You Love to Read about My Move, Don't You?

This will be the penultimate post about my move, I promise. There will be one more post in which I will give you pictures, but I can't provide pictures yet because a) I haven't finished the decorating and b) it's nighttime, and therefore too dark for photography. But I can share with you the latest development. Which actually turns out to be a non-development, mercifully.

I'm renting the cottage from WriterBoy and the Homesteader; it's the guest cottage that goes with their (sizable) house. The thing is, WriterBoy got a job elsewhere and they're moving at the end of the summer, so the house has been on the market. I knew this going in, but was assured that whoever bought the house would probably want a renter, and the house might not even sell for ages, etc etc--in short, I shouldn't worry, even though they weren't entirely sure whether the lease I signed with them would still be valid if the house sold. I knew that moving in here might be risky, but I did it anyway and tried very hard not to think about what might happen.

Then, this weekend, someone made an offer on their house.

Which is great! Because they won't lose scads of money waiting for it to sell. But when I emailed WriterBoy (they were out of town) with a friendly "I sure hope that they want a tenant!", I got no reply. I tried not to worry. They were busy or whatever. But I noticed my mood slowly declining; the unpacking slowed waaay down. What if, I found myself thinking, I need to move again in a month? Oh dear god. Hoping for the best, hoping for the best....

Anyway the upshot is that my landlords came back into town yesterday and when I ran into them they mentioned that the new owners were adamant about wanting a tenant and had absolutely no intentions of kicking me out.

So I get to stay here.

Oh I'm happy! Life is shaping up nicely. And I am truly ready to get back to some kind of mental work. I don't think I've done anything cognitively significant in the last month; it hurts. I need to get myself feeling smart again.

Still Breathing

I am in my house. Pictures *will* be posted (once I've taken them. Once I've unpacked). All plumbing is now operative. Owing to the maternal visit I will be spending the night in a sleeping bag on the living room floor, but that's fine. Because the truck is returned, everything is moved in, and the house is, quite frankly, adorable.

Okay. Someday soon I will think about something not related to the new digs.

But not yet.

Going Dark

I'm going to be offline--or at any rate, off blogger--for the next few days. Actually, it's more likely to be the next week, since I'm reluctant to blog from my mom's house.

Here's the scoop:

Tomorrow I'm flying out to Parentland. I'll be with various parents until next Wednesday, when Mom and I embark on a two-day road trip. In a U-Haul. Did I mention that I'd be with my mother?

Actually, it should be pretty enjoyable. We'll stop over in Undergrad Town on Wednesday night, where I'll be meeting my UG advisor for drinks. Then we'll arrive in Field Town on Thursday afternoon--hopefully not too late--and unload the truck into my adorable new house. The Minister has agreed to help, and we'll also have some assistance from the Homesteaders if they're in town that day.

(The Homesteaders are my new landlords. One of them--let's call him WriterBoy--is a colleague of mine, although he's leaving for another job in the fall. His wife should more properly be called The Homesteader, singular. She: converted their car so that it would run on vegetable oil; bakes their bread; sews their daughter's clothes; made their daughter's shoes; sews all of their curtains, bedspreads, etc; builds cabinets and shelves; gave birth at home without a midwife. She is generally outrageously impressive. Oh, and she's also finishing up her Ph.D.)

Anyway. I am very much looking forward to being moved in. Remember last summer? How all I could talk/think about was my upcoming move? Yeah, that's kind of how I've been lately. At least everything is pretty much all packed up here and ready to go. Now I just need to pack my wireless router! So the next time you see me, I'll be blogging (or reading blogs) from my very sunny yellow new living room.

Do I dare disturb the universe?

Do I dare to paint the bathroom orange?

Ditching

I paid the registration fee. I did not go to the conference. (Y'all know the one--the medievalists know, at any rate.) (And I wasn't presenting, so this isn't a ditching-with-consequences.)

Why did I do it? I love the conference and I haven't been in a couple of years; I was looking forward to it--until this week. And then, and then. I was tired! So tired! So not motivated to rent a car and drive a total of 9ish hours to listen to a handful of papers! (I wouldn't have been able to arrive until Friday afternoon anyway.)

So, this morning, in a moment of giddy transgression, I canceled my car rental and did not pack.

Instead I spent the day painting my new cottage. I got through the bedroom (a darkish sagey green) and living room (sunny yellow). Tomorrow I intend to do the hallway (stormy gray-purple) and bathroom (crazy rust orange; not sure how it'll go with the black and white fixtures, but eh!). I'm undecided about the kitchen: I might leave it as-is or paint it with the leftovers of one or another of the colors.

I love painting new apartments: it's like erasing the previous tenant. Also the interior of the cottage was entirely done in a strangely hot beige that just bugged the shit out of me. It's already much prettier. I won't be moving in for another week and a half (on Wednesday I go to visit Mom, who will drive the u-haul back with me--a two-day trip--should be interesting), but I'm excited to be installed in there. Or I will be, once the painting is done, I've cleaned some of the grungier areas, and the landlords (who are friends of mine) take care of one or two little problems (a broken lock and a sink that backs up into the bathtub--which I discovered when I washed out a paintbrush in the kitchen. It was pretty gross).

Yeah, so this was what I wanted to do. It's funny; I love to travel but lately I keep canceling trips. I was going to go on an epic trans-France march this summer--I was really excited about it--and then I suddenly didn't want to go anymore. Part of it was money, part of it was time (I do need to do some work this summer, for example), but chiefly I felt a deep desire to just stay put for a while. I think it has to do with this long process of coming to accept where I am right now. Knowing that I'm going to be here next year has let me settle in, and being at least a little settled might be what I need. Yeah. I'm looking forward to a mostly-quiet summer. And maybe I'll even write that accursed article I've been not thinking about for the last six months.

This Week in Numbers

• Papers graded: 82
• Final grades assigned: 82
• Instances of plagiarism: 5
• Failing grades for plagiarism: 4
• Failing grades on papers (not in courses) for plagiarism: 1
• Disputed failures for plagiarism: 2 (so far)
• Disputes in which my ruling was upheld: 2
• Disputes in which I was overruled: 0
• Students who brought parents into my office unannounced when called in to meet with me about plagiarism: 1
• Bouts of unwarranted personal sadness over students' plagiarism: 1
• Bouts of rage over students' plagiarism: 2
• Beers drunk last night: 2
• Campus interviews conducted: 2
• Offers extended: 1
• Offers declined: 1
• Batches of new interviews scheduled: 1 (batch)

It Ain't Over Yet

This is turning out to be an exhausting week.

First, we had two job candidates on campus this week. We have made a decision, and really hope that our offer gets accepted. Otherwise, it's back to the application pile.

It's been interesting being on this side of the search. One thing that surprised me somewhat--although it makes perfect sense--was how much personality mattered. Because we're a very small department, we work together pretty closely and see a LOT of each other, so trying to figure out how well we could all work with these people was a big part of the process. The results were pretty clear in this case, although they were both lovely people and highly qualified. Oh--that's the other thing. I already knew that billions of excellent candidates are still out on the market, but this process has confirmed it. We've received well over 50 applications (I don't have an exact count) and many of them were outstanding. Even the ones who clearly weren't a fit for us were, for the most part, very impressive. I'm surprised that I got this job last year. I wouldn't have hired me, given my criteria.

Second, I'm in the midst of the grading. I will not be finishing today, by the way. I haven't even started my survey papers because I have spent untold hours already this week dealing with my plagiarism cases. I met with three students in the last two days, and it was awful. Awful. This is the first time I've had students deny their plagiarism, and they all did it in different ways: flat-out denial; declaration of ignorance ("What, I didn't cite that right?"); desperate pleading. The pleading was the worst: I actually started to cry when s/he left my office (don't worry--the student didn't see that). And now one of them is threatening to bring in his/her lawyer. I keep telling Said Student to go to my chair, who is next on the due-process list, but s/he just keeps sending me pissed-off emails. (Well, okay, s/he has sent me two, but that's plenty.) The defense? "I cited an article, but I did it wrong--so you're failing me for making a mistake." Um. As I said about 25 times in our meeting, you cited a different article. You can't just drop citations into your paper at random--especially when much of that paper is cut-and-pasted off the internet--and call that "proper attribution of materials."

Ugh. I hate this.

Because then I start beating myself up about how maybe I didn't really teach them how to cite and it's all my fault, and I'm a horrible vindictive person and I'm ruining their careers, etc etc. But I've been talking about citation all semester. If they don't get it yet, well....

And I've posted my comp grades, which means that I now have a couple of disappointed/angry students emailing me to know why they did so poorly. Their grades are perfectly justified, but I have to go back and look them up and email them and just generally face a lot of unpleasantness.

At least the utterly lousy weather of the last few days is finally blowing over.

Okay. I need to start thinking about facing my final batch of papers (which should be better and less plagiarized, thank God). And I need to think about next week, when it will all be over and everyone will be GONE and I can think about other things.