Light and Momentary

Apples Galore

We went apple-picking over the weekend and came home with a peck of tasty local apples. Elwood has been making a delicious salad of grated apple and raw beet with a honey-lemon vinaigrette and toasted walnuts, and he also made an apple-fennel salad that caused me so much happiness I thought I might levitate above my chair. 

Tonight Pete asked if I'd help him make an apple upside-down cake, so I went back to this recipe that I shared last year.

Our apples are very juicy. This makes sense to me, the idea that store-bought apples might have lost moisture during their time in transit and on shelves, but I didn't put it together until after the apples went into the hot spiced butter and started throwing off a bunch of liquid. Even though we cooked it down for a while, we still had more syrup than planned and a damp cake as a result. I think if I were to make that recipe again with local apples, I might toss them in a baggie of flour first, as if I were making an apple crisp.

The cake was really delicious but not beautiful, because the syrupy apples stuck to the skillet and needed to be coaxed onto the former-bottom-now-top of our cake. But you know, if you have to choose between delicious and beautiful, delicious is the one you want.

Another Tuesday, another high-body-count novel release

I've been looking forward to the 27th of September, you guys, because it is release day for the third book in the Scholomance series. I always enjoy Naomi Novik's writing, and the second book ended with an almost unforgivable cliffhanger. In contrast to last Tuesday's Kindle notification, which took me by surprise (wait, I pre-ordered that book?), this one was in big purple letters on my mental calendar of Fun Things To Anticipate Cheerfully.

Cheerful is perhaps a weird state of mind in which to approach the Scholomance books, because there is a fair amount of gory death in them. Cheerful is exactly where I find myself, though, pajama-ed and ready to hop into bed with my Kindle.

It took me a couple of chapters to get into the first Scholomance book despite my fondness for Naomi Novik's other books, so if you jump in and find it off-putting, give it a little time. I think Mrs. Darwin posted recently about disliking the second book, so they're not for everybody. But if you tend to enjoy books with prickly female characters figuring out where they're heading, you might like El and her friends.

Murder most jolly

Past Jamie pre-ordered the third book in the Thursday Murder Club series, and Present Jamie had a moment of annoyance when the Kindle delivery notification came in today. It feels a little extravagant to pay $15 for a Kindle book instead of hopping into the library queue. There are a few authors whose books I always buy on release day, but the list is short and they are all women. I was a little surprised that I had clicked the pre-order button.

But then I started reading it at the optometrist's office, and I was laughing out loud from the first chapter. 

This week I am feeling the difference between teaching 100- and 200-level students and teaching 300- and 400-level students. It's not totally out of the question that a grad student would email me on a Friday evening and say, "Hey, I forgot to take quiz before the deadline and I need you to open it back up for me so I can do it tomorrow [i.e., Saturday -- I bet you told your professors all the time about the things they needed to do for you on a Saturday, right?]." But if that were ever to happen, the grad student and I would be having a capital-C Conversation about professionalism. With the first- and second-year students it's a different set of expectations. 

This week I am giving two exams and a substantial quiz, which might not have been optimal planning on my part. It means that I have three sets of students in various stages of stressed-out-ness, and the less experienced ones have a lot of thoughts for me about how I could make their lives easier. "You're not even making us a study guide," said one unhappy student today. Which is true: I am not. 

I got so much email today -- so much vexing email, specifically -- that I did not finish my afternoon tasks before I needed to pick up Stella and take her to the optometrist. And I thought about pulling out my laptop to hack and slash a little further through the pile, but I did not know how long we would be sitting there. I decided instead to read my book, and it was so much fun that I forgot how grumpy I was. That, my friends, is a RINGING endorsement.

The characters are so delightful. I love them all. The narrative voice is a riot. The plots of the first two strained credulity at times, but here at the home of the AMDRALs we do not mind a wee bit of implausibility in our plots. Will #3 be as pleasant as #1 and #2? (Maybe pleasant is a strange descriptor for books that are in fact about murder.) I do not know, but it's off to a great start. I am going to put my pajamas on, even though it is still very early, and read in bed. I might even skip my nightly Trollope chapter so I can read more of The Bullet That Missed.

OOOOHHH, say all the people who read this blog, who could ask for a more enthusiastic recommendation than THAT?

The exercise habit, take #756,321

Last week I sat myself down and said, "Okay, self, what does a sustainable exercise habit look like during the semester?" It feels like there are a lot of things to juggle, you know? But this is what I am testing out for now:

1. I am trying a 3-month subscription to Meg Gallagher's Strong Strong Friends program. So far I am digging it. It's a good level of hard, it's teaching me new things in a way that feels 95% manageable, and it's moving me out of the lifting rut in which I had languished for a while. I'm aiming to lift in the basement on Tuesdays, at the gym on Thursdays, and some combination thereof on the weekends.
2. I am going to aim low with running this fall and see how it feels. It is better to run/walk for 20 minutes than to wish I could run for a sustained 45 minutes. If I am run-walking for 20 minutes on a regular basis, it will move me in the direction of 45-minute runs more effectively than any amount of wishful thinking. I am going to try it while the weather and the daylight allow: MWF, out the door at 7am for a low-stakes run.
3. I am also going to add in a little bit of anti-perfectionist yoga. Does it matter that I am less flexible than I used to be? No, it does not. Does it matter that my mind wanders during yoga? No, it does not. Is it a good idea to stretch out my hips and hamstrings and feet if I am going to be running regularly? Heck, yeah, it is. So I am going to add in a wee tiny smidge of yoga in the evenings on the days when I run. A little pigeon pose, a little forward fold, a little up dog. [you say: "what's up dog?" I say: "not much, what's up with you?"]

Back in the winter when I read Younger Next Year for Women it was so persuasive that I was sure I would be exercising 45 minutes per day, 6 days per week forevermore. It is the sensible thing to do; I am a sensible person. The end!

I hope that I am a sensible person, at any rate, but I am also a person with a bunch of stuff on her plate. I'll give it a whirl. It feels optimistic but not bonkers-optimistic. I will report back on the actual state of the bonkers-ometer in a couple of weeks.

13% of #13, or In Bed With Trollope

I have read thirteen of the 100 chapters in The Way We Live Now, which is my thirteenth Trollope novel. 

I think, though I am not fully committed to the idea, that the novels of Trollope will be my next long-haul reading project. It's just -- phew, that man wrote a lot of novels. He wrote f-o-r-t-y-s-e-v-e-n novels. FORTY-SEVEN. This is a lot of reading and I am already 52 years old. That's, like, the equivalent of three Dickens projects. It's a lot.

Even so, I am going to take a stab at it and see if it brings me joy. I've told you before about how much I enjoy his voice-- he had clearly been thinking for a long time about what makes people tick, and why they do the goofy things they do. The Way We Live Now involves some of the same characters and places I already know from the Palliser Chronicles, and that appeals to me as well. I do NOT love Mr. Melmotte. Have I read somewhere else that he is going to be exposed as a shameless fraud? Or is he just enough like Mr. Merdle from Little Dorrit that I know he's like a nineteenth-century Bernie Madoff? Or maybe I don't actually know that, and he is going to turn out to be a perfectly reputable businessman. I would be preeeetty surprised if that were the case, but life is full of unexpected happenings.

I am finding that it works well for me to read a chapter a night in bed. Reading faster-paced books in bed sometimes keeps me awake longer than is good for me, but Trollope is a very pleasant way to end the day: interesting but never heart-stopping, amusing but not hilarious. I never wake my husband up snort-laughing because I am reading Trollope, but his books often make me smile.

I am not making him sound particularly compelling, am I? If I were trying to start a Trollope club I'd have to rethink my approach entirely. Maybe I'd post some Instagram pictures of me making serious and interested faces at a Trollope novel while reading it over my açai bowl. Maybe I'd make a reel highlighting the funniest parts, except I'd have to learn how to make a reel first. I am pretty sure #Trollope is not going to be making the rounds among the hashtagging mom-fluencers, but luckily this has never been a mom-fluencer kind of blog. 

You will just have to imagine me in my pajamas, smiling and nodding and then nodding off. Probably not the next big TikTok trend, but maybe, if you're looking for a way to ease into both sleep and Victorian literature, you would enjoy it too.

Meteorological Solipsism

I have often observed that weather provides me with daily opportunities to cultivate serenity. It is the finest example of a short-term flavor of inconvenience and uncertainty. Weather is temporary, whatever kind of weather it may be. It is silly for me to grumble about it, silly for me to fret about it. No matter how much mental energy I dedicate to it, I cannot control it. Whatever it may be like today, it will be different in a few days' time.

"Take the long view," I tell myself. "Cultivate an eternal perspective." And yet my inner Serenitometer often looks something like this: 

When I'm in the middle of a particular kind of weather I have trouble imagining anything different. My most memorable example of this shortsightedness comes from the fall of 1998, when I was packing up our Midwestern rental house to move to Scotland for two years.

I knew that the weather was going to be chilly and rainy in Scotland. I had seen the forecast: 55 and gray. But it was almost 40 degrees hotter in our part of the Midwest, and I couldn't get my mind around the contrast. I packed shorts and T-shirts in my luggage, and sent most of my warmer clothes by sea -- a decision I regretted deeply once we arrived. As I shivered in our Edinburgh rental house, I wrote a letter to US friends about my attack of meteorological solipsism. I'm still like that, almost a quarter-century later: my weather is THE weather, the only weather, world without end amen.

Today was the coolest day we've had in months. BRRRR, I said to myself, this does not seem right! BRRRR, I said to myself, it feels too cold to walk home. 

This is objectively ridiculous; in April in these parts we all treat a 65-degree day as an invitation to race outside in short sleeves. You'll be relieved to hear that I did not suffer any frostbite while walking home.

But it reminds me of the way that I always perceive changes in context: my reaction to the things that come my way tomorrow will be shaped by the things that came my way last week and last month. It reminds me to practice being adaptable. Maybe one of these days the weather will even teach me to be more serene. Maybe.

A version of normal

All through the early months of the pandemic I kept a running list of the things I missed at church. With the goal of reducing transmission risk, we stopped singing the Gloria and we switched to the Apostles' Creed, because it's shorter. There was that whole THING about how Catholics were going to receive communion, and I kept trying to put a brave face on it-- to recognize that my preferences are only preferences, and that protecting the vulnerable is always more important than an individual's preferences, and that people who were really emphatic about their preferences still deserved patience and a listening ear from me.

I don't think I ever put it all together in one post, though I wrote about some of it in this post from July 2020. In a world where a million Americans had died or were dying or were soon to die of COVID, it was a teeny little minor trivial thing to miss the Nicene Creed. But I did miss it. 

Today the five of us who are in town this weekend went to church together, and it felt pretty...normal. We sang the Gloria. We said the Nicene Creed: light from light, true God from true God. When I went up to receive communion I knelt down, bare-faced, before my bare-faced pastor, exactly the way I was longing to do it in that old post. Despite the COVID notices that keep plopping into my email inbox at work, the community rate is low and -- for the moment, at any rate -- we are living a cautious grateful approximation of normal.

I am noticing two things lately as we tiptoe back toward something like normal: one is that I remember the shutdown weeks differently in hindsight. I felt so much fear and uncertainty at the time, but in my memories those days are...cozy? almost, weirdly, nostalgia-inducing? Pete says he feels the same way but it still seems odd to me. I guess it's a little like being nostalgic when I see toddler pictures: the hard parts have mostly faded out of my memory, even though I know it was a hard season.

The second thing I am noticing is that my name-retrieval skills are rusty after more than two years of deliberately attending the least crowded Masses. It's great to see people again, and also a little awkward to fumble for names I haven't used in many months. It's interesting to see what my brain spits out as it's trying to get to an actual name-- little nuggets about how the name isn't spelled the way it sounds, or possible alternate names with phonological similarities to the name that has gone walkabout.

Are you noticing this too? Tell me it's not post-COVID brain damage, okay?

Big Kid Switcheroo and Facts in Five

This weekend Joe asked if he could come home and Marie told us she wanted to visit friends in Mathlyville for the weekend. Elwood and I were talking about which one of us should make the drive, when I said, "...wait a minute! What if Marie drives to Mathlyville and gives Joe the car key so he can drive home, and then they do the same thing in reverse on Sunday?" So far so good: less driving for us, no need for bus tickets. It's always a treat to see Joe and I hope Marie is having a grand time with friends.

Tonight we played Facts in Five, a fun and portable game that our younger kids didn't know about. Elwood and I used to play it regularly years ago, but the thing about having kids across a bunch of years is that some things come and go. If you've never played Facts in Five, perhaps you could use another fun and portable game in your arsenal.

Make a grid, five squares by five squares. Across the tops of the columns, write the name of a category. We have the boxed version, but you can draw your own grids on notebook paper and invent your own categories. Composers, English nouns containing 11-15 letters, philosophers, religious figures, female painters, African countries, you name it. Be careful about choosing something that's too far inside your own wheelhouse, because it might come back to bite you. My family wouldn't override me if I said we would have a "yarn brands" category, but they would remember it and I might have cause to regret it the next time we chose categories. Down the left side, write five letters. If you have the boxed version of the game, you flip over little tiles to tell you which letters to use. If you're winging it, one person picks a five-letter word (preferably not "eerie"). Fill in as many boxes as you can before your five-minute timer goes off.

Here's an example from our last round:

(Maybe it wasn't quite fair to use Emily Erwin Strayer, since she performs under her married name these days. But come on -- Q and E in the same round?! No, thank you.)

A thing to keep in mind is that you take the number of boxes you fill in successfully and square it for each row and each column. When you go to score your responses, you'll get more bang for your buck if you focus on filling in a row or a column more completely, rather than adding something to a blank zone. The difference between 4 and 5 boxes filled in a single row or column is much more important than the difference between 0 and 1, even though it's a little demoralizing to have a category in which you have nothing written down. Scores will vary hugely with category and letter choices. This was a high-scoring round; many are not.

Give it a whirl and tell me how you like it!

Friday Mishmash

Do you remember that I am teaching a class this semester that I last taught in spring 2015? On Tuesday I was teaching them about the skeletal framework for respiration, and I came across a quote from 12yo Joe in my notes. He said, “Why do we have bones?” and then answered his own question. “Otherwise," he went on, "we’d be like giant slugs and our enemies could just nudge us into a ravine and eat us at leisure.”

You guys, that cracks me up every dang time I read it. I find it totally hilarious. So since we were talking about bony frameworks, I shared it with my students -- some of whom were, shall we say, nonplussed. "Is that supposed to be funny?" one of them whispered to another. Answer: YES, emphatically YES.

Earlier this week I was looking for an old post, this sweet and wistful one about my great-aunt-in-law's books. But I thought it was from December, not February, and when I was skimming through December archives I reread this post about my first conversation with Nate the Exterminator. I remembered that I had assured him only celibate mice were allowed on my property, but I had totally forgotten the Edna Mode moment and the anti-rat perimeter. Gotta say, in hindsight it seems like that miiiiight have been one of the weirder conversations Nate had that day.

But hey, it had been weeks, at that point, of trying unsuccessfully to figure out what was skritching in the wall NEXT TO MY HEAD in the wee hours, so maybe I will cut my sleep-deprived past self some slack.

Work is a lot but it's good. I feel better about every single aspect of my job when I am writing every day. Also, as a direct result of writing every day, I have three papers under review at the moment. GO ME!

How about you? What's new with you?

Meetings are not my favorite

I used to have a fantastic boss, but she retired right after she got three junior faculty, including me, through the tenure process three years ago. (She stuck around for an extra year specifically so we would have an experienced chair at the helm. She was the best.) We had a succession of interim chairs, and this year for the first time we have a chair who is expected to stay for a while.

"You have a lot of meetings here," he said in our monthly department meeting this week. Reader, he was not wrong.

Over the interregnum our meeting norms have shifted. I would guess that it's partly because of our previous chair's departure, partly because of COVID and the Zoom meetings it begat, and partly because of shifts in societal norms, but to my eye our meetings have gone off the rails. It used to be that only one person would have a laptop open; now it is three-quarters of the people in attendance. Only one of those people is in charge of the minutes. Perhaps at any given time one or two of the other people is looking up useful information on a laptop. Mostly people are poking around in their email. People's phones are constantly making noise; this week it sounded like someone's YouTube video started playing unexpectedly before it was paused.

There is also a degree of drift that never used to exist. People step out, they disappear for a while, they wander back in. And it's not that I want people to feel that they can't attend to their physical needs. It's just-- this is a dumb way to have a meeting. If there is actually a need to gather 25 people for 90 minutes, then that represents a significant cost to the department. Let's use the time well. Let's be all there if we have to be there. If only half of my brain is at the meeting, is it really worth my time to be there?

Let's tell the people who tend to go on and on that they should be concise. If the agenda is not worth paying attention to, let's revise the agenda. Let's not keep a meeting on the schedule because we've always had this meeting on the schedule. And OH how I would love to see a moratorium on scheduling meetings in the day's most productive writing window.

Are you also seeing post-COVID shifts in meeting behavior? Have you ever had any luck telling That Person that s/he has said quite enough already, thanks and be quiet now? What might happen if I just...opted out? Some days a person wonders about these things.