Opening Activities at a 4/4 SLAC and at a 2/2 R1: The First in a Series

At Kalamazoo this year, Notorious Ph.D. asked me if I would blog about the transition from a tiny, cash-strapped, midwestern SLAC with a 4/4 load to a big East Coast R1 with a 2/2. I suspect that there will be a lot to say, so, to distract myself from the ever-changing, endlessly bizarre situation that is the Mihi Family Housing Crisis, I will write about one of them.

Difference No. 1: Gearing up for the new year.

At Field College, this is what happens in the week leading up to a new Fall semester:

• Wednesday before classes start: mandatory day-long faculty retreat.
• Thursday: half-day faculty retreat/faculty meeting (which is attended by all full-time faculty).
• Friday: all-campus (faculty and staff) meeting, at which everyone is introduced to everyone else. This is entirely useless, because either you pretty much know who everyone is, or you don't know anyone, suffer from total information overload, and don't remember a thing. After the meeting is the (equally pointless, in my view) Benefits Fair, at which you collect free toothbrushes and whatnot.
• Saturday: students move in; we're invited to help them. I have only known one professor who has ever done so. Because: syllabi.
• Sunday: if you're lucky enough to be teaching a First-Year Seminar, you have your first class meeting this afternoon.
• Monday: if you advise a student organization, you have a mandatory ice cream social to attend. If you teach First-Year Seminar, you have a two-hour community service project to complete, followed by a picnic. You may also have your second class meeting this afternoon (this has fluctuated in recent years).
• Tuesday: mandatory (and usually rather nice) opening convocation. Big picnic lunch with all the new students. Advising meetings all afternoon.
• Wednesday: classes start.

At New U:

• ...
• ...
• ...
• Classes start! After labor day!

As a new faculty member, I have things to do--orientations and whatnot, which I'm eager to attend (I need information!). Perhaps more senior folk have meetings, but if they do, I haven't heard about them.

There are a lot of factors at work in this distinction. Little colleges like Field need heavy faculty governance and involvement; faculty do all of the advising and need to be apprised of changes in marketing strategies, athletic recruitment, accreditation visits, new requirements for Education majors, and all kinds of things that you wouldn't think that you'd need to know about. They're also expected to be very involved with individual students; the personal connection is, after all, what Field (and a lot of schools like it) sell, and what makes them different from the local State U's. That involvement, incidentally, is what I enjoyed the most at Field, and I hope that I can cultivate some of it at New U (admittedly in a different register).

But now, my primary directive is research. And good lord, I need to get settled in a house and in my office so that I can do some.

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.