I needed this so much!
Pic: Early morning hike with L and T in Baker Woods. Lots of trees have come down in the last couple of days--it has been very windy.
I needed this so much!
Pic: Early morning hike with L and T in Baker Woods. Lots of trees have come down in the last couple of days--it has been very windy.
1. Happy Lunar New Year! At a New Year celebration lunch this afternoon, EM told me we're supposed to rest today and do a minimal amount of work tomorrow. I can do that!
2. The kids got little red envelopes of cash. I'm so touched when work friends and family friends treat my nearly grown-ass kids like their own niblings.
3. I got a nice ramble with L in Baker Woods today. It has been weeks since I hiked with L--She said she missed me, and I asked if it was my silliness she missed. "I missed all of it, Maya." She said diplomatically (and lovingly!).
4. I got a long walk with Big A--it was grey and windy, but we did a "Super Sparty" and it felt nice to be able to stretch my legs after sitting at my desk all week.
5. At came to dinner tonight so I gave the kids their Valentine's Day presents a bit early. When will they be too old to get V-Day presents from me? I hope never.
6. In a first for us--we're now mooching off At. They subscribed to the Criterion Channel and logged us in on the big TV so we can watch it too. I like all of it.
7. Pic: The Red Cedar is kinda plain today. But the mallards are enjoying it and so are we.
Pic: Finally, I get to take a picture from the bank of the Maple River.
Home!
Reunited with my human kids, puppy kids, and plants!
I demolished a large bag of Culver's fries on the way home and demolished all my remaining grading after I got home.
Big A's doc gave us a hopeful update and now we wait for the actual results. Oh, the things I take for granted when I make plans and resolutions...
Pic: (anti-clockwise) Max, Huckie, At, and Nu. I missed these sweet loves and my zillion plants in the tea garden.
We made it back to Michigan! Haven't seen the kids yet as I'm currently in the hospital waiting room while Big A has his exploratory procedures. I hope to see Big A's doc in a couple of hours for some answers/counsel.
Big A was asked not eat anything for 36 hours, so I've been fasting alongside him in solidarity. We're totally going to demolish a brunch on our way back home.
Pic: From yesterday--we're kind of wearing matching shirts! Out on the balcony of our hotel room with the brilliant azure sea and the El Arco rocks in the background. (I'm wearing my heavy winter jacket in the hospital's waiting room today.)Back home (in Michigan) I have two bougainvillea plants I got at the specialty nursery, and one manages to put out a few blooms in the summer and the other one is dormant (or dead :/).
So it always surprises me when I'm in tropical climes and they seem to be growing untended the way they did in my childhood. (Especially if it's in the U.S.--they do that in California, Hawaii, and Florida AFAIK.)
In Cabo, they seemed to be using bougainvillea as hedges and cropping them pretty closely, but nothing could keep these plants from showing off a little bit.
Pic: A Bougainvillea hedge. I took this as a reminder that we're on the cusp of Spring, and soon we'll be awash in scent and color. I took a long Boss Day walk by myself this morning to say goodbye.
#LaterPost
I can feel my blues lifting...
I found six tiny sea shells--one for each person in our family... And they might be the only tangible keepsakes I bring back.
Pic: The view from our first hotel.
#LaterPost
Big A's big medical appointment is next week, and we hope to find out what's going on/why he's losing weight/what to expect in the future/what we can do/etc. We have more questions than the minutes the expert will spend with us, probably.
But in the meantime, we're going to take off for sunny climes for a few days to just... I don't exactly know what... Was it Seneca who said we can change the sky above us but not ourselves? So I guess our worries will come with us, but we'll be worrying under warmer skies?
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the next few days of our tiny break and will catch up with some picture posts when we're back.
Pic: It snowed in the night, and was a picture-perfect winter wonderland as I headed to work this morning.
I turned in my CASA report today ahead of my deadline. (I feel like a true grownup for not waiting until the last minute.)
The kids in this particular case are very young and also extra affectionate and it's truly a delight to be around them. I couldn't meet the kids during the day because we were hosting a campus visit for one of our Writing Center Director candidates, so I met the kids at their therapist's this evening. While I was getting an update from their therapist, the eight-year-old and then the five-year-old came up to tell us that we looked "just like sisters."
It made both of us chuckle because their therapist is a very white lady with short hair and we look nothing alike. And then the kids looked a bit confused we didn't agree. The only thing the therapist and I have in common is that we are both safe adults who show them love and care. I wonder if that made us look "just like sisters" to these little ones who don't have enough safe adults in their lives.
Then that thought depressed me for a while. Kids deserve so much more.
Pic: I was invited to jump this "Ninja" course. I don't think I got it right even after many patient demonstrations.
I kept fiddling with my materials all morning because this was for colleagues and I didn't want to look foolish in front of them... I was in meetings all day, so I didn't get to do a practice run... but... I think the talk went well!
At the pre-event schmooze, drinks in hand, someone sardonically murmured "no pressure" when Pres. A walked into the room. But based on previous experiences, I'd half expected him to be there because he's interested in outreach and rhetoric, so I wasn't fazed.
It was a full house, a very engaged and supportive audience, and afterward, so many (I'm choking up a bit here) came up to give me hugs. I want to remember that I got a lot of hugs and kind compliments. I want to remember that LV said, "What an amazing piece of scholarship. What an amazing human you are." I'm glad I got to share my work, and I'm so grateful to be among good people in this world.
Pic: CP's picture of me mid-talk today. I chuckle every time I look at myself and my mystifying expression. In a way, I'd been preparing for this hour's work for over a year. The only time my voice quavered was when I was talking about Montana Rep. Zooey Zephyr and her supporters chanting "Let Her Speak" as she lifted her microphone toward the gallery.___________________________
Pic: Snow and sky in the backyard this weekend. The last couple of days have been so foggy... I've been white-knuckling it to and from work as visibility is very low, especially in low-lying pockets, and it's easy to imagine shapes where there aren't any and miss objects that only loom up at the last minute.I like the way the kids are using "mid" to describe things that are stuck in the middle to mediocre range. Here's my mid list for today.
* Another day of freezing rain and grey skies... but not quite as cold and there was a fair bit of a thaw too.
* I won't have my car back for five weeks (they have to order a part from Germany)... but they gave me a newer model as a loaner.
* I headed to the gas station for the first time in years (Bluey is all electric). It felt spend-y to fork over 50$ for gas... but I found a lucky penny.
* Last semester, I grandly agreed to give a talk in January 2024... and now it IS January 2024 and my talk is on Friday. Thankfully, I was able to use my writing group time to get some slides done... but it did mean that I didn't get any new writing done.
* I love, love, love teaching... but I'm on two search committees (SIX campus interviews--four more to go), three committees that meet every week for a total of four hours, on deadline for two career reviews, on deadline for recommendation letters for people's grad school applications, on deadline for rewriting our land acknowledgment, making final arrangements for two different guest speakers to visit campus (PBK and Women's History Month), arranging travel for the student honorary convention, vetting papers and programming the WGS portion of the MASAL conference, CASA report due next week... And the list for the next month goes on and on. Each of these things is important and has its own bulleted to-dos, and by itself, each would be something I enjoy doing. But cumulatively, having them all clustered together like this, feels overwhelming. One day at a time, I guess.
Pic: I cropped out guests' faces since I didn't ask people if I could post. But now the focus is on the happy plates (everyone is in the clean-plate club!) from our dinner party on Monday. There were two writers with new books out at the table (Sophfronia Scott and Jan Shoemaker) and I enjoyed introducing them to each other and felt a little bit like I was hosting a salon. Bonus peek of Nu at extreme right. I'm the black blob next to the blue-purple sweater (Big A) at the head of the table. Huck and Max are underfoot.Wow. What a day.
Freezing rain all day, so I moved my classes online and then was committed to sitting with my laptop all day.
I also got into it with the very pro-Hindu nationalist people on my WhatsApp. Hope springs eternal in a teacher's breast I guess. If even one of them stops to reconsider their exclusionary stance, that would be helpful. But I can't do this every day--it's exhausting and draining and makes me question what kind of world I'm living in.
Then Big A woke up grumpy and I pushed back (I mean, he's not a toddler!) and then we fought on text for a bit. Then he "hearted" something I had said in snark and then I felt bad and then the fight was over. Just like that.
My car has been in the repair shop since Monday and they don't know how to fix it--they're waiting on input from the tech team. I was so alarmed by this, that I texted "Is my Bluey [what I call my car] OK?!? ðŸ˜" to the family chat... except I sent it to the repair shop by accident... and they texted back "We should be hearing something today. Bluey has a bit of a boo-boo." And I laugh-cried in embarrassment.
Motaz Azaiza the passionate Gazan journalist has evacuated Gaza. He did such great work, and I'm glad he's safe, and so humbled that he's only 24!
So many of my U.S. friends texted me in a panic about Trump winning the NH primary... but I don't know what to tell them. Is the option really "Genocide Joe?" The lesser of two evils just seems more like the other evil day by day.
And finally: another day of back pain. Whomp-whomp.
Pic: An icy Red Cedar through the railing on the Sparty (not official name, I think) bridge. From my Monday walk.My Twitter and FB feeds are mostly progressive articles and quips, but my WhatsApp (elementary school pals) is chockful of people sharing pictures and claiming they're just celebrating and that it's not at all political. How could anything that caused the deaths of over 2000 innocent people and has led to the current wave of intense and ignorant Hindu fundamentalism be unpolitical? All these (high-caste) Hindu women posting random and adulatory details of the temple! I wonder if our non-Hindu classmates--the Sikh, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Parsi, Periyarist Dalit kids--have already left or are just staying silent.
On the cousins' chat, my cousin very helpfully posted a picture of themselves drinking out of a mug labeled "liberal tears." I was going to say something cutting, but this is a troll move and I'm not responding--anything else would be a reward for them.
Pic: Tagore and "Go Not To the Temple." Friends have been posting a lot of Tagore, and while this is not his best work, I've been resharing it. It would be easy to ignore me, but it's a bit harder to ignore the Nobel-winning author of the Indian national anthem.
My baby uncle, my mom's youngest sister's husband, was named for King Sibi who was willing to sacrifice his life for a dove . As a k...