Now this is a garden blog: Front yard wildflowers

We have what one might call a "project yard."

We live in the woods, on land with lots of pine trees and seriously depleted, rocky, sandy soil. My husband has taken on the project of growing food-producing plants (fruit trees, raspberries, blueberries, tomatoes, asparagus, herbs) to supplement our lavish CSA.

I've taken on the project of beautification.

I'm not a particularly patient, knowledgeable, or experienced gardener, so my method mostly involves planting things that are supposed to be really hardy, seeing what survives, and then buying more of the same. Sometimes I plant stuff too close together (hello, catmint!), and sometimes the heights or colors don't make much sense. But whatever; my theory is that, like my dissertation did, this garden will come together somehow and eventually be complete.

Luckily, the previous owner planted enormous beds of wildflowers, which I love and which dramatically reduce the amount of work that the yard needs.

So for today's post, I'm going to show you some pictures of the front yard over the last 6 weeks--sort of a time-lapse of its blooming.

April 10, with rainbow: Looking out the front door of our house

April 16: Neighbor's forsythia, snow, nothing much in our yard

May 9, for Pete's sake: some green in our garden; forsythia still going strong

May 21: May apples and day lilies are up

June 10: Lots of tall green business and things are starting to bloom in our yard. Neighbor's rhododendron in full swing. View is from to the left of the front door.

June 14: Looking back from the driveway towards the house.

June 21: Daisies getting ready to bloom. I don't know what the little brightly colored flowers are, but they're everywhere and gorgeous. (Close-up to follow in subsequent post.) View is looking left from the front porch.

June 28: Daisies!

June 29: Much-needed rain and the tiger lilies. That's my kid in the tiger-lily-colored shirt.

Monthly Greening: Shampoo and conditioner

As a sort of New Year's Resolution, I thought that I would try adopting one new effort at living in a more environmentally conscious way every month.

We already do a good bit--we compost; we heat with wood almost exclusively (and live in a very heavily forested area, where this is in fact sustainable); nearly all of our vegetables and many of our fruits come either from our own garden or our year-round CSA; etc. But I'm always interested in trying new ways of living a little more lightly--and am also always conscious, of course, of the many ways in which we do tread heavily on the earth (the necessity of owning two cars and driving to work, traveling by air a few times a year, usw.).

But no effort is wasted, right?

Anyway, it makes more sense, it seems to me, to share these efforts, in the hopes that one or two other people might pick them up and that they'll have a bigger impact than if I'm just doing them alone (or coercing my family into joining me).

January was a bit of a bust, though. I still blame the flu for that. I did finally buy a laundry-drying rack so that we can air out small loads by the fire instead of using the drier (and one of this summer's adaptations will be finally put up a clothesline! I loved the clothesline at our old house).

And I'm coming in rather under the wire for February, I realize. But I did try out something new today!

As of today, I'm experimenting with (and hopefully adopting) A Good (Enough) Woman's baking-soda-shampoo and apple-cider-vinegar-conditioner technique. In short: a tea/tablespoonful of baking soda in about a cup of water, dumped over the head as shampoo; and the vinegar for conditioner. That's it! She also recommends using a little baking soda for a facial cleanser, which I'm trying, too (I can't really justify what I've been spending on facial cleansers, given that I'm not sure that they do anything).

So far, so good: my hair feels clean and soft and doesn't have too much of a vinegar smell. And now I need to think of something for March! (Any suggestions?)

Macabre musings on New Year's Eve

Ever since becoming a grown-up--by which I mean, since turning 35; or, more acutely, since turning 40; and, even more acutely, since the despair induced by the 2016 elections--I've been pretty un-keen on the turning of the year. The passing of time. The reminders of age, transience, and mortality. I look at my hilarious brilliant five-and-a-half-year-old son, and I can't bear to think of him growing too old, too soon, you know? And--more to the point--I can't bear to think of myself grown old-old, the world failing through the travails of global climate change, und so weiter und so weiter etc.

Why?

I mean, yes, death. Not much fun to contemplate. In the end I do think that it's the work of life to come to terms with death, something that seems more urgent yearly, if not daily. This is the call, for me, to practice, to meditate, to deepen. I don't do it much; certainly not enough. Every year, it's a resolution. Every year, it fails. Will this one succeed?

Because otherwise, the passage of time yields little to fear--at least, if experience is the measure. I'm really happy with where my life is. I have a lovely little family. I love my job, and it looks like I might secure tenure this year (so far, so good). I love where I live. I have a wonderful yoga studio that's also a kind of spiritual sanctuary for me. (And there's church, of course, where my husband pastors, which makes it a little bit unusual and peculiar, but that's generally good, too.) I'm increasingly physically fit (although my weight has gone up! Wtf? Vowing not to worry about this, too. Muscle mass, I tell myself). My son is thriving, and more astonishing by the day.

So the years have been kind, very kind. And really, I wouldn't go back in time, certainly not to the fun-but-also-weirdly-horrible 20s, or the better-but-professionally-frustrating 30s. And the political situation? It has the feel of something that must be confronted, and pushed through. May we come out stronger in the end.

Death is its own thing. I'm working on it.

Happy new year, everyone.

I Love Gracious Writers

So this is pretty fantastic:

Yesterday afternoon, I was preparing to teach the first day of a new book in my big lecture class (we started it today). And so I popped over to the author's website. It says that she lives in this particular half of my state.

Huh, I thought. I wonder if she's nearby?

A White Pages search revealed that yes, she is very nearby! Like a 15-minute drive away!

So I wrote her an email, which I had to revise about 35 times to make it sound sufficiently respectful and not pushy; I wound up with something like, "I would love to invite you to speak to my class next year, when I teach the book again. (I realize that it's probably far too late to invite you for this year, but, if you're free in the next week and a half, we would love to have you.)"

Yes, I went for the cowardly parenthetical. I almost added another parenthetical explaining and apologizing for the first parenthetical, but I stopped myself. Thankfully. Hyper-self-conscious meta-writing is sorta my thing, but sometimes it just isn't appropriate.

And she wrote back! And asked for dates and times!

And now she's coming to my class next Wednesday!

How cool is that? Bonus cool: That's one less day I have to prep! Plus my TA is lecturing on Monday! So basically I'm done lecturing for the semester, a whole week early!!

I Have Become Obsessed with NaNoWriMo

And that's pretty much all that I've been doing this month.

The end.

Music for the ages

I first saw this on Flavia's blog, back when we were all writing rather more regularly. It's absolutely necessary today, as Reformation Sunday and the 500th anniversary of the theses is upon us. Actually, no, it's just necessary because it's so outrageously well done; no occasion necessary.

I got 95 theses and the pope ain't one

"It's not even fair"

--The words of my five-year-old upon the cancellation of this morning's playdate, which was to afford me and TM both 3 hours of uninterrupted work time.

Sure isn't. But the sitter is sick; no one is culpable. We'll go to a playground with his friend, maybe. But ohhh, what a boon those three hours would have been. Two blog posts down--in February--I complained about a dissertation that I was reading. Well, the final draft is in, and it's almost 300 pages long--mostly single-spaced, at that. I started it yesterday, and it's not bad in substance so far, but it's going to take me an absurdly long time to get through it, and...I don't wanna.

So...maybe I'm not so sorry about losing the time, after all?

Working from bed today

It's been a long first half of the semester. No real problems, or anything, but I'm teaching an extra one-credit course and I'm on way too many committees, most of which have long meetings on Friday afternoons or during my lunch break on Mondays, and I've been pushing myself hard on all fronts.

Or I was, until a few weeks ago, I guess. I submitted both my second book manuscript and my tenure file on the same day in early October--not a coincidence, as I wanted to say in my tenure materials that the book was under review. Up until that point, I was a highly organized and efficient machine, working steadily on the manuscript (and the tenure stuff as needed) and getting everything else done in the margins of that. Successfully, I might add. And I was running three times a week, plus yoga twice a week, and the house stuff.

Since the submission of those materials, I've been at a bit of a loose end. More than a bit. My work seems like a series of small, uninteresting tasks: grade these, answer this, write up that, read this. There's no sense of a coherent, driving project underneath it all. I have an article that I'm working on in the mot desultory way imaginable, and I can't really put pressure on myself to move that forward any faster, all things considered.

So I decided to do NaNoWriMo, just to have a Project. Kind of a silly reason, but I've had a half an idea for a novel for a while now, and why not? Whenever I've written long-form fiction (twice in my life, really), I've done it in big binges: a 200k novel in 6 months, a 90k novel in 56 days when I was on the job market for the first time. I don't know how much I'll actually get done--and I've allowed myself to start a few days early, because I'm sure that I won't write every day--but what the hell, after all. It's not like I need to write something for tenure right now.

Oh, and the title of the post: I'm home sick today. I'm not sure whether I'm sick, but I very likely am, or getting there; anyway I sure don't feel well, and I've been sleeping just terribly for a lot of reasons, so this is a day that's been long in the making, and I need it. Also, my TA will cover my discussion section (I'll grade some of his papers in return). Luxury indeed.

Sometimes one must complain

This is one of those times.

Trivial aggravation: I'm reading this dissertation and it's not really bad, exactly--in fact, the student knows a tremendous amount and is impressively erudite--but it's just driving me crazy, because none of the 80-page chapters seem to have a central argument and the writing is frankly rather purple and why do all the critics have to be praised as "erudite" or "insightful" when they're introduced? and there are all manner of unsubstantiated claims being made--claims that plausibly could be substantiated, but they're not, so I need to keep commenting, and the commenting slows me down in doing a task that is already just boring because, again, I don't know what the central argument is.

A thesis is just so damn important.

And then you need to stay on topic, too. There's that.

This student is quite lovely in all other ways, and is not particularly interested in a research career, so the thing doesn't have to be publishable. It'll be defendable, in the end, with revision.

And s/he's done his/her research. And knows like six languages, so that's cool.

But OH MY GOD I have 48 pages to go and it's just...so...tiresome.

/end rant of the privileged.

(This is my Saturday night.)

And then of course there's politics

Other than this morning's rather chipper remarks about my upcoming semester, I haven't posted since well before the election.

And then the election happened, and I couldn't bear to write for a while.

And then it seemed like there was too much to say.

So I'm not just ignoring it, although it looks that way here. I marched on Saturday. I've sent postcards. I may volunteer for the statewide women's political caucus (ideally after July...). I've donated or pledged more money this year than I've ever given before, and I have plans for more. (Next up: donating to a domestic violence shelter in "honor" of Super Bowl Sunday.)

But I think that this could be a very good time for my scholarship, because it has come to feel like a refuge from the political world. When the news overwhelms me, I open a chapter draft and dive in.

Lemons, lemonade (she said somewhat cynically).

And may the revolution bring us all some giant bubble fun.

How the Semester is Shaping Up

Quick comparison:

• Last semester, I had 111 students in one class (I was responsible for grading the work of 24 of them) and 14 in the other.
• This semester, I have 5 students in my grad class--two of whom are auditing, and therefore not writing papers--and 4 in my undergrad class.
• Last semester, I had complicated assignments: required journals in the smaller class, optional journals + a lot of papers + exams in the bigger class.
• This semester, the pendulum has swung the other way and I have very simple assignment structures.
• Thus whereas last semester I graded more than 600 journal entries, 150 papers, and 36 exams, this semester I will grade a total--a TOTAL--of 14 papers.
  
• Last semester, I gave a talk in March and a paper at Kalamazoo (in May)
• This semester, I am serving as a respondent at a conference in March, then presenting papers at Kalamazoo (May), Berks (June), another conference (June), and ACLA (July).
  
• Oh, and it's the last semester before I go up for tenure, so I'm pushing hard to get my book in near-submittable shape.

Somehow I think that this semester is going to be busier than last.

Still, I'm pretty psyched about the grading thing.

Little writing update

I haven't been keeping up with my writing goal counter very well lately, in part because most of my writing has been a) on articles, or b) not contributing to my word count (e.g. REWRITING a chapter, which is now 1000 words SHORTER than it used to be).

However, I just tallied up my manuscript, and I've got 85,000 words.

So that's 5,000 shy of my goal for the year.

Which means that, pretty soon, and maybe even almost now, I'm going to have to direct my attention quite fully on replacing all of the wrong words (approx. 78,000) with the right ones.

The Boomerang/Zombie/Indefatigably Persistent Article

Uggghhhh.

I finally heard back from the 4.5-month R&R journal on Monday (the second day of our lovely beach vacation). There was no mention of what the reviewers thought of my extensive revisions. HOWEVER, there is now a THIRD reviewer, who recommends R&R with a whole DIFFERENT set of concerns!

OK, that's worse than it sounds. It is an R&R. It is promised to be the final R&R. And the concerns are primarily about clarity. To which I say, fair enough--although I haven't looked at my article since I sent it off in early April, I've been really struggling with and working through the ideas that it's developing, so lack of clarity is a real possibility.

On the bright side, Reviewer 3 appreciated my mastery of the secondary literature, much of which is in a language that I'm not very comfortable with and that I spent all of the spring semester slogging through. So that's something. In fact, I'm pretty pleased about that.

Initially, though, I wasn't pleased. I had that sinking feeling of rejection all afternoon, despaired of earning tenure, etc. Why does an R&R feel so crummy?

In this case, I'm also just out of patience with this dumb article (which isn't really dumb, I don't think, and which is the exploration piece for my second book, so I need it to be acceptable--and accepted). Here's it's history:

• Spring/summer 2011: Article drafted.
• August 2011: Submitted to Big Journal 1.
• September 2011: Summarily rejected by Big Journal (BJ) 1.
• January 2012: MLA talk given on radically revised version of argument.
• January 2012-May 2013: Article completely ignored (by me).
• May 2013: Acknowledgement (by me) that article is total crap, but that MLA essay had something going for it.
• July 2013: Dramatically revised article (arguing the opposite position of its previous incarnation) sent to BJ 2.
• January 2014: Query sent to BJ 2. Editor had misplaced submission. Editor sends it to a colleague, who reports that it isn't "sharp enough." BJ 2 rejection.
• November 2014: Radically revised/rewritten article submitted to BJ 3.
• February 2015: BJ 3 rejects article--accompanied, this time, by a thoughtful, detailed reader's report. Progress! But reviewer doesn't buy the argument.
• Fall 2015: Article is now taking a totally different approach. Maybe 5% of original draft is still in there, mostly in the footnotes. Sent to writing group, who offers helpful advice.
• December 2015: Submitted to BJ 4.
• January 2016: First R&R from BJ 4.
• January-April 2016: Agony, struggles, rewriting, etc. Resubmitted.

And here we are. Problems solved: The argument is no longer alienating my readers, and I have accounted for the secondary literature. All of it (or so it seems).

Soooo, tomorrow, I will print my essay and start the new revisions. I HAVE TO FINISH THIS F^%#@*$ER.

How Long?

So I'm in this really annoying limbo right now with two journals, both of whom gave me revise-and-resubmit verdicts, and both of whom have now been looking at my revisions for some time.

OK, in one case, it's been about a month. But it's been four and a half months in the other, so the second journal is suffering (in my mind) from the sins of the first--I simply can't deal with not hearing about EITHER ONE for ONE MORE DAY (something that I've been saying to myself for weeks and weeks now, of course).

Anyway. No substance, no plot, no resolution. I'm just getting impatient. (And I did contact the 4.5-month journal a few weeks ago. The editor sent my email along to another editor. And I wait.)

It's Just My Ovary!

--by which I mean, not something in my ovary, but literally my ovary, which, for reasons that are not at all dangerous or pathology-related, is in a somewhat funny place (atop my somewhat funny-shaped uterus, whose funny shape is also neither dangerous nor the result of something pushing on it).

This was what the radiologist told me; I won't hear from the doctor until tomorrow, so it isn't official, but I'm pretty sure that I can sleep easily tonight.

So, well, sorry for the panic!

It's Probably Nothing

I just got back from the doctor's office for my annual exam.

I have a new doctor, of course, because I just moved here a year ago. I like her, and my impression is that she's very thorough.

So as she was feeling around on the outside of my stomach and abdomen, she thought that she felt something.

It could be food. It could be stool. It could be a cyst. And it could be worse.

Now I'm filling my bladder with water in preparation for an ultrasound. I should hear back from the doctor with the results tomorrow-ish.

It's probably nothing. I'd just eaten lunch an hour or so previously, and I've had cysts before, and I've had pap smears annually and they've always been normal.

But I'm still scared.

Okay, Full Disclosure

So I was thinking about it, and my last couple of posts have this "My Life Is Perfect" rosiness to them that even I find a little loathsome. And it's not entirely accurate. So this is intended as a partial corrective to that...

...because there are definitely days when I'm cranky and sluggish because it's hot and humid and our air conditioner is broken, or my research seems stupid and boring, or my four-year-old's incessant whining is driving me up the wall--seriously, he whines over things that are in no conceivable way problems! He'll be like, "Mamaaaaa, I want to play with my traiiiinnnn," and I'm all, "It's right there--go play with it already. And stop whining." Followed, of course, by an exasperated sigh and maybe a little grumbling. Perfection is pretty well out of the game.

But I'm trying--not for perfection, but for peace and presence. It is an aspiration, after all.

Quiet Aspirations

In yoga, we often do a pose called Aspiring Warrior. (It's also called by various other names, such as Reverse Warrior, Sun Warrior, etc.) In this posture, you stand with your legs wide apart, the toes of (say) your right foot pointing straight ahead and with your left foot turned in, your right knee bent at a 90 degree angle and your left straight. Your hips face forward--wow, okay, describing yoga poses is hard. Here's a picture:

(https://goodatlife.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/reversewarrior_27.jpg)

It's a posture in which your legs are very strong--indeed, often very tired--and your upper body leans back and over with, hopefully, a surprising lightness. It's quite a lovely pose and fun to do, I think. Most of the time.

My quick image search revealed that most people call this Reverse Warrior, and that's the name that it had in most of my classes, too. My current teachers call it Aspiring Warrior, however, and I've come to like that; it shifts the focus away from the militant connotations of the Warrior and into the idea of aspiration, of yearning and seeking, that the posture entails.

A few weeks ago, as we were moving into the pose, my teacher asked, "What is your aspiration?" It was a question that she'd asked before, but it struck me differently on that day, six weeks into summer. What is my aspiration? At that moment, it hit me: It wasn't to publish more, or be more, or anything like that. It was to live my life--specifically, my life this summer. To live the summer. To be here, to feel it, experience it, enjoy it. To live more.

So I've done a few things. When I'm not too tired (and this flexibility, in itself, is quite remarkable for me), I get up early and meditate on the deck for half an hour, with the sun already high at 6 am and the birds clattering all over the forest. Then I read until the house wakes up, maybe with a cup of tea in my new birch-bark teacup from the recent craft festival.

The deck, with zafu

My cup. Isn't it pretty?

That's one thing. I'm trying some other stuff, too: spending more time on the deck at all times of day, taking naps when I can, doing fun outdoors things with my son (and sometimes even my husband!). Paying attention. Being there.

I have no illusions, really, about the likelihood of my keeping all of this up come fall. But it would be nice to borrow a few summertime habits during the semester. And maybe, simply by making them habits, I'll be able to do that.

Um...a (technical) question

According to Blogger, as of sometime last month, my blog has been receiving over 1000 hits a day. This is up from, you know, 50-75 when I actually post something. (Note that, before Friday, I had last posted about 6 weeks ago.)

I can't imagine that this is accurate. Anyone have any insights into this? Or has Blogger's viewing counter gone haywire?

On my writing goal for the year

In updating (after a long break, as you can see) my Writing Goal 2016! box in the margin over there, I noticed a month-old comment from Flavia asking where I came up with my goal. (I'm trying not to apologize anymore for being such a terrible blogger, but wow, I'm a terrible blogger.)

Flavia asked how I decided on 80 days at 500 words/day or 40,000 words for the year. Those words are all on my book manuscript, by the way, so the gaps don't mean that I haven't been writing--just that I've been writing and working on other things (such the Article That Will Not Go Away And Stay Away, By Which I Mean Get Published).

The answer is not particularly scientific. As of January 1, I had written, I think, about 50,000 words of this manuscript. Many of them are the wrong words, but they are, at least, words.

In my wildest dreams (yes, I'm that crazy!!), I will finish this MS in 2016.

A good length for a monograph is 90,000 words. Hence: 40,000 to go.

As for the 80 days/500 a day? Well, 500 a day seems like a reasonable clip (on average), and not too intimidating. At that rate, it'll be 80 days of writing. Out of 366 (it's a leap year!), 80 is not very many at all--hardly 1 in 5 days. So when you put it that way, I have no excuse for not finishing the book this year--except for all that pesky, you know, reading and research and thinking and stuff that also has to go into it. Also revising. I have had days when I've worked and written a lot and only added 12 words to the word count (or even had it go down)--don't we all?

So that's that. I'm afraid that the answer isn't terribly exciting.

But maybe this is more interesting?: Breaking the book down into words and days is part of an overall project of re-framing how I see academic writing, and just making it into part of my daily work. This past semester, I think that I managed to write--not just read, but write, even if it was only to revise a sentence or two--on all but two work days, from January through early May. I've never even come close to doing that before. And I did it by making the writing work much more concrete: creating endless lists of very specific tasks, keeping track of the time that I spend working, using an accountability check-in website (as well as my own chart and even, to a much lesser extent, this blog), talking to other people about my work. I think that I'm succeeding in making it a thing that I do, rather than a big scary amorphous hovering threat.

Of course, this is the first day that I've managed to do any writing since before Kalamazoo. I was on a week-long research trip, then two weeks of vacation (of sorts) with my husband and son, and we got back late on Wednesday night. So today is my 40th birthday, and one of the things that I asked for was a couple of hours to work...and I got it, and I did! (See sidebox.) Now I think that I'll read something academic and wait for the guys to come home bearing lunch.