Good Things

Good Thing #1: Final proofs of our book have been completed and reviewed and now the manuscript is off to the publisher! So it is officially done and the next time I see it, it'll be an actual book. I have co-authored three books now for this particular series but this is the first one for which I'm the first author. I'm pretty psyched.

Good Thing #2: Telling my grad student who led the charge on a particular analysis that her analysis is what our intellectual mentor in this area of work liked best about my talk last week. My grad student was so pleased and excited to get that kind of recognition. (It was well deserved - she's totally awesome.) Later, I got four requests from different researchers for a copy of our presentation and the best part about that was taking the time to stop and thank my team of grad students (and one new professor who has been continuing with the project via skype). Their work has been really outstanding, and it feels great to reflect on that, and to make sure they know it and know how much I appreciate them. I am so lucky to have these amazing, amazing students.

Good Thing #3: Summer foods. Anything with the herbs I've got growing in my garden - lots of basil. Lots of cilantro. Today it's roasted peppers with garlic, red wine vinegar, olive oil, flat parsley, fresh ball mozzarella, and capers. Soooo good.

Good Thing #4: The heat wave has broken. Pleasant low 80s temps instead of weirdly hot mid-nineties temps.

Kids: Nora seems to have recovered from whatever strange affliction was plaguing her. She's resumed her equilibrium just in time for Milo to start having a rough time. I wonder if he is getting sick; he's been very teary today over very small things (like losing a rubber band).

It's 8:45 p.m., an hour after their bedtime, and I can still hear Nora marching around upstairs in her room and singing songs to herself.

Last night we had a storm. I woke up from the storm. Then I heard our door open. Nora crept into our room. She started to settle down at my feet, like a dog, and I said, "Why don't you come up here with us?" So she slept between us. This reminds me of how far we've come. A few years ago a storm like that would have meant two crying babies, us up and out of our room, comforting them in their room. Exhausting. Now, I don't even have to get out of bed - they come to us. So nice! And to top it off, Milo slept through the whole thing. Even better.

Wow!

That grant that our PO told us we almost certainly weren't going to get? Well, today we talked to her, and she's sending us questions. (That's a VERY good sign indicating the likelihood of getting the grant after all). !!! This is very exciting! The down side is that it's for a much reduced budget - in fact, only 1/3 of our original budget. However, 1/3 of our original budget will still yield a 3-year grant that has a larger budget than my current 5-year CAREER award, so it's not anything to sneeze at!

This is a really amazing and surprising turn of events!

Today is our home day and Milo & Nora had their 2nd swimming lesson of the summer this morning. It went well, they both like it and are putting their heads in the water. Both jumped into the pool on their own without holding the teacher's hand! And they look so cute in their little swim caps and goggles.

CALGONE TAKE ME AWAY

So, Nora has been on an epic morning rage the last two mornings. Four days with her grandparents managed to turn her into a total maniac. Or maybe it's just what she's like now, and I'm searching around looking to place the blame on Jake's parents because it's easy to do. But whatever it is, jeez, I have had it with that kid.

She's just completely defiant. She won't do what she doesn't want to do, she thinks it's acceptable to say no to me (or to scream it), she argues and talks back at every turn, and she just digs her heels in further and further. Honestly, this kid has been pushing me to the brink since she was an infant and she hasn't stopped yet. At times it's even hard not to laugh, because she's trying to use adult ways of arguing in a way she doesn't quite understand yet. I'll tell her I've had enough and I won't tolerate any arguments. "But Mom," she whines, "That's not the point!"

I wasn't laughing, though, when she went nuts at school and hauled off and hit me this morning. She hasn't done anything like that in a year or more.

Mornings are the hardest because I can't defuse the situation by separating us and putting her in her room to cool down. Instead, we are forced together because we must get dressed and out the door and to school. And the problem is, when a punishment is imposed for her hideously bad behavior, that's not the end of it. She'll argue it. And argue it. And argue it and argue it and argue it and argue it. Seriously, if I didn't physically remove myself from her presence, I think she would argue it all day long. Where the hell did this kid come from? And it's not like I argue back or respond or ever change my mind. I don't. I don't acquiesce to her arguments, ever. All the parenting books tell you that you need to be consistent and not back down and they'll learn to respect those boundaries. Those books have never met Nora.

I was never allowed to talk back to my parents. That resulted in things like writing "I will not talk back to my mother" 50 times. But Nora is too young to write lines. And oddly enough, despite me informing her that talking back to her parents is not done, she still seems to think this is acceptable. Where does she get this kind of defiance? Honestly. We are not a spanking family, so all I can think to do is put her in her room until she's willing to drop it. But again, that doesn't work when you're in the car on the way to school.

All I can do is reflect back on how, at least things are better now than they were a year ago. The meltdowns happen, but they last 10 minutes instead of 3 hours. She is capable of internally defusing now, and can change her mood in a few minutes, whereas when she was 2 and 3 she couldn't do that and seemed trapped in a cycle of continuous escalation that would literally last for several hours. (Of hell.)

The thing is, I am not an easygoing, lax parent. We have boundaries and standards and rules and I'd say I'm probably more strict than pretty much any of my peers. Pretty much all of my friends let their kids do stuff that I don't let my kids do. Having two very temperamentally different children has taught me how important temperament is in contrast to parenting behaviors. They both matter, but I never realized how is driven by temperament.

A Complicated Love

As my plane was preparing to land in my town, I looked out the window, as I always do, watching the landscape get larger and larger. Inadvertently, my pupils dilated and my heart swelled as I took in how beautiful everything was. I watched us sail over the rolling farmlands, the woods, the lakes, all the lush greenery that is so abundant this time of year. I can't help it. I feel so betrayed by my state these days, but I continue to love it so much.

When I first moved here 8 years ago, I was coming from southern California. I wouldn't call it an unfriendly part of the country, but it was fairly anonymous. I lived in a big city and didn't know any of my neighbors. Thanksgiving dinners were more about elegance than community. I locked the door to my apartment to go running. Heck, I locked the door to take out the trash.

Then I came here, and found myself frequently surprised by little interactions and events that reminded me how different things were. When I went to the corner store, the man behind the counter chatted with me, welcomed me to the area, and gave me advice. When I passed somebody on the sidewalk, or even in the street in my car, they'd wave. Even if I didn't know them. People had me over for dinner, people I hardly knew. I sat in retired colleague's kitchen as his wife prepared salmon and asparagus, chatting about what the Wednesday noon siren means (preparing for tornados). When I bought my house, the owners apologized at the closing because they didn't have the key to the front door. "We haven't locked it in 9 years, and we couldn't find it to save our lives," they told me. After the closing, I rushed over to my new house. I went into the kitchen. I opened the fridge. There, in the shining, spotlessly clean refrigerator, was a box with a bow on it. Inside the box I found pastries from the local pastry shop, and a note saying, "Enjoy your new home!"

And I met Jake, right away, and he offered to show me around town, right away. "How nice," I thought. "A new friend already! People are so friendly here!"

I was charmed, I was seduced by the culture of this new place. I marveled at things that I hadn't known since childhood, like fireflies in the evening, and cicadas at night. I fell in love with my new surroundings and with Jake at the same time. They became intertwined. As summer wound its way into autumn I marveled at how he and his family and friends all knew the same German drinking songs -- and they sang them, together, loudly, at Oktoberfest. I marveled at how they all knew how to polka, and actually did it. More, I marveled at the close family network I observed, where cousins and aunts and uncles all traveled to get together for people's birthdays and anniversaries.

It was charming that the local NPR station carried not only Talk of the Nation, but also statewide shows on insects and native plants, on home repair, on wildlife. I felt like I had wandered into a scene from A Prairie Home Companion. I still feel that way. And of course, yes, all of this is just a caricature. The state I live in and its people are vastly more complicated than the rosy picture I like to imagine. But I ignorantly allowed myself to live with the oversimplified version, because it suited me.

During my first fall term here, the other new faculty and I formed a cohort and we would go out for drinks and dinner, getting to know one another and our new town. All of us were from either the east coast or the west coast. All of the other faculty complained a lot about our town; its backwardness, its smallness, its provincial ways. And in many ways, it is all of those things. We are a small city of 230,000 people. It feels bigger than it is culturally, because we have both the flagship university and the state capitol here, but it was definitely the smallest city I had lived in. I too had wondered how I would react to it. Would I feel stifled? My fellow faculty members felt stifled, and they complained. Somehow it offended me. I felt protective of my new home state, maybe because it was wrapped up in Jake, a native of the state, with his peculiar mannerisms and regional speech patterns.

What I found was that the pace of life flowed differently, and you had to slow down to notice and appreciate what came up in that flow. The rhythm of the seasons gradually took hold of me. Jake's grandfather brought us brussels sprouts in October. We ate squash and soups in the fall, we ate tomatoes and peppers in the summer. In the winter, we hole up, turning inwards, working more. In the spring, everybody emerges, we become more social. We go out more, we hold parties, we sit outside on cafe patios. We barbecue. We spend winter afternoons making snowmen and ice skating, and we drink hot chocolate. We spend summer weekends at the lake, fishing and swimming, drifting on the pontoon boat as we let our fingers lazily drag across the surface of the water.

How can I not love all of this?

But oversimplified stereotypes cannot endure, and of course there is another side to this state. It's a side I've mostly ignored, which is easy to do in our liberal oasis of a town, but it grew harder and harder to ignore, and became impossible to ignore after the failed recall.

This is the side where friends of friends think it's okay to make racist jokes. It's the side where nobody in the extended family will use my last name. It's the side where my undergraduates, who are always white, aren't interested in learning about ways to better connect to students of color in their own classrooms. It's the side where vegetarian means you still eat fish and shrimp, where a college education is uncommon, and where people describe visitors from the state south of us with words like "bastards".

In the past year there was a This American Life episode about the political upheaval in our state. The general theme of the episode was that people here are so nice, and the upheaval threatens that niceness. They interviewed some people who were campaigning against a local candidate, and they asked those people to discuss the candidate they were trying to oust. The campaigners said, "We don't think she's right for the office. I mean, she's a good mom..." The interviewer noted how remarkable that is, that the strongest thing they could say was that they thought she wasn't quite right, but had to couple that statement with the remark that they thought she was a good mom.

They recorded a contentious meeting that turned nasty, with hecklers, and then you hear one woman in the background call out, "We're NICE in [our state]!"

But what I've witnessed hasn't been nice. Recently we traveled through small towns to attend a wedding. Every other house had a pro governor sign in front of it. There was a giant billboard with the message that our current governor is working for the entire state, not just the "privileged few". That's how teachers are  characterized here now. As the privileged few. That is not nice. In a small town 45 minutes south of us, somebody distributed anonymous flyers attacking teachers in general. That is not nice. None of this is nice.

Intellectually, I understand that of course our state is deeply complex, like any. The farmers who traveled down to the capitol to march on the square come from the same state as their neighbors who thought there was nothing wrong with repealing the equal pay act. The people on my street who shoveled my sidewalk and brought me meals come from the same state as the guy who called in to the local radio program complaining that state workers are spoiled and need to pay their fair share. The family members who gave me treasured clothing and jewelry items belonging to my husband's grandmother -- before Jake and I were even married -- are the same family members who cannot completely hide their racism, their misogyny, and their anti-semitism.

Ours is a community oriented, family oriented culture. I didn't grow up in a culture like that. I have been more welcomed and integrated into Jake's complicated, deeply flawed extended family than I ever was in my own biological family. I grew up in the relative anonymity of the west coast, and then I moved to a town where nobody is anonymous. Everybody knows your story, and that is simultaneously comforting and stifling. I feel so angry, so, so angry at what has happened over the past year and a half. When I reflect on it, I think that I feel much more angry than I would have felt over the outcome of a similar election when I lived in, say, California, because here it feels deeply personal. And I, like many like me who have adopted this place as our own, allowed myself to feel a sense of betrayal. I allowed myself to become seduced by some aspects of this place, without fully understanding everything about the complex, intricate culture and history of the people who live here.

You can't stay in love with a fantasy forever. Eventually, the real parts come out, and the story is messier than whatever rosy picture you concocted. And that's where I am now. Sad, really sad, and still angry as well. But that hasn't made me stop loving.

This weekend I've been all alone because Jake and his parents took the kids up north on Friday afternoon when I was still flying back from DC. And yes, it has been awesome. I saw one friend for coffee but that was it; I wasn't motivated to get together with people because the one thing I don't have any of in my normal life is time alone. I'm pretty much never alone, and I'm a person who likes being alone. So I spent most of the weekend alone, doing some chores and work but also going for a long run, baking and cooking, reading a book (for pleasure, not for work!), and watching original Star Trek episodes.

Jake is a pie person much more than a cake person, so I made some handheld pies for him for Father's Day. I made blueberry, strawberry, and peach bourbon pies:

I also did some weeding and then tried to take some photos of our deck and patio in the event that we ever try to sell our house. It wasn't easy, though.

Maybe I should lay out the outdoor rug on the patio before photographing it, but getting that rug out is more of a 2-person job. (We generally bring it out for parties and stuff.) Also, the giant chicken wire cage around our planter isn't attractive, but there's no way in hell I'm messing with that thing after the effort that went into getting it into place!

I went to an open house Jake wanted me to check out, and another one that was near the one Jake was interested in. Both were a bust. The more time passes the harder it is to try to think about moving. There are so many kids Nora & Milo's age on this block. One thing about our neighborhood with the old houses is that the houses have a lot of character but most of them also have weird flaws. And if we're going to deal with weird flaws, we might as well deal with our own house's weird flaws.

Time is behaving so strangely for me now. As I get older, elapsed time feels like it has condensed so that the 8 years here in my house and in this town (almost exactly 8 years - I moved here near the end of June) feels about as long as the 4 years I spent in grad school. And with the house quiet and empty, it sure does remind me of the very first summer when I first moved into this house, sitting in the same spot I'm sitting now, boxes scattered about the floor. It could almost be then. I was alone a lot then, in my happy little house that felt huge.

Worth It

Conferences are about serendipity. It can be a dud, or it can be great, but usually the ways in which it ends up great are ways that you can't predict ahead of time.

I wasn't super psyched about this conference I just attended but it ended up okay in the end. One thing about conferences is that it usually involves giving one or more talks, and I hate giving talks. I do it all the time, because you have to as an academic, but I don't like it. I still get nervous, no matter how many talks I give. Conferences in which my talk happens on the first day are inevitably more fun than conferences in which my talk happens on the last day.

Anyway, some things that ended up being good about this conference was that I finally got a chance to talk to our program officer and learn more about what the deal is with our grant. I also floated a new idea for another grant I'm working on with some colleagues. She was into it, but really only into half of it, I could tell, so I think this is going to pose some challenges to us moving forward.

One interesting and upsetting thing is that we're struggling to get sufficient funding through these programs for math projects as opposed to science, technology, and engineering projects. Math isn't getting as much money and meanwhile our two math POs are leaving. I asked my PO what happens when she and the other one leave, and she remarked that probably somebody would end up in their roles who is a science person but has some connections to math. "This is very concerning for the future of math funding," she told me. Ugh. In a better funding year our grant would have been funded this time around.

Anyway, talking to the PO made the trip worth it. Another thing that made the trip worth it was my symposium today. I was very nervous about it because the theme of the symposium was for a research area that I'm just starting to get involved in. So I feel like something of a newbie in this area. Meanwhile, 4 of the 5 other presenter groups are super, super experienced in this area of research. Also, I was *extra* nervous because the content area that I was presenting on is the content area that this very well-known researcher, Dr. C, basically created about 20 years ago. I mean, the content area already existed, of course, but her work on the conceptual structures involved in building it still remains the standard to this day. So I'm going to get up and talk about my work in this area, HER area, and she was on the panel too! It's like talking about the Bible in front of God. Which I said, at the beginning of my talk. (Fortunately she laughed).

To add to the nervousness, this researcher has a particular reputation, and it's not a reputation of being all roses. So I was worried that she'd tear me apart.

So anyway I gave my talk with famous Dr. C sitting near me, and she was really nice. She kept making all of these comments to herself as I was talking, and they were encouraging comments so that bolstered my confidence. Then, after the talk, this other famous guy (who also has quite a reputation) asked a public question that was really a disguised attack. It was on all of us but he used me as an example, so it was specific to me. Also, his point was actually one I agree with completely, so I thought his point was valid. We just hadn't addressed that particular point in our talks because that wasn't the focus of those particular talks. Anyway, Dr. C responded and in her response she complimented a particular analysis I had done as addressing this guy's concerns. I also responded, and he pushed back on my remarks very strongly. It was difficult, but I didn't take it personally. (He's just like that.) Afterwards Dr. C told me that my talk had made her trip worth it, and she suggested a small working group where several of us get together to work on these common problems we're all tackling! That was super exciting. If a working group with Dr. C came out of this, it would totally make the whole trip worth it. It was also a relief that she responded well to my work given how worried I'd been about her response in particular. It's nice when people end up being...nice. Instead of jerky. I'm choosing to focus on the niceness of Dr. C rather than the aggressiveness of the other famous guy.

Then in the airport shuttle on the way to the airport, this random person I've never met turned to me as she was getting off and said, "I really liked your talk. I learned a lot, and I'm in SCIENCE!" The whole shuttle laughed, and somebody said "Never the twain shall meet!" (The joke being that math and science never talk to each other.)

The final thing that made the trip worth it -- dinner and wine with my friends last night. Lots of hilarity ensued.

Conference notes

I tried to sort of sleep in this morning during my DC visit. As I kept waking up to doors slamming and loud feet stomping, my brain said, there's the kids. Time to get up. Then I'd wake up a little more and realize, oh, no. Not the kids. Just some boorish adults who aren't my problem.

I love the Hyatt over all other chain hotels. They do a lot of things right. I'm not particularly motivated to even leave my room. My room is about 2/3 the size of my 1st California apartment.

I kind of wish I hadn't agreed to go to this PI meeting. It is simultaneously broad and small, which means there are practically no talks that interest me. Also, I'm still smarting from the whole grant thing, and just not feeling it. Already looking forward to returning home tomorrow.

Geez, what a crappy day. Lousy morning with the kids, then I can't find an affordable ticket to SFO in August and am kicking myself for not buying it a long time ago, and worst is that we found out our grant probably won't be funded. It's not 100% yet because our PO is still waiting on final budget numbers, but I think it's like 99% sure that it won't. Moreover it looks like none of Mentor's other two grants will be funded either. Which is hugely disappointing, and also brings up new challenges with how we're going to handle money and funding issues. We have one unfunded student, which happened due to a miscommunication. He told us in his application that he had funding from his government, which is common for people from his country. Many times we receive applications from people who have full funding from their government that pays for their tuition, stipend, etc. We stupidly assumed that was the case with him. We should have checked more carefully, because it turns out that in this student's case, his government funding is actually quite minimal and doesn't even fully cover tuition. So we were anticipating funding him on one of the grants I was totally sure Mentor would get. Now, without this grant coming through, we have no way to fund this student and it is really weighing on me. Tuition + living expenses is hugely expensive and I'm worried about how he is going to handle it.

This is the problem with relying on grants...when the funding to NSF dries up, and it becomes increasingly difficult to secure grant money, then we start running into problems because we have come to depend on grants as part of our structural way of operating.

Weather change

Rough morning. Since when did french toast become such a culinary insult? Reflecting on today's rough morning reminds me of how far we've come. These days, tears happen less often rather than being an inevitable part of the morning. And when they come, they end sooner. Nora began the car ride refusing to get into her seat, but by the time we got to school she was happy and ready to go. What a change from a year ago. 4 year olds are a lot better than 3 year olds.

Moonrise Kingdom

In my own mind, my life is a Wes Anderson film.

Can Milo & Nora Come Out to Play?

Today Milo wanted to impress his 8-year old next door neighbor on the playground, so he did a headstand for her. She did indeed seem quite impressed.

The 8 year old has a 5-year old sister who gave Nora a little bag with pens. You can color the outside of the bag with pens. Nora has been clutching that thing ever since. At night time, she said, "Eva colors on her bed. Can I have this now and color on my bed? Eva's allowed to do it."

So cute. These girls live in the house next door, literally 10 feet from our front door. Now the kids are running back and forth between houses all the time. I'm really unsure about how much freedom to give them. They are too young to be just going off on their own, but I can see the day coming. But I do love watching them spontaneously go over to the houses of their friends up and down the street - it reminds me of how it was when I was a kid.

Love Our Neighborhood

Our neighborhood is a big pull to stay put. We have this listserve and through the spring I've been purging some bigger items, like the kids' outgrown trikes, our double jogging stroller, a bed rail, stuff like that. Over the years I have gotten a lot of nice hand me downs from neighbors - clothes, ice skates, outdoor toys, etc. I put our items up on the listserve and gave them away to neighbors who needed them. It is always good to give back to the group when it is our turn to pass stuff on.

Today I saw an email come in with a picture of a little kid's bike. Free to whoever wants it sitting outside a block from our house. Perfect size for Milo in maybe a month or two, great condition. Jake went out and picked it up, and now we've got Milo's new-to-us bike sitting in our garage for the day when he's ready to graduate from his balance bike.

Jake's parents picked up a tagalong bike at a yard sale, which they're bringing down to our house this week. I haven't seen it so I don't know if it's the right size for a very little kid, but I hope it is. Then we can buy another one for the other kid, and then go biking around as a family. I can just picture it, biking to the Saturday farmer's market for some local vegetables, music, and fun!

When to Stay and When to Go

A lot of things about the job have turned really bad in the last couple of years. Lousy within-department interactions, with a departmental bias held strong against our area and communicated openly in faculty meetings. A horrible dean, truly the worst manager I've ever known. Explicit communication that our area will not be supported or grown, which always surprises everybody because deans at other universities pretty much universally support our area because we bring in so much money. And to top it off we have lousy math dept. interactions. They've been so bad lately that Mentor and I have gotten an email informing us that our knowledge, backgrounds, and experience are insufficient for us to be qualified to do the job of running a particular program we're running.

What is good about my job? The little bubble that is my area. My direct area colleagues and our area grad students are truly awesome. We work well together, we have terrific collaborations, and I enjoy the collaborative research we do. Everybody in my area is a great colleague.

But is that bubble enough to protect from the incursions from our department, our dean, the math department, and the horrible state political situation that is ruining everybody's town/county/educational system? I find myself wishing I'd applied to a job in the northwest where a couple of my colleagues are going.

What keeps me here: Our city, the weather, the friendly culture of the midwest, Jake's job/family situation. What makes me want to leave: Our state, the racist & sexist culture of the midwest, my job. If I were single, I probably would have left already, but it's more complicated when you're talking about uprooting a family.

Nora Has Better Policy Ideas Than Our Governor

It's just so bad that I can't even bring myself to talk about it. So instead I'll relay a brief interview I had with Nora.

(Walker's administration repealed the equal pay act)

A: If there is a law that says that women and men should get paid the same for doing the same work, do you think that’s a good law or a bad law?

N: A good law. 

A: Why?

N: Because if they want the same amount and they don’t get the same coins, they should.

(Walker's administration rolled back environmental protections)

A: Do you think it’s a good idea or a bad idea to let companies put pollutants in the water?

N: What are pollutants?

A: Poisons.

N: No.

A: Why?

N: Because, what if fish eat them?

A: What do you think would happen?

N: They would die.

(Walker's administration cut funding for education)

A: Do you think that teachers should have bigger classes with more kids, or smaller classes with fewer kids?

N: Bigger classes with more kids. 

A: Why?

N: Because if it’s a smaller class and a lot of kids were there, they couldn’t fit.

A: Do you think teachers should have more kids in their classes or fewer kids in their classes?

N: More kids. 

A: Why?

N: Because if they had a few kids, they wouldn’t be able to garden and stuff.

(Walker's administration took tens of thousands of people off badger care) 

A: There is a program that lets poor people have doctors even though they don't have enough money to pay for it. Do you think that's a good program or a bad program?

N: Good. Because they need to fix the person.

A: But it does cost a lot of money. Is that okay?

N: Yes. Because they need it.

(Walker's administration cut state and county services without cutting taxes for ordinary citizens)

A: Do you think we should all have to pay more money to get things like sidewalks, trash pickup, and snow plows, or less money, and get less of those things?

N: Pay more money to get those things. Because if you don’t have enough money, you won’t be able to buy them if you want them. One time we bought a sidewalk. Nah. Someone just put a new sidewalk.

A: Do you think that was a good thing?

N: Uh huh. Because if sidewalks are really old, you need new.

(Walker's administration passed the voter ID law)

A: Do you think that when people go to vote, they should have to show their driver’s license to vote?

N: No.

A: Why?

N: Because then, I think they’ll be faster.

A: What does it mean to vote?

N: It means to get new people that are good instead of the bad ones. 

Stuff We Saw and Didn't See

Some things we saw:

Other things we saw but didn't photograph:

-- Segway tours (tourists in a group on Segways)
-- A hearse with the top cut out of the roof, and then a bar coming up out of the roof with bar stools seated around it. Tourists drank while being driven around on a ghost tour.
-- A bicycle powered bar. 8 or 10 seats all facing inward around a rectangular bar. Each seat was attached to pedals, and everybody pedaled to make the giant mobile bar move.

We didn't see:

-- Turn signals. Nobody uses them around here. It's treacherous!

Savannah

Last night we went to dinner at a place called the Pink House, which is an old mansion build in the 1700s that just went on and on and on. There were 11 of us and we ate in what used to be the ballroom, and we only occupied a small part of the room. Later we enjoyed the view from a nearby balcony. A woman in a floor-length ball gown walked around to each table to welcome us to the restaurant. She then sang for everybody in the room. You don't see that kind of thing in our town.

Me and My Girl

Different Shopping Attitudes

I no longer have any confidence to buy clothes for the kids that they don't pick out themselves, because they're so picky. Meanwhile, Nora wears about 3 different shirts and 2 different pairs of shorts, and then gets cranky when I haven't done laundry quickly enough so that she can continue wearing the exact same clothes every time. So today we headed out to the store to get a few summer clothes for the kids.

It's funny to observe how Milo is an acquirer and Nora is a minimalist. Milo: Oh, a Spiderman shirt! My very favorite! Can I have this Spiderman shirt? And oh Mommy! Look at this Star Wars shirt! And this sleeveless shirt! Can I have these shirts Mommy? Can I?

Pretty much anything I suggested for Milo, he was game. I wanted to pick out a nice collared button-down shirt for a wedding, and he was even fine with that. He kept seeing more and more clothes that he wanted.

On the other hand, with Nora, I'd say, Nora, do you like these shorts? Or these? Or how about these? Nora: No thank you. Milo: Nora, look!  A Dora shirt! Do you want a Dora shirt? Nora: No, I already have a Dora thing at home. Me: How about these blue shorts, Nora? You need some shorts. Nora: I already picked out a pair of shorts Mommy! That's all I need! Basically, Nora only wanted one pair of shorts, and one t-shirt (Thomas). I had to wheedle her into accepting a couple more pairs of shorts while fending off Milo who wanted to buy every item of clothing in the place.

Milo also wanted a Spiderman action figure, a Spiderman float board, some sort of weird plastic axe / hammer thing, some baseballs, and a set of kids' golf balls and a golf club. (Spiderman is currently his favorite, basically because it is his best friend's favorite.) I said, "Maybe for your birthday." Nora didn't want anything. (I do intend to get them a few summer toys next month, but that'll be a surprise.) It was funny to me to see how Milo wanted everything under the sun and Nora just wasn't all that interested in anything. Fortunately, they both seem perfectly fine with delaying gratification and pointing out something they like that I should keep in mind for their birthday - neither kid ever whines to get a toy right away or anything like that. (Then they forget about the whole thing the next day). I wonder how long that'll last...

The Subtle Effects of Tenure

I've been slowly resolving a two-day series of disagreements with Mentor. They're polite disagreements, but fairly forceful, and it is uncomfortable for me to argue. It's hard to let go of old habits (never argue, just agree, don't rock the boat, make everybody like you so that they'll support your tenure bid).

I have a longer story about this change in me that I'll tell another day, but here is a short excerpt from tonight.

Me: You know it is difficult for me to disagree with you but I think I am getting better at it.

Mentor: Tenure does wonders for one's voice!

So, so true. It changes how I interact with tenured people, and it changes how I interact with untenured people. It just changes things.

Lunch at the student union terrace

Ice cream is an important part of the terrace experience! Almost as important as beer.

Nora, you want me to, like, give you a wipe for your mouth or something? Or maybe brush your hair and adjust that headband? No? Okay.

They recently added some blue chairs to the terrace. For years (decades?) it's only been green, orange, and yellow. The blue chairs have caused quite a stir, believe it or not.

The giant orange chair is still our favorite.

Losing Battles?

These words bug me:

1) Veggies. Why can't we say vegetables? Do we have to give this a cutesy word like veggies? This one is so common that it's less annoying than the next three, somehow...

2) Cardi. Really? Cardi? You can't say cardigan, which is a perfectly good already existing word? Again, too cutesy.

3) Lil. Or lil'. Come on. Do we really need to talk like we're a member of the Little Rascals? It is not that hard to type out little.

4) Prolly. Ugh. This is the worst one of all. If you're typing "prolly", you either don't know how to spell probably, or you've decided to acquire an affectation that makes you sound like a 6-year old girl. With a maturity level to match.

I'd be hard pressed to think of a full grown man who would use these words. Maybe veggies is starting to sneak its way into the common vernacular, but I doubt most men would say "cardi".

I have noticed that I have a lot of writing pet peeves. It's kind of a losing battle, too. Every year I make the same speeches about them to my grad students (we don't write "people that...", it's "people who...") but it doesn't make much of a difference. They do it anyway, and some of them even do it on purpose occasionally just to bug me (ahem, "impact"). It's funny that I care about these things since I break so many writing and grammatical rules myself. So I guess I'm being pretty hypocritical. I've probably acquired these peeves because I have to read so many flipping drafts of theses, prelims, proposals, and dissertations, oh my. Reading student drafts is much, much more exhausting than reading published work. Amen.

But at least none of my students ever use the words veggies, cardi, lil, or prolly in their drafts. So it could be worse!

Summer Plans

I'm excited about a bunch of neat stuff we have planned for summer!

a) This month I'm going to a little conference in Savannah, which is a town I've always wanted to visit. There is a just-graduated colleague who wants to collaborate on a potential grant with me and my post doc, so we'll spend some time at that conference brainstorming grant ideas. Also, one of my intellectual heroes will be at the conference too. He's the guy who offered me a job last year that I turned down, and it was all awkward, and I think he was really bummed but he was nice about it. Then I wrote a paper for a monograph and he wrote a commentary on it. Recently he told me he's eager to discuss the paper at this conference, which will be great, I hope, and probably very helpful as I revise the paper for a journal. (Still kind of scary, though. He's so smart and his ideas are so much more sophisticated than mine that I am intimidated.)

Also, Jake is coming down to join me for the latter half and we're staying a couple of days after the conference ends to be tourists and have a little vacation! I am really looking forward to that.

b) Then like a week after that, in June, I'm going to DC for another conference. There I'll be on a panel discussing this particular methodology that I'm just starting to dip my toes into, but everybody else on the panel is super super advanced in this methodology, having done it for years and years. So that's a little nerve wracking, but I think I'll learn a lot and it'll be good for me.

c) Then in July a friend of mine in my field is coming to our town for about a week! She's going to do some work while she's here, and I'll show her around, and then we got this bright idea - what if we invite some other women in our field to town for a mini writing workshop, where we work together on our writing? So we invited 4 other women, and they're all going to come! Two will come in the middle of the week and the other two will come at the end of the week. So fun! I'm really psyched that I get to have visitors and talk and share with people, especially my friend who will be here for a week.

d) Then in early August, I'm going to go to the bay area for my teacher-friends reunion! It will have been almost 2 years since we've all been together, and even more exciting, one of them will have a new baby (due in a few weeks)! So I get to see all of my friends and also meet one of their new babies!

e) Then in late August, we're all going to go to my mom's house for about a week! And my sister and her family will be there too! Super fun. Oh, and supposedly I'm supposed to spend 2 days while I'm there being on an advisory panel, but the idiot budget people at that university haven't been able to pay me for the work I did on that panel over a year ago, so I'm not going to do it if I don't get paid by then. I mean, I'll still help out here and there for free, but I'm not going to take 2 days away from my vacation to sit in advisory panel meetings for free.

Other things: I signed the kids up for swimming lessons again. I also feel like I should get Milo into baseball, since baseball is his preferred sport if he has to pick. But they still all happen during his nap time, so I'm not doing it. I am starting to feel a little bit like the lame parent who doesn't sign her kids up for activities, but, I mean, going to school 4 days a week should count, right? Plus, he still needs his nap. Nora could give hers up, but Milo still sleeps a solid 3 hours in the afternoon, even though he's 4. Who am I to argue with that? He's always been a big sleeper.

Jake's mom is already bugging us about when we'll go up north. I'm prepared to sacrifice one weekend this summer to that, but any more and Jake can take them on his own. Thankfully, they're old enough now for that! It's nice up there, but it is really tough on me not sleeping for a whole weekend, which is what happens every. single. time. There is only one person out of the 4 of us who actually gets any sleep, and it's Jake.

Writing plans:
1) Conference monograph into journal article, goal: out the door this summer
2) Collaborative with post-doc paper, goal: out the door this summer
3) Second collaborative with post-doc paper (her 1st author), goal: help her out on it and follow her timeline (probably it'll go out this summer)
4) New-to-me methodology paper, goal: drafted by the end of the summer
5) New co-authored book with Mentor, goal: Outline by Sept. 30

Another book? I've been saying to myself, no more books for a while! But then this book opportunity came up, and I thought, oh, that one sounds kind of interesting...so I said yes.

Anyway, I'm hoping that these concrete writing plans will get me past the classic post-tenure slump, which I do think has plagued me a bit over the past 6 months or so. Either way, it's going to be an exciting summer!

Shyness

I've always found it interesting to track the kids' waxing and waning shyness over the years. I used to think that being shy or not being shy was an issue of temperament, sort of constant throughout, but with M&N it has shifted back and forth a lot. Also, when one child is in a shy phase, the other one will switch to an outgoing phase. They seem to take turns.

So I remember when the kids were babies, Milo did not feel so great about other people. This first became apparent when he was just a few months old and our friends came over and he was on the floor under his baby gym thing. One of them touched his toe and said hello to him and he just totally freaked out. I mean, screaming like he was terrorized. I had to take him into another room to calm him down. Meanwhile, Nora was totally fine with anybody and everybody. I remember we went to a Mother's Day picnic sort of thing when the babies were 5 months old and I frequently had to walk away from the group with Milo to help him feel more comfortable. He didn't even like being around all of those people, even when I was holding him. Meanwhile, Nora was getting passed around from person to person and didn't care who the heck was holding her.

Fast forward to when they were twoish, and they had totally traded places. Nora was so shy and concerned about strangers that if we were on the sidewalk and somebody came walking toward us, she'd get upset and need me to hold her. Never mind talking to people. She'd bury her head in my shoulder and wouldn't talk to anybody. Milo, however, was mr. friendly, going around to anybody and everybody saying, "Hi! Hi! Hi!" This was still what they were like when they started school at almost 3, so Nora sort of got the reputation as being a little withdrawn and Milo got the reputation of being outgoing. Nora didn't really have much interest in playing with the other children, except Milo, and wanted to mostly hang around her teachers. Milo would play with anybody.

Now they're 4 and they have switched places again. Milo isn't shy, per se, but he definitely clams up when new people are around, or when he's in a large group. He gets very quiet and isn't really into talking to strangers. He'll talk to other kids, though. It's really interesting to watch Milo deliberately lower his voice when he's playing with other boys, trying to appear older, like a tough guy.

Nora, on the other hand, will currently talk to anybody. About anything. Like, we're at the pharmacy picking up an ear drops prescription for Milo. I tell the pharmacist, he just had tubes put in. And then Nora pipes up, "AND I'M CONSTIPATED!" Or we'll be walking along the sidewalk and pass some random stranger and Nora will say, "I'M FOUR AND A THIRD!" Doesn't matter who it is, she'll strike up a conversation (about herself).

I guess shyness isn't a constant thing, at least with these kids at this point. That's true of me, too, I suppose. I've mostly thought of myself as shy all my life, but I'm not really like that anymore. Or rather, I have learned the skills to interact with new people despite the fact that I don't really like new people. Recently at a conference I was searching around for this friend I wanted to have lunch with. I finally found him and a couple of his friends and as we all started walking to lunch, I ran into this random person, and then that person who wanted to say hello, and more and more people started joining us and my friend said, "You're such a gregarious person that pretty soon we'll have 30 people coming to lunch with us." And I was like, what? You mean shy, not gregarious, right? Also, he's the really outgoing one. It turns out that each of us perceives the other as gregarious, while we both perceive ourselves as shy. So I guess there is a difference between how you feel, and how you're able to act, which, thank goodness. Otherwise, I'd probably spend my life as the little troll scowling in the corner.

Weekend Stuff

1. It was really hot today, like 88 degrees. Awesome! Still cool enough in the morning for a nice 4-mile run, barefoot, no pain!

2. Jake's parents have returned from FL and are here this weekend on their way back to their home up north. I spent the whole afternoon cooking. I forgot how they drink cocktails every evening at 5. It is definitely a fun tradition! But not one I could indulge in regularly.

3. Milo is getting a weird sort of attitude and makes these come backs now. Like, say he's racing somewhere and trips, and we'll say, "Whoa, slow down dude." And he'll say, "YOU slow down." Um, aren't you a little young for that kind of thing? And also, that doesn't make any sense. You're doing it wrong.

4. Nora is totally starting to read stuff on her own now. Today she was looking at a book title and sounded out "Babar". She's pretty psyched about this whole thing and regularly asks me, "Am I starting to learn how to read? Am I figuring out how to read words?"

5. A long time ago Mentor and I applied for a grant. I was pretty hopeless about our chances of getting it for two reasons. One, there were 900 letters of intent and they are going to fund about 30. I think in the end the real number of applications was a little over 500, but still, the odds are lousy. Two, Mentor applied for 3 grants, and I know he's going to get one of them because it's one that NSF asked him to submit because they want to fund a continuation of a project he's currently doing. (That's not the one I'm involved in). So would they really want to fund 2 out of 30 to the same PI? I highly doubt it.

But, when I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine asked if I'd heard back yet on the grant. I said no. He said, "Well, we didn't get ours. And so-and-so from xyz heard back too that they didn't get it, and so did so-and-so from abc, and..." As I chatted with people I found out that a number of people have heard back already. The fact that we haven't probably means it made it through the 1st round of review, so now I have the tiniest modicum of hope. We keep thinking we'll hear soon, and then each day passes and we hear nothing, and my hope grows a little. This is hard because I don't want to get my hopes too high. I really want this grant but need to stay realistic.

6. Nora wants to be Superman when she grows up. Then she corrects herself and says, "I want to be Supergirl."

This is Why I Don't Visit

So, there is an uber-conservative group, an offshoot of ALEC, full of business people and tea party members and people who run private, for-profit schools like Kipp, and they have a sham "research" organization that is aimed at "grading" teacher education programs. Their intention is to give all of the teacher ed programs failing grades, and highly publicize these "results", which they do, to convince everybody that teacher ed programs should be eliminated. They don't actually have any scientists or researchers on their organization, but what they do is conduct fake studies based on things like class syllabi and then create sham reports that they release grading various schools of education. They look reasonable at first glance, but then you realize that the reports are actually based on no data, they don't publicize their analysis criteria, or their methods, and every report comes out with a failing grade or a near failing grade. (Suffice it to say, this sort of thing would never make it past peer review. It's a biiiiig red flag when a group doesn't release its methods.)

Their goal is to a) eliminate teacher ed programs, and b) privatize education.

They have an enormous budget and an enormous PR campaign. And lots of people listen to them. In fact, they're going to start publishing their reports in U.S. News and World Report (who is trying to survive in this time of terrible sales).

They do things like hire students to solicit syllabi from professors, pretending they're interested in a course, and then turning the syllabi over to this organization.

Anyway, this organization is going after the program I work in. This was expected, because they're going after all the top-rated schools of education (and our dept. is rated #1 in the country). They solicited some syllabi in general, and made a couple of very specific syllabus requests: they requested the release of my syllabus for an undergrad class I teach, and they requested Mentor's syllabus for an undergrad class he teaches. Our university refused the request under intellectual property arguments. The organization has now filed a lawsuit to get our syllabi. In the past year our state government made a new law that says you can file a lawsuit like this in any county in the state. So the organization filed the lawsuit in the most conservative county in our state, with the most conservative appellate court. The current expectation is that the university is going to ultimately settle with this organization, because the lawsuit would probably prevail, and settling avoids setting a legal precedent. At that time, my syllabus will be subpoenaed. If I don't comply, I'd be in contempt of court.

One might ask, why bother resisting this? I am not ashamed of my syllabus or the course I created. It is an excellent course and I am proud of it. (And, when colleagues ask for my syllabus so that they can use or adapt it, I freely give it out.) In addition, they're going to create their report regardless, and it will be negative regardless. The actual content of our syllabi will be irrelevant to this outcome. For me, it's more a desire to not comply, indeed to protest, this unethical set of actions. I don't want to condone it, I don't want to be a part of it, I don't want to be under attack programmatically or personally, even though that is what is going to happen.

All of this is to explain what I am about to write below; it's to set the stage, to explain that this current lawsuit is just the latest in attack after attack after attack on my profession, my values, my research, and my way of life. I live with this every day.

***************************

Several weeks ago I got dragged into a conversation with a lot of neo-liberal bullshit about education, and it is still bothering me.

Why do these conversations enact such a high mental and emotional cost? Why is it hard for me to let it go?

It's because I am embattled. It's because I have to live it both professionally and personally. I am steeped in attacks against education and against public workers on multiple levels: local, state, and national. I must address this in my professional life, I write about it, I respond to discussions about it, I read about it. I am confronted with it in my personal life with every other news story that comes across my desk. I have to deal with it with my grad students, facing a job market in which budget crises, loss of tenure-track faculty lines, and conversion to for-profit practices are going to be a part of their new reality as they struggle to actually carve out lives as educators in the face of the CEO corporate model eagerly and gleefully taking over education at the expense of the poor. I have to deal with it with my undergrads, struggling with them to think through why it even makes sense for them to go into teaching at this point given the systematic and ongoing attack on their autonomy, their ability to make a decent living, and their self respect as actual professionals. I have to deal with it personally, as I come off of three years of pay cuts from furloughs, six years of no merit raises and no cost-of-living raises, and a significant pay cut this year thanks to the tea party politics of my governor and state legislators bent on destroying public institutions.

In that conversation I shared some news with this conservative Bush-voting millionaire -- who pretends to care about teachers' lives -- about what our governor had just done. Not only has our governor capped pay increases for teachers and systematically attacked teachers' workplace protections, wages, and benefits, 3 weeks ago he went even farther. He has crafted an executive order that allows for the redefinition of the pay schedule for experienced teachers, which enables districts to eliminate add ons, like advanced degrees, that increase teachers' salaries. So, for instance, that master's degree your kid's chemistry teacher got 15 years ago is no longer going to count towards her salary. For some teachers, this can result in a pay cut of up to 30%. Think about that. THIRTY PERCENT. Think about it some more. Imagine you're a 50-year old teacher who has been in the system for 28 years. You've got two kids in college. You plan to retire in 14 years. And now your salary is getting cut by 30%, and there is nothing you can do about it. When I shared this story with the Bush-voting conservative, he said, "and is that a bad thing?"

Are you fucking kidding me? Are you so out of touch that you don't understand that this is a bad thing?

Here's the thing. I am embattled both professionally and personally, and I cannot escape it. The wealthy white men who made their fortunes in business and now want to talk about this shit with me? Who want to argue their points aggressively in some sort of education debate? For them, it's a fucking hobby. It's a political point of interest, it's a hobby horse. It doesn't affect their lives as they pay for their daughters' lavish weddings or trips to Italy. It doesn't touch every part of their personal and professional lives. They can end that conversation and go back to their fucking golf game. I end that conversation and return to about twelve other conversations of the same ilk. This is why I struggle to let these things go.

Do I sound angry? Because I am. I'm angry.

I also need to do what is necessary to protect myself. And that includes not spending time with people like this having these kinds of conversations. Sorry. It's nothing personal. But I spend enough of my time fighting these issues. I don't need to voluntarily do it any more than necessary. I don't want to spend every day pissed off about stuff. So that means surrounding myself with people whose values align with my own.

For You

Literacy

This morning on the way back from the children's museum the kids were asking me to spell various words for them. They then started asking about spelling just letters or sounds, like "B", or "D", etc. Nora asked, "Does every letter start with itself?" (For instance, "Dee" starts with "D", "Bee" starts with "B", etc.) Without thinking about it much, I said yes.

Then tonight at dinner, Nora said, "I thought of a letter that doesn't start with itself. 'C'. It sounds like 'see', so 'C' starts with 'S'. Not with 'C', which is a 'Cuh' sound."

Two things strike me here. One, how the heck do kids ever learn to read and spell (in English)? Because we have so many exceptions, so many idiosyncratic spellings, so many illogical ways to spell a word, it's a miracle kids ever learn to read at all. Two, Nora is a very logical kid!

Hmmmmm

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. ranks dead last on breastfeeding support policies. We're also the only developed country with no maternity leave policy.

So, let's see. We put out magazine covers with provocative breastfeeding images with captions asking us if we're mom enough. We create commercials terrorizing women into thinking that formula feeding is akin to riding a mechanical bull while pregnant. We have the slogan "breast is best", and we have La Leche League. And we also have no paid parental leave policy and no paid nursing breaks for new mothers.

So as far as I can figure, we're making it extremely difficult for most working mothers to breastfeed (and in many jobs, it's impossible) while simultaneously creating a culture in which you are definitely a second-class mother if you don't breastfeed. Now I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I just have to wonder about this cultural obsession with breastfeeding. It just happens to be the one thing you can't do easily while working many jobs. Seems to me that if policy makers really cared about breastfeeding, they'd enact policies to actually support mothers' abilities to do so. Instead we've got this strong pressure to breastfeed without the supports in place to help mothers do it...unless, of course, they quit their jobs. Then it becomes a lot easier.

It makes a person wonder.

When I was pregnant and trying to figure out how I'd ever manage to breastfeed twins, I discovered that there was a LLL multiples meeting. I was encouraged to attend before I delivered, so that I could make some connections, get some help and advice, etc. So I called up the leader to find out when and where the meetings were. Well, they met once a week. At 10:00 a.m. On a Tuesday.

I was like, "Uh, I teach then. Do you have any evening or weekend meetings that I could attend?" No. They did not. So who gets the benefit of these supports? Not working women.

I personally had it lucky. It's much easier to keep breastfeeding when you have a super flexible job, a private office for pumping, and enough saved sick leave to use the FMLA to at least stay home for a couple of months after delivery. But my job is not the norm. How exactly are women who work less flexible or hourly jobs supposed to do it? I don't think we really care, as a nation, about the health and well being of babies and kids. If we cared, we'd change our policies. I think we're more interested in profit margins and the economy.

Three I Guess

1. A while back I was in the shower and noticed a lump on my ribcage about an inch in diameter. Jake was worried about it, because he's a hypochondriac (especially on my behalf), but I wasn't worried. The ribcage doesn't seem like much of a worrisome place to find something like that. Nevertheless, I called the doctor and long story short got scheduled to see the surgeon today to check it out. Well, the surgeon said that it is just a harmless fibroma, so nothing to worry about. That's good news.

2. My new goal is to be in bed by 10:30 at night and turn out the light by 11. So that I can try to not feel so tired all the time. But wait. It's 10:55 now. Why am I so bad at going to bed? I just don't feel tired at the right times.

Also, night time is my only time to myself. It's hard to give that up. But maybe it'd be easier if I started having an easier time getting up when I hear Milo's door open.

3. Nora has started sleeping in. Some mornings, on school days, I end up waking her up a full hour after Milo's already up, and she is cranky. This seems pretty cruel, that I'm starting to get a sleeping-in kid but the other kid is decidedly a morning person. Who wants his breakfast pronto, thank you very much.

4. Wait. I don't have four things.

Snapshots of Today

This morning we spent the whole morning planting flowers and herbs. Here are my herbs all nice in a row in our cedar planter. How will they do? Only time will tell.

After the kids went to nap I made a summer pasta salad with cherry tomatoes, avocados, basil, lemon, garlic, capers, and green onions, but I forgot the green onions! So I strolled down to the neighborhood market to pick up some green onions. The grocer said "Hey, green onions" and then started singing "green onions" by Booker T. and the MG's. On the walk home I looked at all of the recall signs. Pretty much every other house looks like this:

In the afternoon we went to a party downtown. Our friends have a condo right near the capitol and they have this awesome set up where they've got this huge terrace, bigger than our own patio, and then the terrace connects to this big grassy area and another set of gardens. It's like the best of both worlds, living right downtown in a modern condo and also having outdoor space right outside your back door. 

I'm So Tired

Tonight just as I was literally exiting through the door to go out to dinner (of course) Milo fell off his chair and gashed his eyelid, causing a lot of bleeding all over the place. It's a small (1 cm) but deep cut. That kid is going to have so many scars by the time he gets to college.

The kids' classroom has a sister school in Liberia. They've been sending packages back and forth, pictures, notes, etc. between the two schools. There is currently a book drive to send a bunch of books to the Liberian school. Milo and Nora chose some books to donate.

Meanwhile, Nora has been gathering random pennies throughout the house and she now has a cup full of pennies. She wants to go to the book store with me and use her money to buy a book for the kids in Liberia. She's been pretty insistent on it, so I'll take her this weekend if we can squeeze it in. This is the first time that Nora has demonstrated any sense that money is something you use to buy things. Pretty awesome.

That Time Magazine Cover Everybody's Talking About

Boy howdy am I glad that my kids are older and I now get to rely on my brain, rather than my stupid messed up body, to parent. THANK GOD.

The kids are so awesome and entertaining now. Tonight I tossed Milo's face cloth at him as he was goofing around, and it smacked him in the face and then fell through his arms. Instead of being annoyed, he said, "Good job, you made a basket!"

Nora explained to me that she has something she is going to bring home tomorrow for me for Mother's Day. It's a flower! Maria has been helping her make it! She has absolutely no concept of keeping something a secret. Nora also motioned towards her pants pocket. She was wearing purple and white checked capris, with two zippered pockets. One was zipped closed. She said, "I have something in my pocket for you for Mother's Day too. But I have to keep it in my pocket until then. Well...you can peek. (Opens the pocket about half a centimeter). Okay, that's enough of a peek." I hope whatever is in that pocket wasn't alive.

Lawn Mower Accident

One time, a long long long time ago, I was having dinner with a friend. We were out of town at the time, with a bunch of other friends as well, but this one night just this one friend and I were having dinner. Anyway, at that time, he had this big secret he wanted to tell me. And as he was hemming and hawing and delaying and giving little hints about this terrible secret, my mind started constructing these hypothetical scenarios about what the secret might be.

Meanwhile, tonight I was chatting with another friend and this friend asked if I ever hear from that other friend, the one with the secret. So I was sharing what I know (our lives pleasantly diverged long ago) and then I had this sudden memory. I suddenly remembered that this old friend had experienced a terrible accident, I think involving a lawn mower, in which a very delicate body part had been partially severed!

Isn't that awful? I thought to myself, "How could I have forgotten that?" I felt sad for a bit, remembering that terrible detail about this person.

But then I realized, oh wait a sec. Waaaait a sec. No. There was never any lawn mower accident. That was actually just one of the hypothetical scenarios I had constructed way back when, during the time when he was equivocating about telling me his terrible secret! I can remember where we were sitting in the restaurant at dinner, I remember him being very embarrassed about his secret, and I remember imagining what it could be, including that scenario. (Which is a really dumb thing to imagine. Who mows the lawn naked?) His actual secret was much more benign.

What is really creepy about this (aside from the fact that I had ever imagined such a bizarre scenario to begin with) is that I just barely caught myself in the false memory. Something about the illogic of it made me catch myself and remember what truly happened. But I'm sure there are other times when I don't catch myself. It's truly creepy to me, how our memories are constructed. We construct our memories, totally unreliably, and therefore we construct our past. And our reality. What is real? What is not? There is no way to know. Our sense that what we remember is what happened is totally an illusion.

I have another experience like this. It involves the last time a huge conference I attended was in San Francisco. This was in 2006. I have two memories of staying in a hotel in SF. In the first memory, I am staying in a very large, dark room. There is a table between the bed and the window. The bathroom is between the bedroom and the door. I sat at the table when I talked to my cousin on the phone, telling her a story about a horrible session I'd had in which the discussant had been a jackass.

Then there is a different hotel room I stayed in. It is extremely bright and white, and it is small. There was an armchair next to the bed. The bathroom was behind the bed. The layout of this room was completely different. The chair is where I sat when a friend visited me. My friend sat on the bed and showed me a sculpture he had made.

The problem is, there was only one trip, and only one hotel. And I know I stayed in that big, dark room, and I know I stayed in that small, white room. But I do know for a fact that I only stayed in one hotel on that trip. Which room is the real room? They are totally different rooms in my memory. I mean, nothing even close to the same. If my life depended on it, I could not tell you which room was the real room.

I am pretty sure that these incidents don't mean I'm crazy. I think they just mean I'm able to sometimes, very rarely, catch some grave errors in my mental images and my memories. What I suspect is that these errors are constant occurrences, but I have no way of noticing, or knowing.

Our intuition that we perceive and remember the world in any direct way is an illusion.

Three Petty Things and One Not

Petty Thing #1: Last night Nora asked me how much I weigh. Huh? I said I wasn't sure, since I haven't stepped on a scale in a very long time, and then I gave her an estimate. She said, "Well maybe you could try getting on the scale and then you can let me know." Uh...no? I'm pretty sure Nora has no idea what she weighs, so her sudden interest in what I weigh was pretty surprising.

Petty Thing #2: We have to go to this wedding. I don't want to go, but Jake wants to take the whole family so we're going. It's on a Friday afternoon, at like 3, in a town about 2 hours away. So that means taking the day off work. And having the kids miss their nap. So anyway, it's his cousin who is getting married and I've never met the bride. I've met the groom twice, I think. But recently I got an envelope in the mail (of course addressed to me with Jake's last name) inviting me to this woman's bridal shower. Just me, not Jake.

Okay, wait a sec. I have literally never met her. And she's like 35 and getting married for the second time. And I have never met her. And I'm supposed to go to a bridal shower for her? Are you freaking kidding me?

(Also, the wedding invitation itself included their registry info. Sorry, but...no. I'm no Emily Post, but come on.)

Petty Thing #3: Due to not-worth-getting-into details I am paying $160 to feed my department members lunch. In return for all of those other months when they feed me lunch, and by feed me lunch I mean bring in a tray of limp deli meats and call it a day. Um, can we abolish the communal lunch thing already? I'd rather keep my $160 and take care of my own lunch each month.

Non-Petty Thing: Last night Nora had reflux. And here I had thought, once again, that she had outgrown it. We've been cutting back on her meds. Anyway, I figured she needed to sit upright for a while so I said she could sit with me and watch Deep Space 9 with me and Jake. (It was a quirky episode. The episodes are either stressful or quirky, and this one was quirky, so I knew it wouldn't be scary.) She sat there on my lap for the whole time, and occasionally Nora would look at me with this huge, sweet smile on her face, because it was such a treat to stay up with Mom & Dad and look at the grown-up video they were watching. It totally reminded me of this one time that I took Nora to meet a friend at a coffee shop when she was about 6 months old. And the whole time, sitting on my lap, Nora would look up at me with these giant smiles. My friend said, "Boy does she love you!" And things haven't changed at all. Nora seems so grown up to me most of the time but sometimes I still see the baby in her.

Weekend Notes

Cloudy! Crummy weather! But enough non-rain times yesterday for me and Jake to put together some wood planters, do yard work, and prep our patio for summer.

Dinner: Milo at strawberries wrapped in spinach, cherry tomatoes, rice noodles, a wonton, and cheese. Nora ate...strawberries. And the teeniest tiniest bite of one rice noodle (approximately 0.5 mm thick). LE SIGH.

Jake and I ate homemade hot and sour soup with rice noodles, tomatoes, and spinach. Super awesome recipe. Yum.

But! I successfully made granola bars. I have been struggling with this for a long time because it is hard to get the consistency right. Sometimes it won't set up, and it's granola mush. Other times, it breaks apart and just becomes granola. But now I have succeeded in making actual bars, and the recipe I have is really delicious while still being decent for you (includes stuff like wheat germ, oats, dried cherries, and only has honey for a sweetener!). This is a big score for me because the kids love granola bars but I dislike feeding them what you can buy in the store. Even the healthy organic ones have about 30 ingredients.

Last weekend I went for a run in normal shoes and before the second mile was done my knees were dust. So frustrating. But this weekend I went for a run barefoot style and did 4.5 miles without trouble, so hooray! Part of it might have had to do with the fact that I was going up and down more hills, so it was giving me some relief from relentless flat foot pounding. But then again, this has become the kind of thing where there are about 80 different variables and I always attribute the latest change to whether my knees do well or poorly. It's totally non logical and superstitious and stuff.

More bad work stuff! Last year our chancellor, who has since departed for greener, private pastures, set up a private company to consult with some administrators to come up with a new HR design. They've now released their recommendations, one of them being no more cost of living raises. I mean, not that we've had any since 2006, but that's because there was no money rather than it not being built into the pay structure. Also, compensation would be determined by market analysis. Which means...what? (And how do you do that for everybody on campus, including janitors, secretaries, academic staff, medical personnel, food service workers, science professors, English professors, etc., etc., etc.?) So any raises would be determined by this non-defined market analysis, and by merit as determined by one's peers (which I'm sure would involve no favoritism whatsoever). In addition, these adjustments are supposed to enable a decrease in one's compensation as well as a possible increase. Also, the recommendations include eliminating the separate categories of classified vs. academic staff, which means classified staff (like secretaries and janitors) will lose a bunch of benefits that they've accrued separately due to collective bargaining action in the past.

How much will it take until faculty vote with their feet en masse? Things are really out of control!

Adventurous and Picky

When Milo came downstairs after his nap, I asked if he was ready for a snack. He said, "Yes. I'd like a bunch of spinach with a strawberry on top, please."

??? Where did this kid come from? I didn't happen to have either spinach or strawberries. I offered him some arugula but he wasn't interested. Instead, Milo ate about 3/4 of a red bell pepper. As he ate it, he said, "How are these so good?"

Lest this is too annoying to read about, I have the other child. Things she used to eat have now switched camps into the "cannot be eaten" category. This includes french toast, sausage, and applesauce. Seriously, applesauce? What has applesauce ever done to you, Nora? So now Nora will basically eat pancakes, peanut butter and honey sandwiches, and fruit. I exaggerate, but not by much.

Land of Milk and Honey

1. Last night I was walking home from the gym and marveling at how fabulous everything is when the weather warms up. It was after 6 when I left and now I can walk home on the bike path again, instead of through the neighborhood streets, because it's still plenty light out. It was warm. I could smell the lingering scent of lilacs. Everything is blooming. The birds are loud. Everything about our little spot on the planet is just completely pleasant right now.

I know I wouldn't be enjoying it this much if I weren't contrasting it with other walks home from the gym, walks that happen in the pitch black, boots crunching on snow, hood pulled over my head, gloves on. But, is it worth it? I mean, yes, the sweetness of the warm months is all the more sweet thanks to winter, but I suspect that at this point in my life I could definitely enjoy this kind of weather year round.

2. In my continued "don't be a slob" life campaign, I'm tackling one new cleaning / organizing project a week on top of the normal maintenance stuff. Today it was the hall linen closet. Now our towels, sheets, and blankets are all organized, take that, closet! I subsequently discovered about 200 little packets of alcohol wipes and about a hundred packets of gauze. I think our alcohol wipe / gauze needs are fulfilled at least until the kids go to college.

3. This is a sign of how bad things are with my brain: I have started a "where things are" file on my computer. Every time I put something somewhere special or weird, I add it to the file. So maybe in 6 months when I can't figure out what happened to my white gloves or the Halloween decorations, I'll be able to find it thanks to the file.

4. This morning we went to the children's museum and spent 45 minutes building a giant house out of giant building materials. The kids could stand up in it. I figured out how to make a window and a door. It was definitely super fun.

5. I have an angry screed to share, but I'll save it for later since the great weather and organizing projects are making me so content. Somebody once said something about how I'm always angry, or something like that, based on this blog. Hopefully that isn't how everybody sees me, but I think my writing can skew that way at times because I use the space to work out issues or to communicate more passionately than I would actually feel allowed to do in real life. Mostly I go around pretty happy.

6. When the firefighters ask for donations I always give. I think I'll be doing this for life after what they did for all of the other state workers last year.

7. We launched rockets and played in the sand today. Welcome back, spring!

Transitive Property

Logic begins to develop:

Kids: Are trees taller than people?
Me: Yes, usually.
Milo: And skyscrapers are taller than trees. Are skyscrapers taller than trees?
Me: For the most part, yes, skyscrapers are taller than trees.
Nora: So that means skyscrapers are taller than people!