NCTE 2011-- The Chicago Adventure!!

This past November, NCTE had its 100th annual meeting, and it was in the same place NCTE met for its 1st meeting: Chicago! Here's me on a writing marathon (clearly not writing), meeting a representative of its name (Cowtown):

The journey to Chicago was NOT without hardship, however. Because Chicago's nearby (relatively), a group of UNI students and I took the Megabus from Iowa City. Three and a half hours on a bus, only $27 one way-- not bad! We got to Iowa City, all ready with our snacks to board the bus. When it finally arrived, this is what it looked like:

Somewhere between Des Moines and Iowa City, a deer jumped in front of the bus, tore off the driver's side mirror, and damaged the windshield (shown here). We had to wait two more hours for a new bus, and THEN we could start our trip. Once we got there, we jumped in a cab, only to be told by the cab driver: "I hope I can get you through the Occupy Chicago protesters." Yep. They were all over the place, but fortunately enough had been arrested already that they were no longer physically in the street. (Sorry, don't have a picture of this moment.)

Okay, the conference was fine. But I REALLY wanted to blog about was my very first taste of Chicago-style pizza! Here I am, getting ready for my first bite:

Now, that piece was good. But it wasn't the best Chicago pizza, apparently. It was mainly an excuse for about a pound worth of cheese. Our UNI group went to Giordano's the night the Christmas tree was lit downtown (too many crowds, so we gave up and went to eat while the parade was happening), and we had THIS deep dish pizza:

I don't even know how to describe the yumminess of this crust. Kind of like eating a savory mille feuille. Wow! And lots of cheese and great sauce.

What a great town!

Thanksgiving fun

This is Bella (and my left foot):

This is what Bella did while I was in the kitchen eating dinner:

Um, Sharleen, can I have another copy of your Halloween movie DVD . . .?

Note: Bella is NOT my dog. I was visiting at her house for Thanksgiving. Other than chewing up DVD's, she's a lovely, lovely animal. Whenever I finally get a dog, I will have to have every possible item a dog could chew out of reach, apparently.

Won't you be my neighbor?

Which of these Halloween displays belongs to my house?

A. This one . . .















or B. This one?

Or perhaps I should rephrase the question: Which display do I WISH was in front of my house?

If you're following this blog, you know me well enough to know which of the above displays is my house. If you don't know me well, then let me regale you with a brief trip down memory lane.

A little over ten years ago, I lived in a little house across the street from a dairy farm. I shared the bottom of my driveway with my next-door neighbor. He had signs in his driveway-- and in front of his house-- that said things like "I don't want YOU, or anyone-- this means you!" and "Owner of house has guns." All of these inviting messages were painted on big masonite signs in black paint, accompanied by cattle skulls.

I seriously wanted to counter with signs that said, "Come on in- I have ice cream!" I didn't, though, and it turns out that my neighbor was a fine person who was just very protective and lonely and, well, okay, a little paranoid. I called him my Boo Radley neighbor.

I don't know my neighbors who have the Halloween display (have you figured out which one's mine yet?). I wonder if they're Boo Radley neighbors, too. Or maybe they're really, really creative and cool. I should also add here that their display is much more fun at night, when there are red spotlights on everything. I wonder what it will be like on Halloween.

Meanwhile, I need to add a budget item for next year's decorating: mannequins.

First day jitters

Tomorrow's the first day of the new academic year. 18th year I've done this first day thing, and I'm STILL nervous. Every. single. time.

Why, oh WHY do I do this? I wonder what to put in my lunch. I wonder what to wear that will be suitably "teacherly/professorial" but not too stuffy or- gasp- middle aged looking. I already know I won't sleep well tonight. I've been having teacher nightmares for weeks-- the ones where I'm teaching in a combination of several of my old schools, only I don't know the curriculum, or I have no books, or I can't figure out the class schedule, or any other combination of weirdness related to teaching anxiety.

Copies are run off, syllabi are ready to go, I bought a bouquet of flowers for my office. What's my problem with the nerves? Yes, this is the first time I've taught freshman writing in a decade, but I can teach that class in my sleep.

Will my students think my assignments are confusing? Will they panic about the reading load? Will they whip out their smart phones and drop my class immediately? (And would that be such a bad thing?) I guess the nerves are due to not knowing my audience. I don't know what students will be like here (about to find out). Will I be seen as a crazy liberal hippie who had a brief jaunt in hillbilly country?

My first day of student teaching, I remember getting up early and looking at myself in the full-length mirror after I was all ready for the day. I said softly, "I wonder what my new students will think when they see me." My roommate, who'd just woken up and overheard me, answered, "Short."

What will my students think tomorrow morning?

Hoasnna!

So here's a little Easter message I saw at a church not far from my house in Morgantown. It's been this way since, oh, the end of April. Before I left for Iowa, I just had to go over and take a picture of it.

And now . . . HOASNNA! I made it to Iowa! 17 and a half hours after I first climbed into the cab of a 26-foot Penske truck, pulling my little VW Bug behind on a tow dolly, I pulled up here:

Here's my new home for the next year! 1950's vintage ranch house with a partially finished basement, a detached garage (um, not meaning to complain, but why isn't it attached instead?), three bedrooms, and a big back yard with play equipment. If you want swings, a climbing wall, trapeze bars, or slides, I'm your go-to girl. Just come on by.

Pictures of the interior to follow in another entry. While mowing the lawn Thursday morning, I had one of those "Hey, I really live here!" moments. I have to say that mowing THIS lawn, even though it's substantially bigger than my lawn in Morgantown, is MUCH easier. There's something beautiful about flatness. Yeah, I liked the winding roads and picturesque drives in West Virginia, but when the horizon opened out and I saw a wide panorama of blue sky and lots of corn and soybean fields, I was a happy, happy person. Iowa feels like home. I'm back!

Now if my Morgantown house would just sell . . . anyone want a house?

Haba na haba hujaza kibaba

What, you don't speak Swahili? Okay, neither do I, except for this one phrase, which is the title of a song being learned by the community choir I'm accompanying for. It's a Swahili expression meaning "little by little, until the cup is full." In other words, keep moving forward, no matter how overwhelming the task seems.

Kinda describes wrapping up the semester and getting my house ready to sell. So much to do, so very little time. I know it will get done, because Iowa's where Heavenly Father wants to put me next, but when I think about what needs to happen between now and the end of July, I get a little panicked. So, I focus on doing a little at a time. Baby steps. It worked for the dissertation; it can work now.

First, a picture of my Easter package from my sister-in-law (well, the box):

I got some fun Easter things, but I took this picture because of the little blue cat toy in the front of the photo. The pink one was the cats' Christmas present, and they've chewed it pretty thoroughly. They "hunt" it and bring it to me throughout the day, leave it on my pillow while I'm sleeping, stuff like that. So when the blue one showed up, the cats were VERY happy. They spent the rest of the day taking BOTH toys away from each other (perpetual toddlers) and hiding them/rediscovering them. I guess they were so busy playing that they decided they didn't need to supervise painting tasks.

That was my lame transition to pictures of the second upstairs bedroom. Part of me really wanted to just skip painting, even though I hated the color. Yeah, it was a funky, too-dark shade of olive, but I liked the iris wallpaper border, and to be honest, I didn't want to paint more. But then, I thought: "Wait, this paint probably has lead in it." Then some of it started flaking off, so I HAD to paint for salability of the house. (I think I just made up a word.) Here's the first part of the process, after I'd primed below the wallpaper border:

I should note here that it wasn't really possible to mask the iris border with that blue painter's tape. I had to paint right up to the edge of the irises. I thought that would take forever, but it ended up going fairly quickly, and it was, well, kinda fun. Closest thing to real artsy painting that I'll probably ever do.

Then I got the pale blue paint. I was thinking something along the lines of periwinkle, and as I put the paint on the wall, I thought, "Oh no, too light, too light!" Turns out it wasn't. It was just right. Lookie how it turned out:

I'm very, very pleased. This room's a lot more restful now. Friends had never noticed the iris border before. Now it really shows up.

Next: painting the hallway . . .

Serious musical enthusiasm

First, check out this link: www2.choralnet.org/268945.html

Back from your little virtual field trip? Good! Here's what I thought about it:

I think enthusiasm goes a long way-- maybe longer than we give it credit for. Okay, so maybe you don't always have perfect rhythm, and maybe you fall off the stand from laughing and end up rolling around on the floor at the end. The point is that you had a fabulous time doing it, and every so often you actually did what you set out to do.

I think all of us have more talent than we think we do. It's so easy to say, "No, I don't have enough formal training" or "That's too hard" instead of letting the music play and moving with it.

Or, you can stop trying to be philosophical and just enjoy a funny clip.

upstairs bedroom painting- DONE!

Hi everyone. Brit here, reporting on the remodeling progress of 2011. I have to say, Mom's pretty bad about blogging these days, but I think it's partially due to her needing to pay more attention to-- ahem-- her feline children. Anyhow, once the housemate moved out, the room she'd stayed in was cleared of furniture, so Mom finally decided to redo that room. Here's a picture of me supervising from the futon mattress, which she'd moved out so she could paint:

Mom always said she hated the pink walls and wanted to paint over them. Here's what they looked like before she painted. (The crud at the top of the wall is wallpaper glue that she spent FOREVER peeling off a little at a time. She said it really shredded her fingertips.)

Why did she feel the need to get rid of the wallpaper border? I think she'd say, "Is that a rhetorical question?" Think "pseudo-Southwestern meets attempted floral". Here's the final version, the room all decked out in "Soft Jade":

Now, crazy Mom that she is, she's going to paint the OTHER upstairs bedroom, and then the hallway. Then she promises she's done painting for a while. Until she tackles the dining room wallpaper (two layers), that is . . .

Trip to Ireland

Ireland West Virginia, that is. Yesterday I went to the Irish Spring Festival, about an hour and a half south of my house. During most of the year, the population of Ireland, West Virginia is 60 (seriously). The week of St. Patrick's Day, though, they host a big festival that includes kite flying, road bowling, rubber duck races (not sure what's Irish about rubber duckies), and the reason I came:

Collette and I took a road trip to participate in the harp workshop, put on by Harping for Humanity. I tried to get a picture of the whole group, but I couldn't. The harps in the middle were built by the man standing near them, and behind him is a Venezuelan harp (not sure how he got that on the plane from Venezuela). Most people had lap harps or small Irish harps. My harp was the giant of the group (it's in the back at the left in the photo). Fourteen of us played at the workshop, including a woman who has lost almost all movement in her left hand but still manages to play. Pretty impressive. After the workshop, we had a potluck lunch and then put on a brief concert.

Before the concert, though, there was a parade! Most of the leprechauns were pretty young:

Toddlers should not be handed candy and told to throw it at people. Just sayin'.

Post? Post? What is "post"?

Okay, okay, I've been a total blogger slacker the past few months. Here are my excuses, in no particular order:

1) Teaching early morning seminary has sapped every ounce of energy out of me in the evening when I would normally blog.
2) My digital camera busted, and blog entries without pictures are boring (um, kinda like this one).
3) My cats have been hogging the computer-- okay, maybe not.

I realized a couple of months ago that I'm way more limited on time than I thought I was. After several consecutive evenings of not getting to bed until 11 PM and then getting up at 4:30 the next morning, I thought, "Something has to change." That, combined with some General Conference talks, got me thinking about my Facebook usage and how I was kind of obssessing over being on there and checking every single little new message.

How does this have anything to do with blogs? I think the connection is that the less I'm on the computer, the less stressed I feel. I only have so many hours in the day, and harp practicing is turning out to be more rewarding than blogging. Not that I won't blog at all, or read other blogs; just not nearly as often.

But I really will get a new digital camera someday, and I really will come up with some new, more enjoyable-to-read entries. Just not today. Sorry.

But I posted . . .