Aaaaaand last night I dreamed that they were going to close my graduate alma mater.
(Not the snooty rich SLAC I attended as an undergrad; my graduate alma mater. Which, in case you were curious, is NEVER going to happen, unless they actually close the state.)
Oh, and by the way: can I just skip over Barack Obama and vote directly for Michelle?
And I am kind of bemused that the Olympic commentators keep calling the French swimmer Alain Bernard "a-laine." Um, people, that's NOT how it's pronounced.
Okay, that has nothing to do with anything, but I felt the need to share.
This was one of the most annoying journeys I've ever taken, travel-wise. Thankfully my schedule was flexible - there wasn't anywhere I had to be at any given time. But delays still suck. On my way out to the east coast on Thursday, NYC was apparently hammered with thunderstorms, and since I was flying through NYC (JFK, specifically - wow, is that airport in need of an upgrade), I hit delays, and ended up reaching my mom's place at 2 in the morning. Okay, that's only about 3 hours late, but I think once you hit midnight, every hour feels more like two or three, yes? (I felt worst for the car service people she had picking me up, since she lives 2 hours from Boston and she does not drive into Boston anymore. Actually, she pretty much never did. The guy was nice about it, though). And then of course thunderstorms descended again on Monday, when I was supposed to return, to such grand effect that my flights were canceled. So I took a 2-hour bus ride to Logan, found out that my flights had ceased to be, and couldn't find a single alternative that didn't cost $1100 or have me arriving in, say, Cleveland at 9 pm and departing Cleveland for Current City at 6 am, or both. So I turned around and took the bus back again. And then did it again the next day (yesterday) - and then THAT flight was delayed ~2 hours, and I made it home between 2:30 and 3:00 am.
But I'm here now. Phew!
It was a very mellow weekend. I watched a lot of Olympics and started knitting a very pretty scarf. I've had to rip back a section of the lace like three times, and I seem to have lost two stitches along the way (but I cast on two extra by mistake, so I guess that's okay), but it's starting actually to look like lace. Unfortunately, I picked a pretty multi-colored yarn (this, in Sinbad the Sailor) - I bought the yarn before I'd decided what to make, so thought I might just make a plain scarf - and the colors of the yarn kind of hide the lacy pattern of the knitting. (I like the way solid-colored things look once they're done, but when I'm in the yarn store, I get completely sucked in by pretty, shiny multi-colored stuff.) Oh, well, if I like it when it's done, maybe I'll make a second one in a solid color - there's a lovely little yarn store mere blocks from me that I haven't dared explore yet....
The weather was fairly gray and dreary most of the weekend - the kind of New England summer weather I actually sort of miss, sometimes - and there were a few moments when it felt like fall already. And right before I left Current City, a cool front came through and the temperature dropped about 10-15 degrees, which made it all too clear that fall is right around the corner. And in case that wasn't clear before, it was when I finished buying my school books this morning.
My most recent fall crisis was yesterday, when I called up my favored hair salon to find out that they're closed this week for remodeling, and while I could get an appointment before classes start, I couldn't get one until after orientation. Can I tell you how distressing this was, the idea of showing up at orientation un-trimmed and then turning around and showing up for the first day of class with new hair?? Actually, it wasn't really THAT distressing; even I had to laugh at my dismay, because it shows you how much power I invest my hairstylists with - at some level I really thought that getting my hair done between orientation and the first day of class would mean that I would look COMPLETELY DIFFERENT when classes started. And how could I make my best impression on everyone at orientation if I couldn't get my hair cut/colored by then?? I would be shunned - SHUNNED - if I had crappy hair, even if I then turned around and had nice hair. And then I got a grip and said, Self, 90% of the people you meet in orientation will NOT notice any changes, short of cutting of six inches or going platinum blonde. And the minor details of haircut/color are NOT going to determine how people respond to you. You are more than your hair.
But I called and made a pre-orientation appointment at another salon, anyway. Some neuroses aren't worth fighting.
THE COOLER IS PUMPING OUT COOL AIR AGAIN.
The temperature outside is NOT any cooler this morning than it was yesterday morning (i.e., there's no external reason why the cooler should be cool again).
I swear to god, my apartment management people, though very pleasant, are ditsy enough that I'm willing to bet they turned the damn cooling off over the weekend. Seriously. Time for a little talk...
Over what, you ask? Over the #@!^$ "air conditioning" in our apartment.
I know I've mentioned before that our A/C is really a "cooler" - it's a radiator. Hot water runs through it in the winter when it's cold, and cold water runs through it in the summer when it's hot. No nasty freon or other refrigerants, so it's environmentally friendly.
The problem is, it doesn't work.
Or I should say, it doesn't work consistently. Sometimes I turn it on, and cool air emerges. It's not the icy cold air you get with true A/C, but it's pleasantly cool, and if I turn it on before the sun makes it round to our west-facing windows, and shut the nicely double-glazed windows, the apartment stays pretty comfortable. Not quite as cold as with A/C (I'm one of those people who likes to be able to sleep under a light blanket even in the middle of summer), but you know, very tolerable. I had the cooler on all day Wednesday and Thursday and I was perfectly fine.
But other times, I turn the damn thing on, and it just blows room-temperature air. Which, if I shut everything up before it's skanky-hot outside, is a little bit of an improvement from the outdoors. But not really very much of an improvement.
Did I mention that the high yesterday was 98°F (that's 36° for you Celsius types)? (Weather.com says it was 93° but they're on crack.) And that the high today is supposed to be "around 100°"? And that right now the cooler is set on blowing room-temperature air?
I even turned it off last night and opened the windows to catch the cooler night air (thankfully, it always gets cooler at night here so we get some relief; I know when I visited a friend in Houston the high was 104° but what was almost worse was that it stayed in the 90s ALL NIGHT LONG) (of course, everything in Houston is A/C'ed up the wahoo, but it was still a bit of a shock to this northern girl). I was hoping against hope that turning the cooler on this morning after its long rest would do the trick, and cool air would issue forth.
Nope.
Gah.
(When we first moved in, we had a day of room-temperature air, and I asked the management company to come look at it, and of course when they showed up, it happily produced cool air on demand, and the guy explained that it was a radiator not true A/C, and I though, okay, well, now I know how that works, I guess it wasn't really blowing room-temperature air, it was just that I expected it to be colder. So I thanked them and they went on their merry way. But of course now I've figured out something is FUBAR. And it's the weekend. And I highly doubt they'd show up to fix it today, when I'm not even sure they're going to agree that it's FUBAR. Gah.)
(And I realize this is one of the most boring things I've ever posted. In such detail, no less, when I could just say, "My A/C isn't working properly and it's hot. Phooey." But I am completely obsessing over this, because that's what I do about climate control. It's my thing. I can't decide whether I'm obsessing more about the
heat, or more about the fact that THE ADVERTISED A/C WHICH IS SUPPOSED
TO WORK ISN'T WORKING. Or, is sort of working, but isn't actually COOLING ANYTHING DOWN AND OMG CAN IT BE FIXED OR WILL I LIVE MY LIFE IN UNCERTAINTY. Either way, obsess, obsess, obsess. I'm probably about as bad as Limon de Campo's Awesome Man. And my own awesome man is at work and has heard me obsess about this for the last 24 hours, so I thought it was time to share with you, dear internets. Aren't you glad?)
Taking a shower for the first time since Wednesday morning. I know that not washing my hair for two days isn't going to kill me and it's only relatively recently that people in the US have got hooked on daily shampoos, but OMG it feels good to be clean again. Have you ever had your hair done in an updo or the like by a professional stylist? (I guess this is a question for ladies out there.) And have they told you that dirty hair actually works better, because it's stickier and will stay in place better? By the time I got in the shower this evening, you could have MOLDED my hair into all sorts of fascinating styles, no bobby pins or hairclips needed. (I know, just the image you needed, but I felt compelled to share. This is exactly the reason why people hate blogs.)
Now off to sleep on a sweet lullaby of Vicodin.
Well, all I can say is that if getting your gall bladder out is minor surgery, please god don't let me ever need major surgery.
More later when I can rest my laptop comfortably on my lap again.
In a NYT article about a ban on cockfighting in New Mexico:
“A gamecock shows me what an American should be like....You defend to the death.” - Ed Lowry, rooster breeder, in defense of cockfighting.
Ah, yes. We should allow all manner of cruel treatment of animals because it shows us what it means to be American. Nice.
jo(e) has a post lauding summertime, with a lovely picture from her time at the monastery that she visits (which I envy). It's a lovely post, and I know exactly what she means about the unreality of summer in the midst of snowbound winters; we'd look at summer photos in the winter when I was a kid, and marvel that the world had ever been that soft and warm cacophony of gold and green. (Conversely, looking at pictures of 12 inches of snow in the middle of summer was equally mind-blowing.) But I also had to laugh, reading jo(e)'s post, because just yesterday I was being exceedingly grumpy about summer, and rehearsing in my head all the reasons why I hate it.
I should explain, first, that there was a specific trigger for this hatred. Our new apartment building is still undergoing renovation; almost everything is done but they've been replacing the windows. At the moment, I think NLLDH and I are two of maybe four people actually living here, and there's no one else on our floor. While I was waiting for the elevator yesterday afternoon, I realized the door to the apartment next to ours was ajar, and I thought I'd take a quick look.
I really shouldn't have, because the result was dissatisfaction. It was one of the two-bedroom apartments, and while we're fitting in to our one-bedroom pretty well, the two-bedroom is just bigger enough to make it the perfect size for us. There's more drawer space in the kitchen, there are two more closets than we have, and of course, the second bedroom would be nice (while I really don't work at home very much any more, it would be nice to have a separate room to study; plus, my sister could sleep on an air mattress if she comes to visit. There is literally no space to roll out an air mattress in our current apartment). But worst of all (in my self-centered view), I discovered that the two-bedroom apartments have actual CENTRAL AIR, with their own thermostat and everything. Our apartment, in contrast, has a cooler/heater, which, it turns out, is a radiator: in the winter the building people turn on the boiler so hot water runs through it and it heats the apartment; with the boiler turned off, cold water runs through it, and so the fan blows air that is cool, but not what I would call chilled.
Now, I should also note that I LOVE air-conditioning. My time in the south has changed my view of what counts as "hot" a little (I no longer flip out over temps in the 80s; it has to hit 90 for it to count as "really" hot). But living in the south definitely didn't wean me off A/C; it's EVERYWHERE there. And one of the draws of this apartment was that it has "A/C." (So they said when we were looking at it.) And yeah, the cooler is better than nothing, and yeah, when I thought all the apartments had coolers, I was pretty blase about it: oh, this building has coolers, okay, that's fine. But now that I know some of the units have REAL A/C, for some reason, it really annoys me that we don't.
Anyway, that started me grumbling about stupid summer and stupid heat and what the hell is summer good for, anyway? And then I really started thinking, and I realized: I don't do any of the things that traditionally make summer fun.
I can't tell you the last time I went to the beach or went swimming. (Actually, I can; it was at a gathering of friends from grad school, when I still worked at Rural Utopia. So it was at least four years ago, probably five. It was the only swimming I did that summer, and I had to buy a new swimsuit, because it was the first time I'd needed one in ages - at least since moving to Rural Utopia, which I did in 2000.)
The only barbeques I've been to since leaving Rural Utopia have been faculty-student ones on campus.
Because we've lived in apartments and have no outdoor space, I can't garden (if I were so inclined). I can't sit out in the backyard and sip lemonade, or watch the fireflies and gaze at the stars.
I can't tell you when NLLDH and I last took a vacation together, just going someplace fun to see what it's like, that wasn't to visit family. (Not that family vacations aren't nice. But NLLDH and I haven't taken one of those together for a while, either.) I think it might have been in 2003, when we drove up to one of the Twin Ports in the great white north and stayed overnight.
This is a pretty damn self-pitying list, isn't it? As an academic, the summer has been nice because it's meant a break from teaching, but it's also the time in which one is supposed to make up for all the things that one doesn't get to do during the year. So honestly, all summer seems to bring is the heat I don't like, without any of the fun things that are supposed to go with it.
In a fit of self-pity I confessed this to NLLDH, and within hours he had suggested that we take the day on Tuesday (his next day off) and check out one the national parks nearby. We probably won't actually hike-hike, but we might stroll one of the "accessible trails," and check it all out so we can try some of the easier hikes later in the summer. Yay for NLLDH! How much more sensible than wallowing in self-pity, to come up with a solution!
But if I'm completely honest with myself, one of the problems is not so much summer, but missing having a group of friends with which to do any of these summery things. I recently read a blogger talking about having friends over to her new house, grilling in the backyard and just hanging out on the deck in the warmth of an evening. And I was so envious that I could hardly stand it. I have all sorts of wonderful friends. But none of them are HERE.
That's how I feel at the moment, anyway - it's a very strange feeling not having anything specific to do.
My grading is done; my teaching responsibilities are over.
Classes don't start until August 25, and while there are some people who argue for a rigorous course of study in the months leading up to law school, the general consensus is that such prep isn't really going to help and that since it's your last summer off for a while, you should probably relax and enjoy it. There are a few things I'd like to read before the fall (including an intro to the constitution, because it dawned on me that I don't think I've ever actually read the whole thing, and I just might want a better grasp on that before starting a class on constitutional law!), but I have no fixed timetable for such reading.
There are more things to do to get the apartment in shape, but some of them (taking empty boxes etc. to storage, buying and installing blinds) need to wait until NLLDH's next day off, and others (organizing a shelving unit) require buying stuff, which I'm trying to avoid doing every single day. I could probably hang some artwork, though I'm not positive we have everything in place yet to be sure of where the artwork will go. (Though some of these reactions are, I realize, excuses for laziness. Plus, it's kind of hot out these days.)
There are a variety of other random things that I need to do at some point, but can be done whenever:
- talk to the financial aid person at my school (though first NLLDH and I have to work out exactly how much of the loan money we want to take)
- get the case of my laptop fixed AGAIN
- take Eldest Cat to the vet to get his bloodwork done (this I am procrastinating on because I was supposed to do it months ago and I feel like a bad cat mama not to have done so yet - so, of course, I will be a worse cat mama and let it go longer because I'm embarrassed - I know, sensible)
- complete a craft project I owe someone
- revise an article I owe for a festschrift
- sort through my/NLLDH's books and sell/give them away
I am finding it VERY hard to do much of ANYTHING, though. What I guess this means is that I really benefit from structure in my life, which is what I pretty much thought, but I suppose it's useful to have it confirmed, because this means I should thrive taking classes again (let's hope!). Until then, though, I sit on the couch and read mystery novels. Kind of pathetic.
Partly, I think, this is because I know that at some point soonish I'm going to have that gallbladder surgery, and there's a weird (stupid) feeling like my life has to be put on pause until that's done. Because, you know, I'm SICK. Even though I feel fairly normal at the moment (thank God, no more gallstone attacks yet - touch wood!), there's part of me that feels fragile and vulnerable, like I should stay in a protective cocoon until I get the gallbladder out. I don't think that part of me is right, but it's definitely part of what's keeping me on the couch. (That, and inherent sloth.)
So. How do manage to get things done when there's nothing structuring your time for you??
I have them. Woo hoo. I get to have surgery to get rid of them.
(Can I confess to being a huge chicken about this? I've never had surgery before, except getting my wisdom teeth out. And I realize that makes me lucky and gall bladder surgery is really very minor. But I'm stlll a great big chicken.)
