduled office hours.
• The relationship between students and teachers is quite different over there though. Both more formal and more familial.
• I just submitted an paper proposal online. The online form insisted that I was over the word limit in my title, abstract, and bio, although Word’s word count tool told me I was under the limit on all three.
• Even counting a hyphenated surname as two words, my own word count of the title comes up under the limit.
• My very first conference paper, in graduate school, included the word “fertility” in the title. Was it a sign?
• I tried to write this proposal before traveling, so as to avoid the whole last-minute thing, but it didn’t happen.
• If I found enough time to find and buy a house, I should be able to find the time to write. It’s harder to do the latter with the baby, however. Meredith Small may have been able to write with her baby in a sling (I read that in an interview once, somewhere), but Zebediah doesn’t approve of sedentary sling-wearing anymore.
• About that house: walk through tomorrow, closing on Wednesday. Yikes.
• About that trip: mutual love fest between Zebediah and his paternal relatives, especially his great grandmother.
• I think he may have a thing for southern accents, or it may just be the great-grandmother charisma.
• It seems a little sad to me that Zebediah has no relatives except his parents nearby, but I suppose to him it will be normal. As a child, I didn’t even know anyone from my father’s side of the family, and I don’t remember worrying about it at all.
• My husband doesn’t seem too warped from having lived far from his extended family for his first twelve years.
• I think Zebediah has already been on more planes by six months than I was on by 14 years.