Light and Momentary

This should be my last online class for a while.

Have I told you that I am teaching a summer class? It is the smallest class I have ever taught, which is good, but it is also very different from the classes I am used to teaching. I have two types of students with widely divergent levels of background knowledge, and I am trying to challenge the more experienced students without overwhelming the less knowledgeable students. And I am teaching it asynchronously, which means that it's harder to change direction. By the time I got most of their feedback on week 1, I was well into prepping the content for week 3. 

One of my students wants me to provide significantly more detail on a highly specialized content area, and I am trying to figure out how to respond. The short answer is no. I am going to teach one class, not 1.25 classes, and I am finding it complicated enough to create one set of content in these circumstances. I've asked a colleague if she might have a recorded lecture to share, since she has also taught this material in the summer semester to more homogenous groups of students. Maybe that will be an easy fix.

I'll be diplomatic when I talk to the student tomorrow; I have some alternate strategies she could consider to learn the material independently if my colleague doesn't have materials to share. Summer classes always feel like a lot. At least they're over quickly.

Do not be anxious about anything

So you guys, I am stressed out about a bunch of small-potatoes stuff at the moment and I can't shake it off. I am going to tell you about it instead, and maybe you will be able to help me figure it out or at least commiserate.

Back in the winter my sister-in-law told me to put June 26 on my calendar because there was going to be an 80th birthday party for my FIL. No problem! We had nothing, literally zero things, on our summer calendar.

Except-- in April I put a thing on my summer calendar. A triathlon, in a small town almost 3 hours away from my in-laws' house. In an entire summer full of Saturdays, it was scheduled for the same Saturday as the birthday party. (Is anyone else finding that your calendar management skills are just not the same post-COVID? I imagine my lost calendar skills lying around here somewhere, buried in a heap of 2020 detritus.)

Anyway, whoops, bad planning. But probably salvageable, right? Early morning sprint triathlon, mid-morning lightning-fast shower, midday drive to the in-laws' house in time for an afternoon gathering. Busy but doable.

Except-- the afternoon gathering scooted back a little earlier, and the triathlon scooted forward. This race has a 7:00 start time, but I am not scheduled to get into the water until almost 9:30. 

And also-- the current forecast for Saturday is "strong morning thunderstorms." Or that's what Accuweather says, at any rate. Weather.com is calling for scattered thunderstorms. Does this mean (more) delay? Cancellation? Who can say?

In other circumstances I might just bail on the triathlon, but one of my good friends is driving some distance to do it with me. I don't want to bail on her.

I have often thought that weather offers an excellent opportunity to cultivate an eternal perspective. It is the epitome of a short-term frustration: no matter how annoying it may be in the moment, it is guaranteed to be a temporary flavor of annoying. No matter how much you fret about it, you change nothing. Unpleasant weather forecasts, then, offer us a chance to grow in tranquillity.

OH PAST SELF, you can be awfully idealistic sometimes.

I guess my magic-wand outcome is that (a) the foster dog gets adopted quickly so we don't have to worry about transferring him to a different foster home over the weekend, (b) my friend and her husband come down for a pleasant chatty dinner on Friday night, (c) the weather forecast shows a clear belt of storms moving toward Triathlon Town when we wake up early on Saturday morning, so (d) they cancel the tri and give us vouchers for next year's race and (e) we go out for pancakes instead. And then (f) we can leave in plenty of time for the birthday party once the storms have passed through.

Alas, I do not have a very effective magic wand -- more like a Wishful Thinking Stick. Is there a patron saint of weather? Probably there are only patron saints of "don't worry about the weather! cultivate an eternal perspective instead!"

Joe's Personal Training Tips

I just finished my fifth week of weight workouts with Joe, and it's been pretty fun. He's always been a kid who dives deeply into whatever his current interest might be, and he's been focused intensely on learning about weight-training for a couple of years now. He has been extraordinarily patient and encouraging as I've been figuring out a beginner routine, and in this post I am going to share some of his thoughts with you.

If you were to google "weight training women over 50," you would get a lot of articles dotted with pictures of gray-haired ladies smiling as they heft 5-pound dumbbells. Joe rolls his eyes at those articles. He says 5-pound dumbbells are going to get you exactly nowhere. He says it's more fun to move heavy things, and more valuable to lead with compound movements rather than emphasizing work on isolated muscles. And he also says you haven't really worked out if you haven't made some gruesome faces while trying to do something that feels a little too hard. If you're smiling, he would say, you need a bigger dumbbell.

Here is my current split, designed especially for a somewhat fearful and injury-prone middle-aged lady:

Day 1
Assisted pull-ups, 4 sets of 6
Bench press, 3 sets of 6-12
Squats, 3 sets of 6-12
Bicep curl/French press superset, 3 sets of 10-15

I want to be able to do a pull-up. I was pretty close to hitting this goal last summer when a repetitive strain injury intervened, but I have mostly stopped knitting this summer and it seems to be working fine. So far. Joe has me doing the highest volume on assisted pull-ups because that's the outcome I'm focused on. I am throwing in a little extra volume with 50 pounds offset (sets of 7, not 6), and adding a few panting ugly pull-ups with 30 pounds offset. This was the week when something clicked, and my arms and back were like, "Oh, you want us to move like this? Can do." It felt pretty cool.

Day 2
Romanian deadlifts, 3 sets of 6-12
Lat pulldowns, 3 sets of 6-12
Shoulder press, 3 sets of 6-12
Pteranodon swoops, 3 sets of 10-15

Lat pulldowns also target the pull-up goal. Romanian deadlifts have been the hardest exercise in terms of form, but I am persevering. Joe is telling me I should also try conventional deadlifts, but I keep telling him I'll try them later. At the student fitness center, the staff will complain about deadlifts that are too loud, and I feel a little too uncertain about lifting weights to take a rebuke in stride.

Most people say "lateral raises" instead of "pteranodon swoops." But I need something to amuse myself by that point in the workout, so I imagine myself coasting through a primordial forest instead of wilting on the gym floor.

Day 3
Assisted pull-ups, 4 sets of 6
Bench press, 3 sets of 6-12
Calf raises, 3 sets of 10-15
Rear delt flies, 3 sets of 10-15

Joe encourages me to alternate between barbell and dumbbell bench press, but dumbbell bench press feels scary to me. "You are not going to drop the weights on your face," Joe says in a deliberately patient voice. But...I am not convinced about this.

Things I did not know a month ago:

1. The order matters. Lead with the compound movements so you can get the most out of them.
2. Encouragement matters. Yesterday I went by myself because Joe was playing board games. I benched 65 pounds for 6, and I knew, I absolutely knew, that if Joe were there saying, "C'mon, drive!" I could have squeaked out another one or maybe even 2. But the Joe-in-my-head voice is not as powerful as the Joe-at-my-elbow voice.
3. Newbie gains are a thing -- a fun and motivating thing. When I started, I could do two sets of pull-ups with 70 pounds offset before I had to switch to offsetting 90 pounds. There's a sign near the assisted pull-up machine that says "One day the thing that feels hard for you today will be your warmup." And who knows, it might even be true.

City on a Hill

Early in the morning on April 12, 1992, I had a dream. I was walking with a group of friends on the edge of an enormous canyon. It was filled with impenetrable clouds, but I knew that the walls plunged down for thousands of feet through dangerous and unknown terrain. On the far side of the canyon, though, far away on higher ground, I saw a city.

I cannot describe it to you. I can tell you that its walls gleamed in pale blue and purple. I can tell you that its banners waved in jubilation above its walls. But I cannot convey its beauty to you. I could not convey its beauty to the companions who walked beside me in my dream, and they did not understand why I fell to my knees there on the edge of the canyon and wept in awe. Almost 30 years later the memory of that triumphant city, the most captivating place I had ever seen, still moves me to tears.

Six days later I entered the Catholic Church. I believe that she offers me the truest path to the beautiful city and the deepest union with Our Lord on this side of the divide. 

But I have to say, her bishops in the US are not making her seem very attractive just now.

I think if you asked a dozen American adults with no religious affiliation about the Church's top priorities, most of them they would say something about passing laws against abortion, and maybe something about controlling people's decisions. This would be a terrible distortion of the global Church's actual priorities, and it would also be completely unsurprising.

The Church is meant to be a refuge, a home, a hospital, a feasting hall. I am Catholic because the Church offers me the opportunity to encounter God. I can meet the Lord in reconciliation and be set free from sin. I can receive him -- the fullness of his mysterious Self, the Word full of grace and truth -- in the Eucharist. I can steep myself in Scripture with a community of believers around the world. I can grow in wisdom and grace as I yield myself each day to the voice of the Holy Spirit. The mission of the Church is true human flourishing: abundant life in the present and the future, and liberation from the errors of our past.

I don't know if any of that is visible to our hypothetical unaffiliated American adults. But isn't that the work that should be making the news?

Last week our new associate pastor introduced himself. He spoke simply and humbly about wanting to do four things while he is here: to know us, to be known by us, to love us, and to serve us. It sounded so right, this resolve to foster deep connections and to strengthen the parish community in our mutual love of the Lord. This morning I was reading 1 Corinthians 15, in which St. Paul writes about his preeminent priority (I note some divergence from the preeminent priority of the USCCB): Christ crucified and risen.

You already know that I accept the fullness of the teaching of the Catholic Church; you know that I have struggled with practical questions about who should and should not receive the Eucharist. Obviously I'm not suggesting that we should treat the Eucharist like a snack to be dispensed to fractious toddlers demanding their turn. But I am struggling with the asymmetry of the bishops' responses to different types of deliberate harm to gestating babies, and different types of offenses against the culture of life. And I'm thinking they could take a cue from St. Paul: more of Jesus, less of the culture wars.

Dogs + sleep, a bad combination

I never sleep well when we have a foster dog. I am always acutely aware that there is another living creature in my house for whom I am responsible. No matter how quiet the kids may try to be if they're on overnight duty, the minute I hear a bit of dog noise I am AWAKE AWAKE AWAKE. 

Before I had kids I worried that they would need me in the night and I would sleep through it. I used to be such a heavy sleeper. And now I seem to have permanent mom-ears. The click of a dog's toenail on the floor is enough to send me SPROINGING into the new day.

I assume at some point I would get used to this, if we were to adopt a permanent dog. Mickey has been a little more wakeful at night than most of our other foster dogs. If he's sleeping upstairs, where it's hotter, he wants to get a drink toward morning and then go back to sleep. I don't know if it has to do with being 50 or if I have somehow broken something in my brain, but I can't really go back to sleep these days. I hear him come downstairs and it's as if a bugle chorus, a hundred members strong, just played reveille in my bedroom.

Nobody would own a dog if this were a permanent state of affairs, right? How long does it take to go away? Our longest foster stays were 3.5 weeks, and that wasn't long enough for my brain to settle down.

Cooper again

Do you remember, Cooper, the Chihuahua mix who bit me without warning and then decided I was his arch-enemy? Cooper was adopted by a childless couple with lots of Chihuahua experience, and all was rosy at first. Well, it was rosy except when he bit the person cleaning their house. 

This afternoon we took Mickey to the shelter so the vet could check him out and clear him for adoption. I overheard someone in the hallway talking about Cooper's place in the vet schedule. "Oh, no," I said, "does that mean Cooper's adoption didn't work out?" "Yep," said the foster coordinator grimly.

I suspect there is a story behind that grim "yep," but things were chaotic enough that I didn't ask her for details.

This shelter is really dedicated to keeping animals alive, to rehabilitating difficult pets and offering second chances to animals with behavior problems. But Cooper is going to be tough to rehabilitate, it seems to me. And there's a line somewhere, right? How many humans can a dog bite before he runs out of second chances?

I don't make those decisions. But I assure you I did not volunteer to foster Cooper this time around.

I have a dog etiquette question

I did not know until today that a vocal subset of the population considers it rude for people walking dogs to allow the dogs to pee on other people's lawns. 

I posted in the spring about the differences in the ways that people approached dog ownership in my childhood versus now. In a world where dogs roam around off leash, of course they pee on lawns. I am perfectly happy, 100% happy, to ensure that any poop belonging to a dog for which I am responsible is picked up promptly. But I had no idea that it was considered unneighborly to let a dog mark a neighbor's tree or shrub.

What say you, internet friends? Is this a small segment of fussy people with carefully manicured lawns? Or have I been oblivious to a rule I should have known about already?

Nine days

Alex, whom I have not seen in the flesh since December 2019, is coming home a week from Thursday. I can’t wait to see him. 

Strawberry-rhubarb crumble

If you happen to have rhubarb awaiting your ministrations, I can recommend this strawberry-rhubarb crumble recipe. I dialed back the sugar and swapped in some rolled oats for part of the flour. Easy, popular, tastes like June.

Sometimes blogging is good for you

Tonight one of my kids got injured in a bloody and distressing way, and in the moment I shifted into Uber-Calm Mom mode. After about 15 minutes it became clear that things were going to be okay, and the kid perked up considerably. But I did the thing I often do: after the need for a gentle calm soothing presence abates, I feel a powerful need to howl. I feel jittery and distressed in a way that is hard to shake off.

I DO NOT LIKE IT when people I love get hurt, I would like to say. NO MORE INJURIES for ANY of my children EVER, I would like to say.

This time I said to myself, "...wait a minute. Weren't we just blogging about this very phenomenon, self?" And lo, a similar thing happened on the 27th of April, when a bird pooped in Stella's eye. "Focus on the good outcome," I told myself. "Do not envision the might-have-been scenarios."

I am really good at thinking up might-have-been scenarios. But maybe that particular light needs to go hide under a bushel. Here I go, focusing on the good outcome instead.

You do this too sometimes, right? Tell me you do this too.