Moscow

This trip, as all trips to Russia, requires much extensive blogging. A small vignette for starters. For those of you concerned about your carbon footprint. Get more concerned - you are working for Russia too. Today at the conference I am attending I sat near the window only to realize that the window air conditioning unit was cranked full blast to combat the relentless central heating that is a feature of all Moscow public buildings...

just prior to the accident - note moose in background

close brush

So I am sitting here with a neck brace on and a bottle of lortab to hand after flying from an inner tube and planting myself headfirst in a snow bank yesterday. Thank god I am not dead or paralyzed! I'm just in masses of pain and have been told I must rest and stay away from work all week. This seems impossible, but I shall try my best. Up until the 'accident' it had been a beautiful hike up a canyon. We saw three moose and had a little picnic - all with Nancy who was visiting for the weekend. We had planned to go to a movie after the walk but instead got to have our very own episode of ER. Just incase, they insisted on strapping me to one of those backboards a la Hannibal Lector... and I got to have my first cat scan. How was everyone else's weekend?

approaching the end of the marathon

Last job candidate will be here Monday and Tuesday. yay. Hope we can land someone for the two Spanish positions now that Arabic search has been declared DOA. This was very frustrating because I think that we had the perfect candidate and the person was rejected by the Middle East Center, in my view, entirely because they felt threatened. Another job talk today from a literature candidate who didn't talk about literature. Weird. But she showed some cool photos...
Am hoping to slip away to the slopes tomorrow.

up for air

The long silence has probably been troubling for all three of you who check this blog....
The thing is, we have been doing job searches. This involves attending all the candidates job talks, many dinners, meeting with each candidate to discuss benefits and other 'perks' of working here, etc. Regarding talks... it has been weird. All the candidates are here for positions in literature, but so far only one has actually talked about literary texts. The most recent candidate talked mainly about the socio-economic underpinnings of friction between the Koreans in Argentina and the local Argentines. We were somewhat amazed by her. You know how some people are such overachievers that, well, its alarming. She was one of those. In addition to a PhD in Spanish/Comp Lit from Cornell in 2004 and serving as CEO for some Korean company since then, she also won the international salsa competion in Puerto Rico in 2002. And she's a vegan. I don't see this as a fit. And then there's the Arabic search which has erupted into a major conflict with the Middle East Center -- no surprise there. We are trying to negotiate some sense into them via the Dean who in the meantime is a finalist for a provost position at the Universtiy of Arizona and can't help but be thinking "not really interested in wrestling this one to the mat, cuz, I might not have to." So we soldier on, amidst increasing mountains of snow, may I add. Truly we are having a record year of snowfall which is all good for drought, but we are getting sick of shoveling the driveway. I have been cross country skiing and today did what I thought would be a snowshoe up Lambs Canyon, but the road to the trailhead is long and plowed so I never actually needed to don the snowshoes.
For those of you following the "family bush" we have Nancy visiting next weekend and Ian and Judith the following weekend. For the latter I am concocting a hike/snowshoe that crosses from one canyon over a ridge to the adjacent one. All in all about 7 miles which should keep us busy.... The last half seems to be in mobile range which should put any worries of losing us to rest.
Sam just won his sixth grade chess tournament. Following in Catherine's footsteps as she won hers two years ago. And they hardly ever play chess so they must just be smart:)

SNOW

Much snow today. Here are some pics.

semantic obfuscation

Due to an email glitch I learned at the last minute that today I was to join a lunch in honor of a visiting Turkish parliament member. Found myself next to a colleague from another department who embarked on a denial of the Armenian genocide. Well, let's be more clear. He concurred that something bad had happened in 1915 but insisted that it was irresponsible to term this 'genocide' because it did not meet the legal definition. He then veered off into a bizarre narrative about how Turks would be happy to admit to the event but not on those terms. Really, he opined, it was "more like what happened in Bosnia, ethnic cleansing." Oh, OK. No problem.