lunabee34

1. The semester is finished! I made myself sick Tuesday and Wednesday with the grading and the going to graduation (getting hot activates all my autoimmune stuff, and we couldn't eat lunch until like 2, which activated a migraine), but now it's done, and I'm so so glad. Last semester I went down to the wire grading and said never again, but I did it again this semester. I need to be firmer in my resolve not to procrastinate my grading.

2. Fiona has once again gotten the most AR points (this reading program they do) in the whole school. That's my genius baby.

3. I took Dylan to a new rheumatologist yesterday. We saw three people who worked together as a team to put together an investigative/diagnostic plan. I know it doesn't mean anything, but I've got hopes that these people might be able to help them.

4. We are watching Dragon Prince. The first 3 seasons were a rewatch, but now we're into the new seasons. It's such a good show. I love all the same-sex couples and the interracial couples and interspecies couples. It's just a damn good show.

5. Have a Stranger Things rec:

no retreat, baby, no surrender by alivingfire
Series where Hawkins is a post-apocalyptic hellhole after Vecna.
Steddie + Robin/Nancy

1.

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This translation is incredibly explicit--fair warning if you want to teach it.



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The students were quite good about the whole thing. Most of them thought the play was funny, there was participation in class discussion, and I even overheard a few of them saying they might want to write their papers about the play. No one spontaneously combusted or threatened to get me fired, so success!

2. Additional bookses

Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this for McPhee's stories about writing for the New Yorker and for the background on how he wrote his nonfiction books.



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Seaweed, a Cornish Idyll by Edith Ellis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is such a strange and wonderful book.

I didn't realize any Victorian novels blatantly discussed polyamory, but here we go.

Additional themes include the intersection of masculinity, desire, sex, and sexuality; traditional views of women vs seeing them as erotic beings; and marriage.

I really enjoyed this one.



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3. A rec

blood, love, and rhetoric by sourpastels
Stranger Things
Steve/Eddie
Glorious slow burn

and it is Dylan's hair. LOL Y'all, they let their roommate cut it, and it looks like--well, it looks like a squirrel has gnawed it into the worst mullet ever. The back is all unevenly long, and the sides are undercut all raggedy short, and the bangs are incredibly long and down in their eyes. Dylan has informed me that people their age find this haircut incredibly attractive. No! No, they do not. No one finds this haircut attractive. It is killing me to behold this travesty on a daily basis. I know this too shall pass, but I wish it would pass a little more quickly.

2. Dylan still has to take one class this summer, so they will officially graduate at the end of summer term, but they walked last week in a graduation ceremony that impressed the heck out of me. GSU has over 50,000 students, so they had something like 6 days of graduation with multiple ceremonies on each day. At Dylan's ceremony, there were probably 10,00 people there about 1000 of which were graduates. They did the whole thing in an hour. An hour! It was marvelous.

3. I have come to believe very strongly that people who ship characters with faintly ridiculous names--Shitty and Bitty and Biggles and Raffles, for example--should be required to write at least one limerick about them.

4. I turned in grades yesterday; now I have to write a conference paper to present next week (*cries*) and then another to present in early June. And I'm chairing a hiring committee, which has gotten much more complicated in terms of process and HR requirements since the last time I did this.

5. I'm thinking of nominating either Ouida's Syrlin or Princess Napraxine for Yuletide this year. Anybody interested in reading those novels even if you're not interested in writing about them? I'd love to have a little book club going once I finish writing this conference paper.

1. I don't think I ever posted about the conference for which you all provided such excellent cheerleading. It was glorious. I had to get up at 4 in the morning every day to watch all the presentations, but they were pretty much uniformly excellent. My presentation went over extremely well, and I just had a lovely time.

Last year was my first time to attend this conference, and I had a great experience last year, but I enjoyed myself so much more this year after spending all last year involved in two reading groups. This year, I knew so many of the participants and they knew me. It made for a much richer experience. I can't wait until next year!

2. I am essentially finished getting my courses together for the fall except for finishing touches. Whew. Classes start on Wednesday. I am really excited about this graduate class and will be posting about it periodically.

3. Convocation, the big meeting of all university employees that kicks off each academic year, was last week, and I got recognized for 15 years of employment plus my Excellence in Service Award. The president also gave me a shout-out during the Strategic Plan unveiling. It's a bit surreal to go to these things and see my fingerprints all over so many aspects of university operations. LOL

4. I have to travel every day but one next week--either to doctor's appointments or to meetings. Hurray!

5. Still enjoying my hair. I got many compliments at Convocation, which was unexpected and welcome since I am self-conscious about it. I am enjoying playing around with my new curls, but they are still so new that I am startled every time I get a glimpse of myself. I feel an urge to explain that I didn't do this to my hair; it just spontaneously happened, promise. LOL And I wonder sometimes if it really looks good or I'm just imagining that it does and people are thinking, "What's that old lady doing trying to look young?" Basic insecurity crap that will go away as I get more confident with styling it.

1. Since I last posted about my hair, it has gone from 2A waves to 2B-2C waves/curls. This is so wild.

I went to the hairdresser on Tuesday and got a lot of the length cut off and some waves put in to support the curls and OMG it is so curly now. It's very curly at the roots/crown with lots of genuine ringlets and curls/waves on the sides. It's less so in the back, but my stylist says that since the roots are curly all over, she expects that it will continue to get curlier everywhere over the next couple years. She predicts I am headed for genuine 3A-C hair in the near future.

I am having so much fun playing around with my new curly hair. I finally have a diffuser, so I had a go at styling it myself with heat yesterday, and I think I did alright. I need a stronger hold styling gel which I am picking up today, and then I will have all my curly girl accessories and accoutrement. It's just going to take practice. My stylist was so proud of me, though. She said I was very informed and had done my research and had my facts about how to care for and style my new hair correct. I told her I only know how to do one thing and that's research. LOL

I'm still just in shock that this could even be a thing that happens. So wild.

2. My summer class is over, and it was truly a joy. Poets of color often get left out of courses about nature poetry, so it was important to me that the course included them. One of the poets I included that was new to me is LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. We read her poem My First Black Nature Poem, which is about the struggle to have positive interactions with nature (in this case, natural bodies of water) when it's the site of generational trauma. The poem references Goree, Senegal, the largest hub of Atlantic slave trading from the 15th-19th centuries, and Lake Champlain, which was part of the route of the Underground Railroad. It evokes the practice of drowning black towns to form lakes (like Lake Lanier in GA), and although the poem suggests that African Americans prefer swimming in pools to swimming in natural bodies of water, it evokes the legacy of racism that prevented them access to public pools after desegregation. Many towns closed public pools or turned the public pool into the country club pool to avoid having to allow African Americans to swim with white people. This happened in the town I live in. There's still not a public swimming pool. This has had serious consequences for public safety in that African Americans are still less likely to know how to swim than white people because of historic lack of access to places to learn how to swim.

3. The graduate class I am constructing is going to be really good I think. I feel so much pressure and responsibility for this class to be good because I didn't get any proper instruction about teaching in graduate school, and I think about how much easier my first years of teaching would have gone if I had. I think once the headache and tedium of constructing the class are over, I am going to be very proud of it. I hope to be finished with it this weekend. *crosses fingers*

I think teaching it will be truly delightful, and I'll be posting about it as I teach it.

1. I got a gift card from spikedluv to the Laurel Mercantile store, the online store of the couple who does the Home Town TV show on HGTV. The Savannah candle is on its way to my house! <3

2. The conference went off without a hitch. It's the first conference we've had since I became president and started coordinating almost 10 years ago in which every single presenter showed up. LOL There's usually at least one person who just no shows. We also had our first international presenters (from Greece and China), so that was an excellent first!

3. I got my class up on time, and I think it's going to be great. It's British and American poetry through an ecocritical lens, so we're starting with the usual suspects--the Romantics and Transcendentalists--but then we're going to get to the fun stuff. LOL I'm doing this class with a creative project instead of a research paper, so I'm excited about that, too. I usually get really fun and interesting work for the project, and it's not the same boring old research paper.

4. ( reading )

1. I got the most amazing hand-drawn postcard from elfin!

2. Classes started back. Spoiler alert: I'm exhausted. LOL I'm doing that lovely thing where by the end of the day I feel feverish, like I have the flu. (No worries; I don't actually have a fever.) But I only have to be on campus two days a week this semester, and I'm hoping the work from home days will help mitigate the fatigue.

3. I'm not doing an end-of-the-year reflection post where I assess how I did on my 2022 goals and make some new ones for 2023. For the past several years, it's just been an accounting of how I only met one or two of my goals and did terribly on the rest, and that kind of post does not spark joy. I'm still reflecting on 2022 and making goals for 2023, I'm just doing it in my paper journal.

4. Thursday night, I went to see the Legally Blonde musical, and it was fantastic! It was an off-Broadway production, so the cast was phenomenal. I really enjoyed the way the show has been updated from the movie. Definitely recommend.

5. I gave up caffeine because I read that people with fatigue who are heavy caffeine users often create a crash effect that exacerbates their fatigue. I was drinking between two and four full-size Coke Zeroes in the morning + some black tea, so that seemed a reasonable possibility to me. I stopped caffeine on December 27 and have had no positive effects on fatigue. If anything I am more noticeably fatigued. Do y'all think it's been long enough that if giving up caffeine was going to magically make me less tired, it would have done so by now? Or do I need to give it some more time?

1. I finally finished grading today. I gave a final on Monday at 8, had a meeting from 10:00-12:45, and then went to the endo (an hour away). Got up at 5:30 on Tuesday and graded until time to go to the neuro at 10:00. Emma and I had our appointments, got home at 3:00, and graded until bedtime. Got up at 5:00 today and graded until 9:30. But now the semester is put to rest!

2. Neuro agrees that it is trigeminal neuralgia almost certainly caused by the root canal. We're going to do an MRI just to be sure it's not caused by anything else like an MS lesion or whatever.

3. We all agree that we are going to aggressively pursue as many diagnostic avenues as possible for Emma, so she's having a lumbar puncture, and hopefully that'll give us some info. If not, we're going to do this new kind of skin punch nerve biopsy. *crosses fingers* She's had some improvement from the starter does of Cymbalta, so he upped her to 30mg. Back in a month. Friday, we see my GP who will start her on a low dose of statin for her bizarrely high cholesterol.

4. I am so tired. I have cried every night for the last week with stress and exhaustion. I am so glad the summer is here. I have got to get some genuine rest.

1. I am crossing my fingers that we've got Fiona's orthodontia fixed. They put glue on all the screws (why not just do that to begin with, she asks) and adjusted one side of the device; the orthodontist thinks one side of her jaw is moving forward more rapidly than the other and essentially creating torque that's popping the opposite side out. Also, they have a plan for what to do if it happens again. Very happy they were taking it seriously.

2. Poor Sammy has some skin problems. He has a couple of bumps on his head, and we noticed yesterday that he seems be starting the cat acne on his chin. He's got an appointment for Monday. He doesn't appear upset or uncomfortable; he's not scratching obsessively or anything. But I want to nip whatever this is in the bud.

3. Week one of a two week asychronous conference with several synchronous presentations throughout just ended and week two began. This conference has been awesome; so many great teaching ideas. I am super digging it.

4. Mom is coming to pick up Fiona at the end of next week, and then she's going to MS for her spring break. I am super stoked! I am going to get so much work done. LOL We are also going to have some colleagues over for dinner, and I'm excited about that.

5. The legislature approved a 5k raise for all state employees, so we are each getting an extra 5k spread between our final two paychecks of this fiscal year. Then our contracts for next fiscal year will have the added 5k. So in total, our household will get an extra 15k this year, and y'all, I am not going to lie, I am so relieved. I have been lowkey fretting about paying for Emma's college in spring. All the saved up money was going to be gone after paying for this fall semester, and I'm not eligible to teach overloads next year because I get a course release. Josh can teach overloads, so it was going to be doable but tight. But now we can pay that 8k per semester so much more easily. So grateful.

6. Fiona is having a playdate! She's had no problem making friends, but it has been so hard for us to connect with other families outside of school, so super happy about this for her.

1. One of my recent joys is Josh discovering Anne of Green Gables. He read that book to Fiona when it was his turn to read to her at night over the course of the last several months, and his delight in Anne was just wonderful. They started Anne of Avonlea in the last week, and he keeps coming and telling me things Anne has done or said. It's the best.

2. Fiona said, "Some of the kids in my class have to wear masks now. Isn't that great?" And I said through gritted teeth, "Oh yes!" When I was thinking, "No, no it is not! That just means they either have COVID or their parents do and the CDC now says they can come back to school after 5 days instead of 10. Also I can't believe your school is actually making them wear a mask so hurray for that I guess?"

3. None of my classes got cancelled. Hurray! I am excited about this semester. It has the potential to be a very good one. *crosses fingers that it lives up to my expectations*

4. The guest room is pretty much done; we're lacking one trim piece that goes over the threshold of the door, and I want to get new curtains for the room, but other than that, it's finished. Hurray! It looks quite fine. And my house is nice and neat now. I am relieved.

Turns out that in addition to the issue that caused the flood, the toilet tank in that bathroom has a hairline crack in it that is causing a very, very slow drip, so the goal is to replace the tank this weekend. I didn't even know it was a separate piece; I thought the toilet was all one piece. TIL

5.

News from Nowhere by William Morris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is really interesting. I don't think that society as Morris lays it out here would work, and he's elided a lot of the more thorny bits in favor of describing all the beautiful architecture and clothes, but what strikes me most about this book is the optimism rising from despair. Morris is writing at a time in which conditions for the working poor are horrific and the twin devastations of industrialism and capitalism seem insurmountable. And yet, he's optimistic that something better is waiting in the future. I think there's a lesson in that for us now.





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