winter break

No pictures unless Ellen comes through with one from her cell phone, but we had a super afternoon yesterday. Sam and Lars sledding and she, Jerry, Zack and I cross country skiing. They had a fabulous contraption to pull him in on its own little pair of skis and we sailed around the Mountain Dell course on a gorgeous sunny afternoon. My second time out this year - so happy.

Look out Alison and Sian

So, I have just enjoyed the angelic photos of Harry on his second birthday. Below is what you have to look forward to after school in 11 years.... After they shed their coats, shoes and backpacks they made three boxes of Kraft mac and cheese and played some sweet xbox....

30 degrees

What a difference 30 degrees makes. Left work this evening and it was a balmy 39 degrees. I made the kids walk to school this morning - they had gotten a bit soft after a week of being driven.

Tree evening

The nutcrackers released from storage.

Me making fondue.

Sam lighting the tree.

Catherine holding tree up.

dinner party

Having new colleagues over for dinner tonight and i guess am a little anxious. I kept dreaming that I forgot to come home and poor Craig was left doing all the preparation, or I would come home and had forgot to shop and had to piece together a meal from the detritus in our fridge. At one point I was frying up pieces of stale bread with some ham wrapped around them. Anyone else want to come for dinner?

melting?

A gift purchased from Chocolate.com has just been delivered by UPS to you.


A signature is not always required upon delivery so please make sure that someone is available to receive and store your gift in a cool location. Many Chocolate.com gifts are perishable and should be kept out of the heat.

Well no worries about it perishing in the hot sun....

PS - thanks to whomever sent it. I'll find out when I get home.

Even colder

This morning it is 8 degrees so I drove the kids to school. They refuse to wear real coats and I saw a fair number of boys in shorts at the high school. Clearly no one expects to be stranded outside for any length of time. I am sitting at the auto place having my brake pads replaced. They had "glazed" over, whatever that means. In practice it meant the brakes squealed like banshees so in addition to the driver of the car being embarrassing (see post from a couple of days ago), the car was also mortifying.

Marking papers

It is that time again. Here is a choice quote so far:

English's role in India has many faucets.

Brrrrrrr

It is 16 degrees fahrenheit outside - that's about minus 9 for you celsius folk. I slept well but Craig was plagued by the furnace clicking on as the gusting wind through cracks in the front door would tell the thermostat that we were about to be frozen in our beds. Then Zoe did one of her early morning vomits -- part of being an elderly dog. Oh and apparently I snored but I'm sure that part isn't true.

I drove Catherine to school wearing my Norwegian wool hat which she finds so embarrassing that she kept asking me to duck down incase any of her friends spotted me.

Eating my words and my xmas baking

Sam and I embarked on the Christmas baking - six mini bundt cakes which we planned to drizzle with a chocolate granache. The cake batter looked suspiciously wrong and the cakes emerged from the oven, flat and cookie-like, that is, delicious but wholly unsuitable for gifting to the neighbors. They could only be removed from the pan with a spoon. So none of us are hungry for dinner now.

A winter query

Snow! So it finally really feels like December. So I am polling my readers - who uses an electric blanket?

Just wondering.

counting down

Only one more week of term - yay. I gave my last real lecture in Language in Society class on Wednesday and it sucked big time. Nothing like going out strong...

This weekend we will do some Christmas baking. My goal this year is to gift to the neighbors before they gift to us - hah - take that Mormon housewives. We may even do Christmas cards this year.

Picture from the Holberg Prize Ceremony

Here is my father and Crown Princess Mette-Marit in Hakons Hall at the Holberg Prize Ceremony.

Two pictures

We loved the signage.

Us on the train from Flom to Myrdal.

Off season in the fjords

Much updating needed after a gorgeous day and a half on a fjord trip. We still aren't really over the jet lag and this became a problem when we crashed in Flam for 4 hours late afternoon and woke up to find that there was nowhere to eat that was still open apart from the brewery which was serving a $100 per person fixed menu dinner that included trout and cured meats which didn't appeal to either of us. We ended up with a beer sampler and talked them into serving us the dessert from the fixed menu. Surprisingly satisfying.

Two Oslo pictures

Craig found a new friend.
On the fjord front early morning.

It's 5:49am in Oslo

Should have taken the full dose of ambien... Craig was up at 4 and all showered and beautiful with nowhere to go by 4:45. At which point I admitted defeat and so here we sit waiting for the starting gates on the morning buffet to open at 7am. There are some mighty tasty morsels for the early bird. Immediately after it is off to the station for our train to Bergen. Just so you know, while I write this, Craig is dipping into his book on greatest criminal defense arguments and has just shared with my tired brain a thrilling disquisition on 14th and 4th amendment rights. Will try to upload some pictures now.

yikes

So, some of my colleagues got funding to bring three artists to campus this fall and I assigned my students to attend one of the three performances. Tonight was the final one - Adelina Anthony, performance artist, doing her show: La Angry Xicana. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to suggest that they be sure that they wanted to choose this of the three shows, but half way through when she was doing a graphic bit about sex and I was looking at the short blond hair of my oh so returned missionary student two rows ahead of me, I thought, hmmm. I mean I know I am supposed to be all about pushing boundaries and helping youth explore their identities but I am not good at it which is why I became a linguist. There are no provocative movies to show, no problematic texts to discuss. Call me a coward. I remember when a new book came out for teaching third year Russian that had a theme for each chapter and had clearly decided to move beyond the traditional topics of 'home' 'education' etc. and so this book had a sex chapter and I just couldn't do it. There aren't many people I want to discuss sex with and my students are nowhere near the short list.

Doctoral family

There were four of us the last time we posed for this doctoral family tree shot, but Zbigniew is no longer with us so now we are three. Victor who directed Christina's dissertation, who directed my dissertation. Here we are at the end of the Macedonian conference letting down our hair - I think Victor wins on that front.

The prince and the pea

This is our bed which just keeps getting taller and taller as Craig continues his neverending quest for comfort. The latest addition is an Ikea mattress which rides upon the substrate of Sleep Number bed. He says he is sleeping like a baby. May it last.

A plague on our house

Sam came home from school today with a temperature of 102.8 so I guess we now have a case of the flu in our house. No cough which seems to indicate it isn't swine flu.

Conference Vignettes

1) Undercover cop arrives bright and bushy tailed on day one and leaves defeated after one and a half papers. Admittedly the first was in Macedonian and the second so 'linguistic' it might well have been in another language. He judged that the Greek patriots might also not be lured out to hear about vowel contraction and the like in Macedonian.

2) Cut to the afternoon when a very bright and very young grad student is reading his paper on something intensely linguistic; one of those language phenomena that people use but deny using. He utters the following sentence just as two burly local Greeks (in workmen's caps, no less) enter the room -- "their very existence is questioned..." which is of course the raison d'etre for these two chaps' presence: the questionable existence of Slavic Macedonians.  A bit of a back and forth ensues during the Q and A as we insist that they have to ask a question relevant to the paper (impossible of course) and they content themselves with leaving some "literature" and making their exit.

3) Day two contained the most contentious papers. Anything with "Alexander the Great" in the title is like a red flag to a bull. This particular Alexander the Great talk was fascinating. By an anthropologist who showed how both the Greeks and the Macedonians who are fanatical about the name question have found themselves a Pakistani tribe who purport to be descended from soldiers in Alexander's army. Who knew? Each country now offers scholarships to their respective 'tribespeople' to come and study in the homeland. 

4) I took my charge to provide food for the conferencees seriously. The day before it started Craig said to me "Honey, why are there 36 eggs in the fridge." Because Macedonians don't like the steady diet of muffins and other relentlessly sweet carbs that form the usual American breakfast buffet. So I boiled lots of eggs and we had sliced meat and cheese and fruit and I received many compliments on my egg boiling skills...

5) All of this could have only been accomplished with the help of our stellar project coordinator, Addie, who has more poise at her tender age than I do now. OK, she did lose it at one point on Friday when the lunch cart she was wheeling over to our building got caught on a pebble and the vat of soup went everywhere. 

This is where I live part 3

This was in my inbox today:

I just wanted to make you aware that there is an issue in my class. I am currently enrolled in Professor ________'s class, ___________. For this class the book Helden wie wir  is supposed to be read. I find it very offensive and have voiced my opinion to Professor ____________. I suggested that she give me a different book to read and I would be happy to do similar assignments. She told me to read it with a different perspective. This book has nothing to do with my German skills. It is a perverted book that talks about inappropriate topics such as sex, worded very offensively, and masturbation. I am to meet with her tomorrow morning and we are supposed to talk about it, but I wanted to let you know that I refuse to read this book and it has to be fair to all of us. I don' t want to be a victim to this book or this class.

updates

Apologies dear reader(s) for the long drought in posts. Life has been a roller coaster mainly because I am hosting the conference from hell this coming week. Way back in about 2002 I agreed to host the Macedonian-North American Macedonian Studies conference in 2009 which at that point seemed so distant that saying yes was easy. Putting on a conference is hard work under the best of circumstances - well off departments probably use conference services, but in the poor humanities we go it alone. So I had to book hotel space, set up a payment website, organize food, contract out for a scenic excursion, find a place to host a party for which I managed to get live Balkan music and dancers. This was stressful enough but then the Greeks found out and all hell broke loose. For those of you not in the know, the Greeks object to the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia calling itself Macedonia because that is a Greek word and no one else should use it. One of my colleagues in Classics noted that it is kind of nice that people can be so passionate about a word, and I would agree if I wasn't dealing with volumes of what can only be described as hate mail. Some listserv out there encouraged its members to write to the university president and demand the cancellation of my conference. So, I got summoned to the president's office to bring him up to speed on this particular area of Balkan conflict. The positive thing was a very clear statement of support from his office that is on the home page for the university and the VP for communications took over replying to all the crazies so the stuff stopped being forwarded to me.

Oh, and I get a uniformed security guard for the conference and an undercover guy who came by the department on Friday wanting to know how he should dress to blend in. Which of course for all you academics out there raises difficult sartorial questions.

So, Wednesday the people start arriving and through Saturday night my life is not my own.

Halloween 09

I'd lost my star trek beam me up badge by this point.

Scot with guitar
Sam and his friends

Ellen's little one
Catherine

homework

Correcting assignments today based on the students' viewing of a Deborah Tannen video lecture about her work on the different ways men and women talk. One of the students wanted to reference her point that neither men nor women talk more, but that who does so varies according to whether the space is public or private. I quote:

"Men do pubic. Women do private."

If only he had added an 's' to 'private'...

this is where I live part 2

So today in my class where we were talking about language and gender we hit the topic of different ways that English refers to men and women. Of course we talked about titles: mr. mrs. miss. ms. and, guess what, a huge number of the students had no idea what ms was. One guy said that he knew the term and that it meant "a widow, um, like she had a husband, but she lost him."

technology teens

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a teenager these days. I watch Catherine and her friends making use of all the fabulous technology and think how much fun Jeanne and I would have had editing endless pictures of ourselves. Here is a nice pic of Catherine and one of her friends.

fall break

Enjoying a much needed fall break. Mum has been here since last Thursday and we have done lots of fun things. We went outlet shopping, lunched in Park City, did a scenic drive for the fall leaves, saw Couples Retreat, had Ryan over for dinner, and had glorious facials. We look so fresh and dewy you wouldn't recognize us!
Tomorrow I am off to NYC for a whirlwind business trip, but hope to fit in a little shopping on Friday afternoon.

This is where I live...

Someone I know here at the university who is organizing an off-campus social event received the following RSVP.


If Desert Edge Brewery were inaccessible to someone because of physical
barriers, you would consider changing to another location. But what about
moral barriers? By entering, I give tacit approval to their promotion and
glorification of alcoholic beverages and their deliberately offensive
attitude toward my faith, e.g., a product called Latter Day Stout,
references to the “Zion Curtain,” and such.

Once again, count me out.

Because we are low brow

We went to see The Hangover at the dollar theater last night. Craig was worried that it would be too raunchy for S and C but I checked with Alison. I remembered her saying that she and Sian had accidentally seen it this summer and I always trust her developmental psychology expert opinion. She didn't recoil in horror when I posed the question so off we went. FUNNY.

vignettes of teenage life

Last night we went out to dinner - me, Catherine, Sam and two of Sam's friends with whom he had been playing pick up soccer for six hours (no school yesterday or today). Afterwards the boys wanted to go bowling so I dropped them off. Proof that boys of that age are wildly different sizes.
Bowling lane employee: "What size shoes do you need?"
Boy 1: "7"
Boy 2 "7 and a half"
Boy 3 "12"

Then Catherine and I went over to the high school parking lot and I let her drive for the first time. She was great!

we have work to do

Today was our department's retention, promotion and tenure meeting. This is the most serious forum in an academic department - the place where careers are made or not. As chair I attend in a purely listening and question answering capacity. So when I hear things such as what I am about to recount, I CAN SAY NOTHING. They were discussing someone up for a crucial review. The candidate has an absolutely exemplary record. There is much praise and discussion of the candidate's stellar research and phenomenal teaching and then one of my thoroughly unreconstructed male colleagues (someone my friend Catherine would describe as "out of compliance with North American standards" remarks: "And she is an excellent mother. She has those two small children and is just superb at balancing all the demands of her life."
I noticed one of my senior and feminist colleagues approaching the minutes taker after the meeting and I am sure it was to suggest that certain comments wouldn't be missed if they never appeared in the formal minutes of the meeting...

smut mongers beware

So, we had a person whose job, among other things, was to order films for faculty. She is no longer with us, in large part because technology had moved on so much since she was hired that we couldn't get her to learn what we needed. Latest discovery reveals that she had developed some technological skills we had no idea about. We also often wondered what she did with her time all day every day with little to show for it. Well, now we know. Turns out that over the years whenever a faculty member would order a film, she would screen it and edit it to remove any salacious content. No wonder she never had time to do anything else. I guess all the movies we think we have in the library are actually sanitized versions...

we have a floor

Craig has been toiling all weekend and we now pretty much have an entire floor. We just need to put up base boards and move furniture and we will be back to having a nice habitable space.

prima donnas

So, I had an email from a faculty member asking who should move two folding trestle tables from our building to the neighboring building for a reception next week. The list of possibles included, the custodial staff or our staff. I replied that I thought we faculty could do it.
Here is the reply. Names have been omitted to protect the feeble.



Thank you for your consideration of this matter. However, you might not
have considered all implications of this decision: As far as I remember,
________ has terrible back problems as it is; _______ has a shoulder and neck
injury; and I am simply not willing to carry tables and possibly get
injured in the process. In addition, asking a junior faculty member (who
might not feel empowered enough to say no) to carry tables has all kinds
of problems of its own.

I have advised the caterer to bring his own tables and reduce the amount
of food to offset the cost.

its finally paying off

I am enjoying Catherine this school year. She is doing really interesting work at school in the pre-International Baccalaureate program and is working very hard. We have had many conversations about the John Knowles novel, A Separate Peace, as she has worked on various writing assignments connected with it. It is magical to see her maturing into a thoughtful student.

students...

Hello professor:



I'm afraid I have to beg your pardon, again, and ask for that lady's E-mail address, the one that schedules which cultural event we'd like to attend.

I had to walk home in the rain and my backpack got wet. I thought it was more water-proof than I found that it was. The piece of paper that you wrote the E-mail address got wet and your ink ran; I couldn't make the address out.



Thank you again,

Marking

I am teaching a class with 42 students this semester. Second year general course on language and society. Shocking range of ability/literacy. My favorite from the pile of papers I just went through: In response to the question: What are some positive reasons for using a local dialect? "Makes them more trustworthy, "more dust of the earth."

Mad Men

We are now addicted to Mad Men. I saw four episodes on the plane back from England and immediately got Craig hooked when season three started. Alison and Sian, this could be your next box set!

work wonderful work

Yesterday when Craig got home from work, I said, "I have to tell you what happened at work today; you will be amazed." And he said, "no, I won't." Because, well, basically he has heard so much crazy shit about my work that its probably true that he cannot be surprised anymore.
But just imagine that your heard the following (of course, entirely hypothetically). Someone who works in a large organization, lets say a university, has a colleague who has over many years become increasingly disaffected and badly behaved. Events transpire that lead said person to pursue legal recourse against perceived aggressors/transgressors. Months pass as the legal machinery grinds along and then you find yourself in a meeting, not with the disgruntled colleague, but with the head of a key affiliated unit and you learn that disgruntled one has been in possession of a master key to that unit for years and still has it and well, has had access to all files, all everything while the legal action has been wending its way along. And no one thought to take the key away? Or more likely, no one really remembered that it was in this person's possession.
Of course the above story is really just hypothetical, a aren't you glad that hasn't happened to you story...

the good streak had to end

so far this trip has been a miracle of excellent planning and serendipity. I was particularly pleased with my layover in Paris on the way here, where I bought a pass to the lounge to spend my nine hour layover and had a free 15 minute massage, wrote a large chunk of my paper, and napped for three hours in the quiet room. The overnight hotel in Zagreb was sleek and had a delicious breakfast included in the price. The flight to Zadar went off without a hitch and I walked out of the airport to a bus that dropped me across the street from the hotel.
This morning I overslept. Fortunately I had booked a taxi and they called me from the front desk at 5:37 when I hadn't appeared. Flight to Paris uneventful, but now we have had the dreaded "slight delay" announcement which I am pesimistically envisioning not to be slight.

last morning in Zadar

So, I was pretty excited because I planned to have a good sleep last night, but then I had to finish my book so lights didn't go out till after midnight. Then at 1:30 awoken by text from Catherine who was spending the night at our house alone. "power has gone out. What should I do?" I don't know.... I'm in Croatia! We shot messages back and forth, talked briefly and I guess it eventually came back on. Around 3am another message: "How do I turn the swamp cooler back on?" I slept in till nine, had the hotel breakfast and then down to the beach for a last swim which was glorious. Checked out of my room and left my luggage so I could walk into town to do a little shopping. Which I did, followed by calamari at a cafe on the beach. I am just about to head to the bus station to get the bus back to Zagreb and tomorrow at the crack of dawn, I begin the return journey.
PS - a cane with that bikini I mentioned two posts ago is optional

Conference excursion

Slavic linguists enjoying the sunset from the Zadar quay.



Where our boat docked for lunch and swimming during the afternoon.

Things I have learned in Croatia

1) Dried figs are delicious.

2) You can wear a bikini well into your 70s.

Zadar, Croatia

I can't actually believe that this is a conference apart from the part where i did have to give my paper. Here is the view from the room where I spoke.



Here is the lunch platter four of us shared yesterday.


The buildings on the right down the quay are the university. I kid you not.


Walking from the hotel to the university.

NB

All day faculty retreat yesterday. Note to self. Next year, hire actors to play our parts. We are that predictable.

Pictures from England

Cousin Harry riding his big dog.

Sam holding a crayfish catch.

Rachel's house through the trees from across the river.

Catherine on a train.

the floor

Serious work on the floor is continuing. Two weekends ago we rented a floor stripping machine and removed all the linoleum tile and remaining grout from the kitchen floor. Today we are going to lay new floor.

Half way through the first week of school. Transition to high school seems to be going pretty well although we are all to imagine the unfortunateness of having the guy you think is cute in only one class, and that class is chemistry, and you have to wear goggles....

Sam has a math teacher that is making my heart sing. Not only does he not yell at the students and eat popcorn during class (last year's nightmare) but he actually corrects their homework himself and talks to them about where they went wrong. I know this sounds like common sense, but let me tell you people, there is a lot of correcting each other's work in middle school here.

oink oink

I have been down with the flu (not swine, I don't think) since Monday. Well, I should have been down, but I kept trying to deny that I was actually ill so the minute I felt any surge of energy, off I went full tilt. This culminated with a Wednesday evening back to school clothes shopping trip which I am going to blame for knocking me out once and for all. Yesterday I was forced (for reasons that I will not disgust you with) not to leave my house. At 10:30 last night, I was convinced that I was in fact going to die. Craig conveniently out at a band practice - probably best as no one should witness that horrible choice of which 'end' to deal with first. Today, the worst had passed, but still all day in bed. Managed a cup of noodles this afternoon. This is of course impossible timing because term starts on Monday and I have no syllabus prepared. I go to Croatia for a conference in ten days....

fabulous mini holidays

One great thing about the annual pilgrimage to England is the whole holiday within a holiday way we get to do things. A bit like a big chocolate easter bunny with candy inside. The easter bunny is the England part as a whole and the candies inside this year are Dublin, the barn walking trip and our trip down to Brighton. Dublin has already appeared in pictures in an earlier post. The barn walking trip was also absolutely wonderful. Pictures to follow, but suffice to say that several times each day, I found myself sighing and saying aloud how completely perfect everything was. Now we are in Brighton with Alison and Sian where we arrived in the middle of gay pride (which if you know anything about Brighton, you can picture) and the pouring rain. Today was beautifully sunny and we went to Beachy Head (competing for top suicide spot with the Golden Gate Bridge).

Tonight pizza and tele...ahhhh

Celebrating Sam's birthday on the farm

Auntie Rachel serving

Sam's birthday dinner request -- shepherd's pie.

Charlie, Sam and Adam putting up with party hats.
Cakes.

Dublin

This was the most perfect rainbow I have ever seen taken on our return drive to the airport.

Dublin Bay.

Ikea round the world.

Catherine and I both liked this.

Sam is 13

Hiking with his dad in Italy

Eating his favorite spinach dumplings in Italy

gorgeous picture

Sam looking for fish at Barfleur

healthcare update

Craig is still over looking after his mom who went into the hospital so that she could have the 3 day hospital stay required by medicare to allow her to go to a skilled nursing facility. Which is where she went today. The idea is that they will physical therapy her to the point where she can get in and out of bed by herself and attend to other necessities, by herself. I think Craig will finally be coming home tomorrow. He will drive her car since she won't exactly be needing it. Can't wait to have that big old Crown Victoria taking up most of our driveway.

perfect timing

is when you finish a bike ride and just as you are loading your bike onto the car, an ice cream van comes past and you can buy a delicious, unplanned treat.
I am loving having a really good bike rack on my car. It makes it possible to take my bike to places where the terrain is relatively flat since I have no illusions or desires to be a "mountain biker".

another wholesome utah evening

To celebrate Catherine and Sam's last evening before flying off to Europe, we went up the canyon for another picnic dinner. Ellen, Jerry and Zack joined us.

study abroad newsflash

I hear about what is going on with the study abroad program in Siberia primarily via urgent text messages from Yulia, the woman on the ground. Today's announced that one of the students had been in a bus accident, but was ok, but with a sore back and asked me to call the insurance to confirm procedures. 

I called to follow up with her and it turns out the student was injured not so much by the car crashing into the bus he was on, but by the humungous Russian man who fell on him as a result of the car crashing into the bus. Hope we are covered for that...

Back from Colorado

Here are some pictures of our trip. Fortunately, Catherine grabbed the camera and took pictures of our fireworks on the driveway.

Craig playing guitar to his mom.

The new puppy.