Light and Momentary

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This image is from the @marzipantzshop Instagram account; her website is here.

In case you missed it, the vice-president of El Salvador told Senator Chris Van Hollen today that the Trump administration is paying them to imprison people deported from the US.

Angry Daffodils

One day in the fall of 2023 I came home from work overflowing with grumpiness. My boss had told me he wanted me to prep a new class and I did not want to teach it. I decided to go to the garden store and get a big bag of daffodil bulbs. It was chilly that evening and the light was fading, but I dug holes in my yard until I felt better. 

Almost all of those daffodils are blooming right now, and they are reminding me that it's usually a good idea to turn frustration into productive action. I could have slumped on the couch that evening, drifting around the internet in search of consolation. But instead I did something that brought me joy last spring, and is bringing me joy this spring, and may very well be bringing me joy in ten years or more.

Note to Fall Jamie: always plant more bulbs. You never regret planting bulbs.

And another note to Future Jamie: you didn’t have to teach that class after all. Dread is always useless. 

Christmas nostalgia in Holy Week

Even though it is almost Easter I am thinking about Christmas this evening. That's because I'm going to tell you about some scraps of paper that I have been keeping since December.

I've posted before about our gift-opening traditions. We open presents in rounds, with breaks in between. The sequence of the rounds is determined by contests, and the nature of the contests is always hotly debated. They used to be tame and ordinary, and then somehow they turned weird. During the polar vortex Christmas we had a contest to see who could hold his/her hand in the snow the longest. One year we competed to see who could stay upright the longest in a one-legged jumping contest on the trampoline. Once we raced to see who could loop around our downstairs the fastest while balancing a couch cushion on their head. 

I started to say "you get the idea," but it might be weirder than you think. 

I proposed a contest in December, and everybody liked the idea. I said, "What if everybody suggests a contest on a slip of paper, and then we each rank the proposed contests? We'll tally the points and open presents in that order." This was the result:

I don't know how readable that will be, and Typepad has not been rendering pictures reliably lately, so I'll describe it for you. Imagine a collection of a dozen Post-it notes, suggesting and ranking a variety of activities. Make anagrams with Scrabble tiles. See who can scream the loudest. My contribution: eat the largest quantity of Sandy's kibble.

It was a joke, you guys. I thought I would read it out loud and everyone would burst out laughing (yes) and then we would be done talking about it (surprisingly, no). One of my children actually ranked it as the best idea of all. "Kibble!" he said, whenever it was time to think of a new contest.

We had the nicest Christmas this year, with all seven of us here and only the seven of us here. I don't know how often we'll have Christmases like that. It's always good to have company and I'm delighted when our kids want to bring their friends and romantic partners home for the holidays. And at the same time I've kept this little pile of Post-it notes since December, thinking nostalgically about our shared traditions and our shared sense of humor.

(Kids, if you're reading this, there are no circumstances in which I will ever eat Sandy's kibble. Nostalgia, yes; kibble, no.)

Favorites

Suzanne asked me which Dickens novel is my favorite, and that is a harder question than you might think. 

When I finished the Dickens novels in 2010, I would have grouped the books like this:

Short, very good	Excellent, long	Good, long	Bleh
Great Expectations Tale of Two Cities Oliver Twist	Pickwick Papers David Copperfield Bleak House	Our Mutual Friend Nicholas Nickleby Little Dorritt Barnaby Rudge	Dombey & Son Martin Chuzzlewit Old Curiosity Shop Hard Times

My ratings have changed over the course of the AMDRALs. I loved Our Mutual Friend the second time around, but the second time through I found the young women in both Bleak House and David Copperfield pretty grating. Much to my surprise, I really enjoyed Martin Chuzzlewit in 2017. 

One of the trends I have observed is that my life circumstances often influence my enjoyment of a Dickens novel. When I went back to Pickwick for the 2018 AMDRAL, I had trouble enjoying it. It's the most playful of the novels, but I was teaching a fully online summer class for the first time and it wasn't going well. I wasn't feeling very playful. 

That's the reason I am very curious to revisit Dombey & Son. I read it for the first time in August/September of 2008, and my plate has rarely been fuller than it was then. I was being investigated by CPS, I was pregnant with my fifth child (and still throwing up in my third trimester), I was drafting the first half of my dissertation in preparation for a fall-semester prelim, and I had an absurdly long list of household tasks I wanted to complete before the baby arrived, like getting a new roof for the garage. Oh! And! in the first part of that window I was still closing out my early intervention caseload!

Not long after I finished Dombey & Son (grumpily, so grumpily), I read an article asserting that Dombey & Son is the Dickens novel most likely to be appreciated by people who think they don't like Dickens novels. At the time, I thought, "Are you kidding me? DOMBEY & SON?!" (I thought I remembered that this was Adam Gopnik writing in the New Yorker, but I can't find it in their archives and Google isn't turning it up elsewhere.) For that specific reason I am very curious about what it will be like to go back to that one -- it seems like an interesting place to land after so many years and so many re-assessments.

If pressed to pick a favorite-- wait, no, I can't pick just one.

Best short novel: Great Expectations
Most fun: Pickwick
Most skillfully crafted: Bleak House
The one I am most likely to pull of the shelf and read a chunk of, just because: Our Mutual Friend

TAMDRAL season approaches

This year will be the Twelfth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, which means that we are nearing the end of the list of Dickens novels. Here's where we've been:

2024 Hard Times
2023 Great Expectations
2022 Nicholas Nickleby
2021 Little Dorrit
2020 Oliver Twist
2019 Tale of Two Cities
2018 Pickwick Papers
2017 Martin Chuzzlewit
2016 David Copperfield
2015 Our Mutual Friend
2014 Bleak House

We have three left: Barnaby Rudge, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Dombey & Son. I think I want to save Dombey & Son for last, and I'm leaning toward Old Curiosity Shoppe for this year and Barnaby Rudge in 2026. Any opinions? We'll start a month from today, after I submit spring semester grades. 

Nous prévoyons un voyage

At the end of last summer I was feeling burned out. I've been on the teaching schedule consistently in recent summers, and summer teaching is intense. The promotion process had made for a stressful year. My run-ins with generative AI-fueled cheating in April and May had been demoralizing. 

As soon as I submitted summer grades I emailed my chair and told him I would not be available to teach in summer 2025. "Maybe," I said to my college roommates, "maybe I'll go to France for a month. Rent a small spare apartment in Nice and walk on the beach every day and never look at my email, not even once."

Alex and I were going to go to France in the summer of 2020 because I was turning 50 that year, but we all know about summer travel plans from 2020. 

Let us hope that summer travel plans for 2025 are more likely to materialize, because as of today we have plane tickets. Elwood and Stella and I will be gone for most of July. Pete, who does not love to travel, will mostly be here in Gladlyville and has agreed to take care of Sandy while we're gone.

Wow! Also eek! But mostly wow!

The reluctant landlady begins eviction proceedings

We've had occasional garter snake sightings at the back door for years now, but I was still not delighted when I came home today to find this guy--

--and his camera-shy friend--

--both basking in the sunshine right in front of my back door.

I texted the picture to the family group chat, and my children were Not Helpful. Pete said, "Friends!" Alex said, "Bring them to Easter and we will play Dodgy Snake with the cousins." (Dodgy Snake is a Boy Scout camp game in which you find a snake and toss it at your friends. Or perhaps at your enemies? We did not play Dodgy Snake at Girl Scout camp and I must say I prefer the orienteering and lanyard-making version of summer camp to the snake-projectile version.)

I had just popped home to eat lunch and let Sandy out, and I had to get back to the office for a meeting with a student. On my way out, the bigger snake was there again, curled up right next to the back door. "I don't think so," I told him, and I grabbed a nearby stick. I scooped him up and flung him into a garden bed. where I found another stick and pitched him still further from the house. (I did not see exactly where he landed. It is possible that I tossed him over the fence and into the neighbors' yard. Perhaps not my most neighborly moment.) 

What do you know about the habits of garter snakes? Is this one likely to slither back to  his sun-warmed spot at the back door, or will he shake himself off and say, "I guess I live in the neighbors' yard now"? I have never seen the snake that used to ease himself in and out of a tiny hole in our foundation since the day that I launched him, croquet-style to meet his destiny. I do hope the back-door snake does not think he lives in the garden bed now, because it is full of lovely baby brunnera and astilbe and new little hosta leaves, and it would be a bummer if I had to set them all on fire.

I have so many snake posts in my archives, you guys. Every link in this post is about a different snake encounter. I never thought I would be a snake blogger but here we are.

Back at it

I hit another bump in the road with lifting motivation. Do you remember that I was aiming to deadlift 200 pounds this spring? I thought I'd just bump up the weight by 5 pounds every couple of weeks, and -- hey presto! -- I'd hit 200 pounds by the end of the semester. For a while I was cruising right along, feeling strong and happy. A month ago I deadlifted 185 pounds for the first time and it felt fantastic.

But I am still finding it difficult sometimes to be a middle-aged woman who lifts. My mom is always worried that I'm going to hurt myself because I'm lifting too much. The guy who coordinates personal training, on the other hand, wanted me to know that a good deadlift would be twice my bodyweight. (This was his reply to me when I told him, enthusiastically, that I had just deadlifted 175 pounds for the first time. Read the room, pal.) Last month I wound up deadlifting next to someone I know from work, and even though he is friendly it felt strange and unpleasant to make scary deadlifting faces next to a guy from the office. (Also my PR is his warmup.) That free personal training session was thoroughly disheartening-- both the assumption beforehand that obviously I would prioritize weight loss, and the annoying gatekeeping vibe of the session itself, as if she had to ensure that I was barbell-ready before any barbells would be making an appearance.

And this part is silly but true: after deadlifting faithfully twice a week and eating my protein and taking my creatine, I noticed some muscle growth. This was the very goal I had been pursuing, one would think, but my raised-in-the-80s brain said OH NO OH NO YOU ARE GETTING LARGER MAKE IT STOP RIGHT NOW.

This was all rattling around in my brain in the presence of the conviction that it shouldn't be so hard to deadlift 200 pounds. Joe and his friends could probably deadlift 200 pounds with a two-finger grip. Casey Johnston sailed past that milestone very early in her lifting career, so it isn't a male-female thing. But deadlifting 185 pounds with good form was absolutely the upper limit of what I could do a month ago. 

All in all, I was feeling discouraged.

But tonight I went back to the gym and I told myself I would deadlift with low expectations. When 155 felt good, I told myself I'd just do one rep at 165, which turned into a set of 4, which turned into a second set of 4. Afterward I looked up age-specific deadlift expectations and discovered that it's normal for women in their mid-50s to find a 200-pound deadlift daunting. Casey Johnston and I are both female, but she started lifting in her 20s. I was so skeptical of that linked table at first that I looked around for other points of view, but the internet seems to agree that most 54-year-old women are going to have to work at it if they want to deadlift 200 pounds.

I have put my scale in the basement for now. Maybe it's best if I don't tell my mother about my interim progress. Even though the end of the semester is always a little bonkers, I am going to keep showing up and doing what I can do. Maybe I will be able to do 190 next week. We'll see.

#27

I finished Trollope novel #27 recently and it was not my favorite.

The MacDermots of Ballycloran was Trollope's first novel. It shows. I read recently that his mother, herself an author, was preeeeetty skeptical about her son's ability to write a novel that anyone would want to read. Ouch! And yet it is true that I had to haul myself forcibly through the first half of the novel.

Trollope lived in Ireland for a while as a young man, and he set several of his books there. In this one he keeps trying to capture the dialect difference in his spellings of the Irish characters' dialogue. Because of my professional background I am the worst possible audience for that. It grated on me the whole way through. It's very difficult, I know, to spell out dialect in a way that's consistent and transparent, and still I was irritated from start to finish by the lack of consistency and transparency. 

To my eye, the narrator seemed to be looking down on the Irish people, gawping at their poverty and blaming it on their laziness and fondness for alcohol. Honestly, I was a little shocked by it at first. Imagine my surprise when I learned that his Irish novels didn't sell well because English audiences thought he was too sympathetic toward the Irish!

The second half of the novel moves more briskly than the first, and it raises interesting if familiar questions. One of the characters finds himself accused of murdering another character. What actions can a man legitimately take to protect his sister? Is true justice possible or is it destined to be corrupted by personal opinions and interests? The thing I might remember most warmly from the book is the decision of the accused man to return from his hiding place after fleeing initially, and face the legal consequences with all the courage he could muster.

One of the central characters is a Catholic priest; he might be the first one I've seen in a Trollope novel. It's also the first time I've seen a Trollope character develop dementia, and I'd say it's skillfully done: the man who was initially just cantankerous and isolated becomes unable to reason and remember, in a way that will probably ring true for readers who have watched a loved one's cognitive decline. 

Twenty-seven down, twenty to go! Next up: Nina Balatka.

Recommended

I finished the second Vera Wong book yesterday and it is even funnier than the first. I kept setting down my Kindle to laugh helplessly.

It probably works better to read them in publication order, since many of the characters from book #1 are back and part of the fun of book #1 is the uncertainty about who deserves sympathy vs. suspicion. 

In both books it's not hard to guess where the plot is going, but that will not deter me from buying the third one whenever it comes out.