Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

When I came home this morning, I found Sydney had made the most of my absence: he’d turned our apartment into a bachelor pad.  Or, more accurately, his old dorm room, with stereotypical professor’s study and bachelor pad styles cooperating nicely to make a royal mess.  The front room was abandoned, but he was sitting up in bed (which was unmade), typing away on my laptop, surrounded by pillows that were struggling to hold up massive Latin texts and reference works.  In other words, the barricade of books he’d built around his desk in the front room had been abandoned for a cushier spot in the bedroom that was also a magnificent fort.

Erin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2alJObBYkdg

After hearing about how Arwyn kept us from enjoying the Daylight-Savings-Time sleep-in, our housemate, Christi, sent us the link above. Sydney and I both laughed–hard–and the thought of it later in the day was enough to make it hard to keep a straight face as I worked in my office.

Erin

On Saturday Sydney had to help tear down the community garden plots while I went to choir practice.  Basically, a group of gardeners got together to tear down all the fences and haul off all the garbage that other irresponsible gardeners had left.  If the field isn’t cleared the tractor can’t plough.  So you can imagine how Sydney was feeling toward those irresponsible gardeners as he spent a cooooold Saturday morning (28 degrees when I left him) pulling out stakes, hauling off netting, turning up abandoned hoes, etc.  Yup, the anger kept him warm.

But this week marked the last of our gardening for the year.  We tore down our own fence on Thursday and rented a U-Haul van to haul off all the wood.  Now everything’s at our house, though we need to put the wood where it belongs (currently drying out in our driveway) and put garden stuff up in the attic for the winter.  Oh yeah, and I need to transform our farm vehicle back into something resembling a car pretty soon, before it gets too cold to spend much time outside.  It’s nice to have the garden tucked away in our house, with potatoes and onions and squash in the basement, tomato juice and canned pickles, peaches, salsas and the like on the shelves, and a full, full freezer.  Of course, if Sydney goes to Oxford next spring I am going to be left with all that food–and I’m going to feel like cooking a lot less often.  Oh well!

Erin

I walked through the bedroom and bathroom, into the livingroom/kitchen . . . and was face-to-face with the bowl of celery mashed potatoes we left out (intending to throw it out this morning–even Sydney’s stomach wasn’t going to be up for another round of that).  The sight almost made me go back to bed.

Erin

So I tried another new recipe today and, well, I suppose it provided balance for my success earlier in the week. I’m not sure whether the mashed celery potatoes (basically, equal parts celery and potatoes mashed) looked or tasted more sickening.

I noticed that Erin went to the trouble of tearing the recipe into numerous pieces before putting it in the recycling.

Sydney

So I expected to see a few interesting outfits on campus today, given that it’s Halloween and given that college students seem to have a hidden desire to wear weird clothes now that they no longer go to a strict high school or have to hear their mom say, “Sweetie, is that really the kind of thing you would want to meet your grandmother in?”

But what I didn’t expect was not to know whether some of the students walking down the street intended to dress for Halloween, or whether this is their normal attire.  As we were pulling into campus today, the first thing we saw was a young woman in black cowboy boots, leopard-print tights, a black miniskirt, and black jacket.  Honestly, I have no idea whether that was meant to be a costume, or whether leopard-print tights and miniskirt are acceptable week-day wear.  And it’s kind of like inquiring whether a woman is pregnant: there’s really no neutral way to ask.  So I am walking around being amused by costumes right and left, and bemused by other more ambiguous wear.

Erin

I really love holidays.  Halloween may be an exception, however.  As a kid, I liked dressing up and doing the trick-or-treating (once I got past my shyness), but Halloween in a college town is a very different thing.  I think I’ll be leaving campus early today and leaving the students to their revelry without me or my car anywhere near the festivities.

Erin

I just made a pilaf that we’ll definitely be making again: Wild and Brown Rice Pilaf with Butternut Squash and Dried Cranberries, to be exact. Try it. Though judging by the reviews the recipe has received, not everyone is as enamoured of it as Erin and I am.

Sydney

I asked my students to write reflective papers (yeah, yeah, I’m branching out) about the way they see Faulkner depicting race relations in his stories.  The papers were supposed to include some of their own reflections about their expectations, in what ways they found his view surprising, etc.  Mostly it was supposed to get them to talk freely about things they may not have taken the time to wrestle with in their first reading.

An interesting effect: from the majority of my students I am getting the message that they are really liking the way Faulkner’s representing race relations in the South.  Why?  They would be (understandably) uncomfortable with a text that was overtly racist, but they are also very tired of having beaten into them that whites did very bad things to their slaves in the South.  In the stories my students read, Faulkner doesn’t go for either end, but rather describes life in the South in a comical way, with members of both races making mistakes, being duped by each other, and living in ways that are intimate with each other, despite the color line.  I don’t think my students are used to the idea of laughing in any story that is even remotely tied to issues of race relations.  Interesting stuff you learn as a teacher.

Having managed to get through a Faulkner unit without getting myself fired for one reason or another (always difficult teaching texts containing politicized issues), I’m now moving on to teach Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.  Here the difficulty is different: the entire book is about French Creole society in New Orleans, and I don’t speak any French!  Ah, and my (French-speaking) advisor is coming to observe me on Friday.  Lovely.  Thank goodness for audio recordings!

Erin

1) I was feeling a bit pushed for time on Saturday, hoping to get things done before church on Sunday.  I had volunteered (why, oh why?) to lead my reading group in discussion on Monday, but had also offered to loan my book to another woman.  So after being up until almost two o’clock the night before, I got up by seven to finish my reading before I handed the book off at church.  My eyes were totally shot: seeing spots, mounting headache, and utterly resistant to reading anything on page or screen.  But I finished my reading right before church only to discover that my friend will not be able to make the meeting, and so will not need the book.  Sigh.

2) Sydney and I decided to take a nap after church, given the struggle of staying awake and trying to focus on the music on the page during church.  But in the middle of the nap I woke up and thought, “Is someone cooking corn?  Yum, smells good.  I’m hungry.”  After drousing for another twenty minutes or so, I got up to discover I had left my tea kettle on, and it had not only boiled dry, but also melted the enamel onto the stove (electric burner)  and blown off its little topper.  Nasty mess.  Thankfully, I can get a replacement burner fairly easily (I think), and my tea kettle was not expensive.  I’m resistant to boiling tea water in a sauce pan, so I’ll be getting a new teapot ASAP.  Do you think I was being encouraged to try to do less when I am horrifically tired?

3) Sydney and I began to take down some of the things in our garden later this afternoon, hoping the fresh air would help to revive us.  Fall weather is setting in and the field needs to be cleared by next week.  In the middle of untangling netting we realized we were feeling not simply rain, but sleet.  After another half-hour of icy fingers and terrific winds, we called it quits.  Sleet?  Come on!

The nice thing about so many accidents and strange surprises is that they were so odd that we couldn’t do anything but laugh–and we needed that.  A bowl of a new curried pumpkin soup I made tonight also helped to improve the mood.

Erin