Catherine making money

Catherine has finally discovered the incredible cash cow that is babysitting. Here are a couple of pictures of her babysitting Ellen's baby Zach this afternoon.

Crafty Christmas

A holiday arrangement.


This is Catherine's table decoration.


I made this wreath so we can keep up with the wreathy neighbors. Note all greenery comes from our very own garden.

humbled by hubby

Today Ellen and I had signed up to attend a 3 hour Bikram workshop. A guru woman was in town from Boston to teach it. She had been advertised as a person who takes cripples and gets them bikram-ing like mad. So, I get up this morning and Craig says he'd like to join us. There were about 35 of us at the workshop and it was great. The usual class is 90 minutes so this was working through the poses and getting feedback and answers to questions. Craig was singled out and dubbed "new guy" because he was the only one in the room who had never been to a class. He was like a human piece of positive reinforcement for the instructor. He is naturally quite flexible and in the distant past did a lot of yoga so is familiar with some of it. But she would come over and coo about "you see, the new guy just trusts his body and just goes with the pose." Sickening. Anyway, I got up my courage to ask a question regarding pose: hands to feet:




Anyway, you have your knees bent and then you are supposed to cup your heels with your hands and straighten your legs. Ultimately you end up looking like the people above. Problem. Cannot cup heels no matter how bent my knees are. So she comes over and we work at it a bit and she concludes that I just have to hold my ankles and keep working towards my heels. There is absolutely no question that I can straighten my legs. I stand up and she says to everyone (and this was fine, because it was clear already that the class was about seeing what different anatomy means for the poses): "Well, of course she is having trouble. Look at those legs. They are long, the torso is short and the arms are short." at which point she gestured to the length of my forearms versus my legs. So I have spent the rest of the day integrating this limb issue into my understanding of my general inflexibility which I had attributed to my tight hamstrings. Meanwhile, Craig bends over, cups his heels and straightens his legs. God love him.

downtown on a Friday night

As I was walking to my car after a rousing Mozart Requiem at the Utah Symphony I witnessed the following amusing scene. It was chilly, but cold not withstanding there were two young women clinging to each other and shivering at one of the crosswalks. They were each wearing a sequiny halter top and teetering on high heels. (They also had on trousers, just in case that wasn't clear). Anyway, along comes this 'hobo' (this is the word that Catherine and Sam use for down and outs. I have no idea where they got it from. In my idiolect it conjures up visions of unemployed men riding the rails. This man was clearly unemployed but decidedly less romantic than my 'hobo' visual.) Anyway, he says to the two women: "Wow, I thought I was crazy, but you two have me beat." It was a cute, urban moment in a not very urban place.

Marking papers

This is the part I hate the most (well, maybe not the most, but it ranks pretty high). So I have stayed home this morning with 35 assignments that I should have handed back by now and which have been lying on the floor next to me desk for two weeks. Meanwhile, I find myself posting, whipping up a tasty beef stew, and committing other acts of procrastination.

Bikram yoga or death by a thousand degrees

OK, only about 105 degrees. I have now attended two Bikram yoga classes - suggested to me by a couple of people who swear by the heat, humidity and regimented routine of 26 poses bracketed by terrifying breathing exercises. I think I like it, or at least at this distance (four hours out) I like it. The room smells bad. I suppose there really is nothing to be done when a space is used day in and day out to contain straining, sweating humanity. I knew it wouldn't be fresh, but it really is something to be reckoned with. Then there is the heat. I consider not having had to run out before the end of the 90 minutes a major triumph. Of course, I have to find my triumphs somewhere because the class is a very rude reminder that I am not one of the flexible members of the human race. It is kind of humbling to actually be in a room with 30 or so people and really be the worst one there. This is not hyperbole and I have no illusions about measuring myself against the lithe, agile, willow people in the front row or the solid, tattooed vegan types, but I have never actually been the worst at something in a group setting (except maybe ballroom dancing). I am absolutely the worst. There are whole poses that I cannot even begin. This is largely due to my back problems since the tubing incident of last spring, but having short hamstrings and other rigid bits doesn't help. So we are all lying on our tummies and we are supposed to grasp our ankles with our hands so that we are like boats. the teacher had to come over and suggest I just try to grasp one side and switch off. I could almost manage that.

Work funny

We had a departmental meeting a couple of weeks ago. Much dreaded because of a terrifying disconnect between the realities of global financial collapse and our faculty's view that this somehow shouldn't impact their mission to write esoteric things, teach boutique courses, and generally come and go as they please. Add to this the prospect of considering a temporary halt to recruiting PhD students (for reasons which will be exemplified below) in the face of some faculty who cling to the idea of being a doctoral granting department no matter what that looks like in practice. In the end the anticipated fireworks didn't go off; perhaps there had been enough preparatory small group conversations that people had begun to internalize the idea that it is, in fact, not possible to proceed with business as usual when you've just learned that 9-12% of your state appropriated funds will be permanently reappropriated by July 1st. But the really choice meeting moments had to do with our director of graduate studies reporting on the actuality of the PhD students we currently have. There was really not much to say when confronted with such facts as one post comps student who has been maintaining current registration (which you do by paying for 3 credits of tuition every semester) for SEVENTEEN years. As the DGS deadpannedly remarked, "Aside from the ethical question of how we let someone languish, but pony up cash, to such an extent?... four of the five committee members NO LONGER WORK HERE, and the course work is so far in the past that the discipline has surely moved on so what sort of dissertation would the person possibly be writing... The full DGS report was peppered by exclamations of "WHAT?" and the like from the faculty. Even the most staunch defenders of the PhD programs had the good sense to look dutifully troubled by the state of disarray.