Settling In

I expected Bonaventure to have some adjustment problems as we started our new lives here in Idyll. And he did, a little--especially when I started spending whole days in the office, back in early September, he would be alternately surly and needy with me in the evenings. And he woke up a little more at night for a while, too; he's still not a champion all-night sleeper (and in fact he now comes up to our bed at around 4 or 5 am--please don't judge; sometimes I let him stay), but he's more or less back to normal.

What I didn't expect, for some reason, was that I would have adjustment issues, too.

At this point--a little over a month into the semester (and somehow already having midterms?!)--I'm feeling like myself again. But things were strange for a little while. Of course, while change can be exciting, changing everything at once is a little bit much.

And the change has been pretty dramatic. We're 1200 miles from our old house; we're closer to family; I'm in a job in the same field but with very different expectations; TM is in a whole new field; Bonaventure is in all-day nursery school for the first time (4 days a week); and we have to drive everywhere, when we used to walk. Even the landscape is different:

Fig. 1: down the street from my first apartment (and last house, actually; they were half a block apart) in Field Town

Fig. 2: the view from my bedroom window in Idyll

Anyway, by now I'm feeling acclimated, more or less. Overwhelmed with work, as always, but it's interesting work, at least for now. I'm on two dissertation committees and a master's exam committee, for students who are doing neat things and from whom I'll learn something. I'm involved in a seminar series that will kick my ass. I'm preparing my first graduate seminar. It's cool. And every day I feel a little less like I'm frankly out of my league, and a little more like this is my new, good life.

Oh, and we DID close on our house--in time to move in the weekend before classes started. Had I not mentioned that?

If if if

IF the seller of the house that we by all rights should have been inhabiting for two weeks now is NOT in the psychiatric ward of the hospital on Wednesday, we will have a place to live.

I am out of hoping energy.

Things Aren't Looking Up

But at least we're in New State.

In a hotel.

With two cats and a three-year-old.



Sigh.

Holding Pattern

That's the nice way to put it.

Other ways of expressing our current state would be limbo, suspense, empty void of unknowing, and purgatory.

We're at my mother's house--still. The plan was to leave Field State on the 28th, after closing (check!), go to visit friends in Northern City for 2 days (done!), take a two-day visit to Northern Beach (yep!), then drive out to Mom's for about 3 weeks, with a break in the middle to go to New State and then to In-Laws' to pick up the cats. (New State--visited! Benefits package received! Cats--collected!) And then, we were to close on our new house on the 18th and move in and be sort of mostly unpacked by now.

Well! That didn't happen. Maybe it'll happen on Monday. Maybe it won't. WHO KNOWS????

Here's what happened:

We got a call on the morning of Monday, the 17th--right about the time that I was thinking, Hooray! We move tomorrow! No more living out of a suitcase! Etc.!

It was our realtor.

The seller hadn't opened the doors for the moving company that morning. Eventually, the police were called. It turned out that she had attempted suicide and was in the hospital.

That's one for the books, eh?


 

Anyway, she has physically recovered and was discharged on Thursday, with plans to move out on Saturday so that we can move in on Monday, even though we might not be able to close until Tuesday (apparently there's a legal way for that to work out). However, she wasn't returning her lawyer's calls yesterday, so who knows whether she'll authorize the movers to come in today?

I am expending all of my hopeful, anxious thinking today wishing her well, hoping that she is safe and able to move forward--and out. And also thinking, Oh my God I have classes to prep! Books to locate and unpack! Meetings next week! And Bonaventure's school is about to start! WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DOOOOO?????

Foo. Fleeing the state was all too easy, wasn't it. 

Life among the Boxes

We move a week from tomorrow. Our Pods arrive today. (One is already here, in fact--I had to move the car to the street because it's pretty much blocking the driveway.)

I'm almost wishing that I felt more ambivalent about leaving Field Town, but frankly I'm impatient. We've already had our going-away party, and then on Saturday I went to a (former) colleague's going-away party, and it's all starting to feel redundant. We've been doing the "Oh-I'm-sure-I'll-see-you-again" thing, knowing that in most cases, we won't; this helps to soften the blow, but by now, I more or less just want to disappear. Good-byes should only be so long.

But Field has been so important in my life: my first faculty position, meeting my husband, my child's hometown. Eight years! I was only in graduate school for seven.

And will I ever come back? We say yes, but we know (and say among ourselves) that it's unlikely. The town is two and a half hours from the nearest big city, and the possibility of even visiting said city is pretty remote--most of the people that we know there have moved away by now. And, at least until there's a change in administration, we both want very little to do with Field College proper from here on out. That's not a good feeling, by the way. I hate it that our relationship with our former employer has soured, due to--well--meanness. Quite simply.

Anyway. So much to look forward to! The three-week gap between closing on our Field house and closing on our New house is going to be a bit unwieldy, but we'll spend a few days with friends, a few days at the (Midwestern) beach, and time with both of our families. And then: Moving in! Our great new house! My great new job!

Seriously. When I can see through all the mini-crises and the stress (our [current] house appraised at less than the sale price! the seller of our [new] house was refusing to sign the contract! Bonaventure hasn't had some obscure screening that's required for his new nursery school! etc!), I marvel at my good fortune. I hit the freaking jackpot.*

*I may be speaking too soon, of course; who knows what politics and weirdness await? All jobs have politics and weirdness, after all. HOWEVER: 65% salary increase + 50% teaching reduction = awesomeness no matter how you slice it. Not to mention reducing the distance between me and my family from 15 hours of driving to 2.

Survivor: Moving Edition

We got our moving estimate today, and it was a little over twice what NewU will contribute. (More money might be available, but it also might not, so I'm not going to count on it.) I was pretty floored. We live modestly, I think, in a 1300 sf two-bedroom house; we're getting rid of our dining room set; we have only one pretty lightweight couch and no entertainment stuff (TV, "entertainment center," etc.); and so on. Now, we do have a Vespa and a small (50 lb.) boat, so those add a little weight--but still. How on earth do we have an estimated 12,000 pounds of stuff?

So we're looking a little bit at other moving companies, but without a great deal of hope. And we're figuring out how to lighten our load.

One of our strategies will be to fill our little car with all the small-but-heavy items: cast-iron skillets, the marble top of a small table, the blender and food processor bases, TM's collection of antique weights for his scale (purchased in Paris, no less. OK, maybe I can start to see how we live heavily...).

The second strategy is to ditch as much of our stuff as we can.

We've already had a yard sale and, between that and a carload to the thrift store and a hefty clothing donation to the foster-care organization a friend works for, we've gotten rid of nearly all of Bonaventure's baby stuff (my pangs of ambivalence about this went away entirely when I learned how much the move will cost), an absurdly heavy and pretty ugly coffee table ($2!), a superfluous desk, a file cabinet, our spare iron, and four boxes of books. But the purging must continue.

I'm working on getting rid of more books; I have old translations of Russian novels that are probably more readable in more recent translations (and they're in dingy paperback form, so there's no real reason to be attached to these copies except that I read them once), and I'm working on getting rid of novels that I probably won't read again and could get at any public library if I decide that I must. So that's a start.

But what about:

1. sweaters that I don't really wear much, or at all, but that I knit myself?
2. art books that don't much interest me but were gifts and probably expensive? and that I might be interested in one day? (yeah right)
3. our second copies of Wheelock's Latin textbook and the JACT Reading Greek series? Isn't it true that TM and I vitally need our own copies of each?
4. the second pizza paddle, which is a little too small for a proper pizza but might hypothetically come in handy? (and that weighs about 3 ounces?)
5. all the CDs that I bought in high school? (I got rid of the cases several moves ago.)
6. the five Harry Potter books that I own, three of them in hardback?
7. VHS tapes?
8. audio cassettes?
9. a speaker set and subwoofer when one of the speakers seems to be broken, and we don't know whether it's fixable? (It's not even our main speaker set.)
10. leftover fancy paper used to print the final copy of our dissertations (in, let's recall, 2007)?

And this is just what occurs to me right now.  Discuss and vote, please.

In all of this, of course, I am at once inspired and horrified by Notorious Ph.D.'s recent, drastic purging of everything. (Horrified not by her actions, but rather by the thought of doing the same myself. And also inspired by the same thought. It's a dangerous temptation.)

Everything costs money

• Daycare enrollment: $534 deposit
• First round of earnest money on new house: $500
• Inspection of new house, including radon and radon-in-the-water testing: $835
• Anticipated closing costs on current house: $534, plus we've agreed to pay the buyer's share (including inspections) to the tune of about $1100
• Ice cream to celebrate selling the house: $10.24

I think that's it for today.

(And we're selling the house without an agent, so really, we're saving something along the lines of $8000--also, we got our asking price, provided we cover the buyer's closing costs! So while the out-of-pocket feels pretty intense right now, everything is going as well as could be expected. Thank goodness we have the cash to cover all the little things. Especially the ice cream.)

Remiss

I know, I know. I say I'll blog, and I don't blog. It's crazytown.

Anyway, just a quick update:

-We found a house in New State. It's lovely and costs more than twice what our current house did. But our current house, which is lovely and perfect, was absurdly cheap (we paid $119,500), so I'm not complaining. Plus, the bank thinks we (I) can afford it.

-We are meeting with a prospective buyer for our house IN SIX MINUTES. Wish us luck, everyone.

-Pretty well settled on full-time, four-day-a-week care for our son. We visited the nursery school, and it's wonderful. Plus, it's on my new campus!

-The tiresome awfulness of Field College continues. Just wanting this matter resolved. And I can't say anything at all about it until it is resolved, so that will have to do for an update on the issue for now.

Carry on, everyone.

OMG paint. PAINT!

I've been painting walls.

Five rooms down. One to go.

We move in less than two weeks.

!!!!!!!!!!!

In related news, I now have the coolest bathroom EVER. Gothic cathedral theme, anyone?


(Apologies for incoherence. Once we've actually moved in--LESS THAN TWO WEEKS!!!--there will be pictures. And someday I might have a thought in my head again; right now, all I yearn for is an end to classes and an end to painting.)

(I do miss blogging, I think. There will be more of it in the future.)

Where I was and where I am

I spent Memorial Day weekend in the vicinity of


And this week I am alternately vacuuming up dead faux ladybugs and painting the new living room a startlingly bright orange. We move on Monday. Have I started packing? No! Hurrah!

Oh, and today we discovered Reason No. 4 that we're happy we didn't buy the place (not that we were planning to): The water heater has an enormous rusty leak in the bottom. When the plumber says that a leak is "the worst [he's] ever seen," you're glad that you don't own the damn house. Hurrah again!

Anyway, this is just to say that I am both too busy and too boring to be posting anything of substance (insofar as I ever post anything of substance. In fact, I do believe that I have used this very parenthetical more than once before). Pictures of painted rooms may come, with TM's consent (it's his house too, after all).

Grading, Grading, Over the Bounding Main

How did this happen? How am I grading again?

Oh well. By Wednesday, it will all be over. It must be over. I am not taking grading to Kalamazoo.

In other news, we found a house. It is less adorable than my house, alas, but it's a good size and has reasonable rent (about $125 less than our combined rents), a big yard, and loads of storage--a huge attic AND a basement. (Not that our boxes and few suitcases need all of that room, but it's nice to know that if something doesn't fit into the house proper, we'll have a place--or rather places--to put it.) We move in on June 1. I can't wait to paint!

Now, can I do four more papers tonight? That would mean that I could spend some serious time tomorrow on my paper, which is coming along but not quite...there, yet. Gah.

*An image search for this title yielded a picture of something called "graded bedding." I don't know what it means, but my vote is YES.

Not dead yet

I don't know why I haven't blogged in so long, and this isn't going to be a long post, either. I think that my last post sort of paralyzed me, blog-wise, because on the one hand I figured I should answer Maude's question re. proposal and ring (it's my grandmother's, by the way, so we had to wait a little while for it to arrive in the mail--it came with documentation from 1932! Perhaps I will show you later); on the other, I had work-related stuff going on that could have been interestingly bloggable; on the third, I felt that, while it would be weird for me to completely ignore the engagement business, I also felt an obscure pressure to blog something more academic. And so, in a triumphantly decisive gesture, I blogged nothing.

I was also absurdly busy last week: on-campus writing contest, guest writer visit (dinner and lecture), insanely important person's visit to campus (there were snipers leaning out of the window of the office next to mine, I kid you not; and also, the maintenance people painted all the peeling windowpanes), and then an overnight conference trip with a dozen or so undergrads (we got back last night amid rain and wind). Today there was a huge pile of snow on top of all the daffodils, so I stayed in quite happily, reading Virginia Woolf in my bathrobe and taking a lovely nap. Now the snow is mostly melted and I'm bracing myself for the next absurdly busy week. In fact, all of the remaining five weeks of the semester promise to be absurdly busy. If only the absurdity were of the amusing kind.

And summer will be busy, too, but in a more fun way: Kalamazoo, followed by a long lingering six weeks of watching the garden grow, then a trip out east, a month in France, and then about 2.5 weeks before we go back east for the wedding. Meanwhile, we'll also be looking for a place to live, and God knows when we'll actually move in together.

It's ironic: I know married couples who have to live apart because of their careers, but we'll be living apart because of (ahem) our gardens. I mean, the tomatoes will continue fruitful through most of September. We wouldn't want to miss that, would we?

(Actually, what we might do is move in together in mid-August or September or whenever, and then either keep our leases through September or try to work out a deal with the new tenants. What problems we have, indeed.)

Enough for now. I need to go to bed, where I will try to convince myself that another Spring Break begins upon the morrow....

Oh! And thank you, everyone, for all the lovely kind wishes! I agree with Crazy--being able to share good news makes blogging great. You made me smile, a lot. Thanks!

The Smallest House in the World, in Pictures!

The house, it is finished! The pictures, they are uploaded! The file sizes, they are reduced!

Above, you see the front of the house. Isn't it cute? The owners tell me that it was built sometime around 1920.



In this picture you can see all the four colors of paint that I used. This is from the living room looking into the hallway; the bedroom is on the left and the orange bathroom (which came out really well) is on the right.

The kitchen, in its original beige. It's tiny. The appliances and cabinetry are behind me, so you can't see them, but they aren't all that interesting anyway.



The living room. I truly love the round doorways.


And the bedroom, with my extraordinarily sumptuous--bordering on brothel-like--bedding!

Okay! I am officially done talking about my move and new house. I've even sort of been working this week, so it's possible that someday I'll say something of interest to someone other than myself.

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.

Why I'm Glad to Be Moving

From 1:30 to 4:30 this morning, my neighbors argued over whose turn it was to plunge the toilet.

Seriously.

How do I know this?

Because, owing to paper-thin floors/ceilings/stairways, I was AWAKE.

Goodness

(Time to bump the maudlin down from Position 1, I say.)

Thing I am happy about.

1. Although it's currently 41 degrees out and rainy with no foreseeable improvement in the near future, and although the leaves have not yet begun their unfurl, there are little flowers here and there, the grass is noticeably greener, and the birdsong these last few weeks has been phenomenal. I have, on my own, learned to identify the warble of the cardinal, and I am infallible in my cardinallocation. Having lived in urbanish environments for so long, I hadn't realized just how happy birds' singing makes me. The coinage "cardinallocation" is also pleasing.
2. School ends in just under 2 weeks. What with peer workshop days and a library resource day, I only have 11 preps to go. And two of those won't really count because they'll be for the last day of class, when we don't have to do much of anything, and 2 more will be negligible because of course evaluations. So there are really only 7 discrete preps to go.
3. I'm teaching some truly awesome courses next year. One is the senior capstone seminar and I get to do whatever I want, so I'm doing some serious medievalist shit which will be awesome, according to me. I don't know how the students will feel, but since they're all senior majors and I know most of them and they're mostly quite good (and they mostly like me, I think), they'll deal and should be fun to work with. The other awesome course is a one-credit honors seminar--it only meets for 50 minutes/week and shouldn't be too taxing--on a topic that I've sort of fantasized about teaching for a long time. So while this means that technically I'll be teaching 5 classes in the fall, I think that I'm okay with it.
   
4. I'm being semi-groomed to take on an administrative-type post next year which would give me a course release. Plus it would be interesting and pretty great on the CV. It might not happen, since I'm so ridiculously new to the college and it's ultimately up to the dean, but apparently no one else wants this position (or any other position--the senior folks here are seriously overworked), so it might happen.
5. I've been reading the application packets for the search committee that I'm on, and the process is fascinating. It's a creative writing search, which helps--I get to read a lot of wonderful short stories and poems without having to think about how I'll teach them. I'm a little worried about getting the search wrapped up before my anticipated Fleeing the Scene date; however, I'm choosing to be optimistic.
6. And finally.... I'm moving! At the end of May! Into the Smallest House in the World! Yes--it's a house! A tiny little guest house. Approx. 650 square feet. TINY. But I thought it would go well with the Smallest College in the World (okay, not the smallest, but pretty damn small) and Tiny Field Town. It's all about miniaturization. What's great, though, is that it has a basement and a garage and a yard. And it is quite seriously adorable and hobbit-house-like (I will post pictures when I move, I promise!) Also, I will be driving all of my furniture and books and things out here in May, and it'll be great to have all my stuff again. I miss my stuff. Lately I've been thinking about my books--for some reason, I keep getting flashes of yearnings to pick up my Proust again; I'm about 5.5 volumes into a beautiful old edition that I've been reading on and off for years--and this makes me acutely conscious of how much I love having my little library around me. I also love setting up new living spaces; I'm quite good at making them nice and homey, if I say so myself.
   
7. Oh, and the Summer Trip of Mystery is still in the works, but I'm not ready to talk about it yet.

That's that. Now: Off to grade!

Adjusting

Okay. So I'm going to be open-minded. There will be things to like here, right? There are good things about every place. Right?

Here's the deal: My apartment is pleasant, light, quiet, and consoling. Everyone I've met is nothing but friendly. But the town...oh, the town. Field Town, I am disappointed in you.

What I'm realizing (in the 3 days that I've been here) is that there are certain things that I like to have nearby. Near enough to walk to, ideally. Or to bike to--but there's no bike shop in town, so even if there were these things in bikeable range, I wouldn't be able to get to them. These are the things that I like to the point of needing:

1. a yoga studio (or, at worst, a gym with yoga classes)
2. a decent grocery store or farmers' market
3. a bookstore (other than the campus bookstore, which only sells course books)
4. multiple restaurants
5. a pleasant place to have a drink
6. a nice cafe

There's a good-looking coffee shop not too far from me, so we've got #6 covered. But 1-5? Not so much. Not at all, actually. The only drugstore/general-store nearby is a CVS. The only grocery store is a major chain with no organic yogurt or vegetables and a sorry selection of cheeses. Main Street is littered with empty buildings. All of this--well, it depresses me. I'm seriously considering starting to make my own yogurt and cheese--but I need to take care not to get too ambitious, given the workload that's about to fall upon me.

It's a shame.

Last night, making dinner, I suddenly felt sad. More than that: I felt afraid. What if this was all a mistake? I wondered. What the hell, in fact, was I thinking? Moving all the way out here, away from everyone I care about and the lifestyle I'm used to (and love), for a short-term, middlingly-paid job that I'm not actually sure yet that I'll like? Am I insane? Is everyone secretly thinking, "Wow, that j, she sure made a nutty decision there"?

Then, of course, I thought about how many of my friends have done this exact same thing, for the same stakes and with all the same discomforts (some in far, far worse places), and I felt a little better.

--Sort of. Because just how bizarre is this profession, that we expect to have to live far away from our families, friends, and partners, going through exhausting moves year after year, often postponing having children, just in the hopes of one day being able to settle in approximately the part of the continent that we'd prefer? Or in the hopes of being able to settle somewhere, period?

I know that this is an old subject, and I don't have anything new to add; nor can I imagine a plausible solution. I've thought about this a lot before, too. But living it--well, it adds a certain reality to the madness. I know that I'll get used to this place, and will probably like it fine before the year is out. (Maybe I'll break down and get a car--surely all the things I want are within half an hour of here. And I used to walk half an hour to yoga, so what's the difference? Other than the fossil fuel consumption, of course.) Right now, though, it just seems crazy.

According to Plan

Well my goodness, y'all's've been busy. My bloglines are overloaded. And, since I'm writing this from a carrel in the paltry little Field College library (closed after 4:30 pm and on weekends during the summer), I'm unlikely to be caught up anytime soon: my internet won't be connected until Tuesday. Unless, that is, I get my office key before then...in which case I can use my office computer. No promises, though.

So everything went perfectly well, and by general consent this was the most organized move in the history of the world. It's true that I did accidentally put into storage one box that was supposed to come here, to Field Town, and that the cord for plugging in my printer has mysteriously gone missing, but all things considered--this was a 5-day move, involving 9 different people--I'm pretty pleased.

Driving is not scary, by the way. I'm so over my phobia. Hallelujah! I = a functional adult!!

It was really nice having my dad here for the last few days (he drove out with me--a two-day trip--and stayed until this morning). I actually felt a little weepy when he left; it was very comforting to have him around to help me get settled in. He's great with this kind of thing. He'll do things like decide that I need a hanging lamp over my kitchen table (with my consent, of course), then just go out and find me one--and, if we hadn't found one, he was prepared to make one for me. He also made me a big batch of his special, delicious granola to tide me over for a couple of weeks.

But now I'm here on my own, trying to figure out how my life is going to look for the next nine months or so.

My apartment, I like. It's the second floor of an old house, with its own entrance (which is nice) and a very grandmotherly little kitchen. I found a square wooden clock with three geese wearing blue ribbons around their necks on it in a thrift store ($1), contributing substantially to the grandmotherly look. I have somehow wound up with a twin bed (eh) and a huge la-z-boy recliner (complete with built-in cooler!), thanks to the scrounging efforts of my department chair. So the place is furnished, and comfortable, and could use some stuff on the walls. Today I need to get my email account working--in fact, I should do that right now--and then open a bank account.

That's enough for the moment. Apologies for the rather dull and disjointed post, but that's how I'm feeling today. More as I settle. And I'll try to get caught up on all your doings in the next week or so!