obligatory where-the-hell-have-you-been post
I've been sitting right here, actually. I read all your blogs, I swear. Sometimes I even comment. But every single bit of my brain energy has been devoted to work, seminars, thesis proposal writing, comprehensive exam studying, and teaching. That's not the exact order, but it's darn close. Everything will ease up on November 11th around noon—that's when comprehensive exam part II will be over.
So here's the bullet list:
* work: It's work. It's actually fine (unlike this same time last year) because with the exception of one big project completely under our control, there's just a lot of fluffy stuff for me to do each day ("fluffy" in that it requires little thought on my part).
* seminars: I still love them. I'm still not a fan of poetry, but I love the poetry seminar. I haven't done much on my seminar project besides gather all my research into a pile, but at least it's something. I had two presentations in the class last week, and they went fine. In my composition studies class, I've thought of a topic for my seminar project and it's nothing at all related to computers. Hooray!
* thesis proposal writing: I'm working on it as we speak. I have a large pile of stuff, so the annotated bibliography portion is taking the longest to do. I told my thesis director I'd have a rough draft of the proposal to him tomorrow, so I shall. Note the term "rough," which is why I'm not freaking out about it or anything.
* comprehensive exam studying: Our group has ramped up to twice-weekly meetings, and we met yesterday morning for a few hours. We're firmly into the 18th Century, but thankfully an American or two were on the reading list so it wasn't all English authors, all the time like it has been. We're meeting again tomorrow. I have to talk about
Tristram Shandy for the group.
* teaching: I still love my class. They have an in-class essay tomorrow (description), during which time I will be reading
Tristram Shandy.
Labels: gradschool, life
i nearly shuttered the blog last weekend
...not for any scandalous reasons, but because I have
nothing to offer right now and don't see that I will for the foreseeable future. It is very difficult to be responsible for three large and distinct things: my actual full-time job (completely removed from academic endeavors), my academic endeavors (2 seminars to take, 1 comp class to teach, 1 thesis proposal due in a month, 1 book to index (not mine), 2 comprehensive exams in November), and writing about things loosely related to my books (that is, techie things and blogger things).
The vast majority of my blog readers are here for the latter, which is unfortunate because that's the stuff that lives at the very bottom of my to-do list—not necessarily because I don't want to do it, but because the things above it are far more important
to me, as they involve things like a paycheck and my future. A blog without readers is just a paperless personal journal, and I was never a big journal writer, so it seemed it would be kind of pointless to keep a blog around.
So, I really can't say why I did decide to keep it around, other than perhaps next semester will be different (as far as time constraints go), and the following years will be
much different, so maybe I'll get back to writing about the things people actually want to read. Maybe. Sometime. It's extremely difficult to schedule time for things secondary to job and school, since neither of those things follow a strict schedule. Given how I like to
schedule things, you can imagine how frustrating it is, never knowing when I'll be able to do x, y, or z. So for those of you wondering when I'll do x, y, or z,
I don't know.
Labels: life
my flooring is beautiful but...
...my hand? It will be scarred.
The flooring guys came out on Monday at 10am to put lovely beech laminate flooring and white colonial baseboards in my 12x13 bedroom. They were a few minutes early, enough so that I hadn't locked the cats in the bathroom yet (the front door had to be open while they were working). Max, my old cat, he loves people so it was no problem picking him up and putting him in the bathroom (although he was a little bummed he didn't get to hang with the people, of course). But Deuce, bless her little heart, was born a feral cat. Although she is now four years old and I've had her since she was two months old, she is quite terrified of people-who-are-not-me. I guess when you get thrown down into a sewer and have caustic goop thrown on top of you when you're a few weeks old, burning off parts of your fur and necessitating a month-long stay in a vet hospital after being rescued by a vet tech who happened to pass by the scene and hear your cries for help, well, that's imprinted on your wee psyche.
So when I reached under the pile of stuff on the couch where she had wedged herself, so I could pull her out and put her in the bathroom, she flipped out. Flipped. Out. She peed all over the couch, all over me, and scratched and bit the living fuck out of my right hand. I got her into the bathroom, and she and Max sat quietly on the counter for the next five hours—not a peep out of them. Meanwhile, I was bleeding from a deep scratch on my thumb and approximately eight punctures on my fingers. The flooring guys sort of looked at me like "uh, you're bleeding" and I said carry on, no worries. I wrapped my hand in a towel. The wound cleaning stuff was in—you guessed it—the bathroom with the cats. I wasn't going to open that door until the flooring guys were gone.
Then I got angry, because I was so stupid for not putting the cats in the bathroom ahead of time, and I couldn't leave the house because the flooring guys were here, and I smelled like pee, and I didn't know what I should do. So I called my buddy (who is also my boss), and she called Kate (who is also technically my boss) to have Kate come down and sit with the house while the flooring guys were here, so I could go to urgent care/the ER and have my hand cleaned up/get antibiotics/get a tetanus shot/etc. The third owner (aka my third boss, and the person who works harder than any of us) asked if I wanted her to come with me to the urgent care and I said no, I can sit by myself. In retrospect, it would have been wise to take her up on that offer, for reasons we'll soon learn.
I wrapped a bag of frozen vegetables around my hand, and waited for Kate.
If you know anything about cat bites, you know they're different than dog bites because of the shape of their teeth. Dog bites rip things open, while cat bites puncture and close in on themselves (thus trapping all the germs inside). I wasn't bleeding, and I had washed my hand under hot water, so it didn't look bad unless you looked closely and saw the swollen redness around everything. It was stiff and painful by this time, but didn't look like it.
I IM'd my buddy and said, "Kate's going to get here and think I'm a big wuss who smells like pee." Ever the wise one, she said, "no she won't."
Kate showed up, looked at my hand, confirmed it was a wreck. We made plans for me to head off to urgent care, after looking up the nearest one to my house—the only urgent care places I know about are the ones near other people's houses. Go figure. So I got in my car and headed toward the front gate. At this point, about 200 yards from my house, my horn started to blare—one long constant hoooooooooooooonk, very loud, very annoying. Now, I've had issues with the disarming mechanism in my car alarm for over a year, but got around the issue by never arming it. Apparently, it finally decided to arm itself on its own, and my remote transmiter wouldn't disarm it. I shut the car off, the horn still blared. I turned the car back on (and really I shouldn't have been able to do that, since it was the alarm and the alarm shuts the car off when it thinks it's being stolen) and threw it in reverse back to my parking spot.
I got the manual out of the glove box and frantically looked for the fusebox schematic so we could find the horn fuse and pull it. By this point Kate came out to see what the hell was going on, and she pulled it and the horn was still blaring so I yelled "yank the battery! yank the battery" and the horn was blaring and it was general mayhem until Kate got the battery disconneted and the horn stopped. So then we realized that we yanked the wrong fuse for the horn anyway, and she pulled the correct one out and reconnected the battery and...no horn sound (yay!) but the car won't turn over (fuck). The alarm finally shut the car down because it was in "I'm being stolen" mode, so that's fine. I called AAA to have them tow it to the dealer. The tow guy came and of course it turned over for him, but the alarm still had control of the car because all the side lights were on and the little alarm light was flashing. But no horn sound because we pulled the fuse. So, he towed it to the dealer.
So Kate and I were both stuck at the house because the flooring guys were still there and there's no way she was going to let me drive her truck to urgent care (I don't blame her in the least). Funny thing, she said when she heard the horn blaring from afar, her first thought was "I hope she didn't pull onto the road and get into a wreck." Given events of the day and also in the past, this was a valid thought. If I had taken up the offer from my third boss, I'd have gotten myself to urgent care, but then this whole car thing would have happened anyway so I figured best to have it all happen on the same day.
Since there was nothing to do but wait until the flooring guys were finished, we did just that. Two hours later, the dealer called and reported that "everything is fine" with my car, that he just reprogrammed the alarm transmitter and receiver and the alarm can now be armed and disarmed. I was skeptical, because I know my car. But we said fine, we'll come get it. The flooring guys finished up and we headed off to the dealer. The plan was to get the car, then I'd go to urgent care on my own.
The dealer was wrong, I was right, and my car alarm was still messed up. Left the car with them, went down to the Enterprise Rent-a-Car place a few blocks down the road and got a rental. Kate said she'd lead me to the urgent care and make sure everything was settled there before leaving me on my own. So we got to the hospital ER (we thought they had a separate urgent care center but they didn't. no big deal, they weren't busy.) and I was registered and such and then Kate gets a phone call that there's some problem with the fence at her house (the fence that encloses her many dogs) so she had to leave.
The doctor and nurses cleaned me up, I got a script for antibiotics and also a tetanus shot ("whoa, you're a bleeder!" said the nurse who stuck me) and was sent on my way with instructions to come back the next day so they can make sure everything was healing appropriately (after telling my horror stories about vet techs and cat bites). I managed to get home without incident, and sat down on the couch and my formerly-freaked-out cat sat right next to me like nothing had ever happened and all was well. I apologized to her for having to yank her out of her hiding place to put her in the secure place, and licked my leg and rubbed her head on my knee and all was well.
My floor is really lovely. I can't wait to do this all again next week when the flooring guys come back to do the other room!
post-script #1: Kate's neighbor backed into her fence and broke it, but got it fixed up and the dogs were ok.
post-script #2: My boss broke her little toe last night. It's not a good time to be any of us. Or, we can say that bad things happen in threes, thus we're all done with the emergencies for now.
post-script #3: I will get my car back tonight, after paying $486 plus a hundred bucks or so for the rental. I still don't plan to arm the alarm, but the module will have been fixed, should I choose to do so.
go to main pageLabels: life
holy crap, it's july already
How'd that happen? (yeah, yeah, I know, Gregorian calendar and all that...but still) The last time I had a gap in posts, my parents started to worry. So here's a filler post because I don't have much to say. I blame it on
Mel, because she calls and we'll talk and talk and talk and then have nothing to blog about. Well, that's not true because I get
tons of things to blog about out of our conversations, but that's not cool to do if the other person doesn't agree. Much like how the other week I made a comment about my buddy and it pissed her off and I deleted it. I didn't even know she read this anymore, that's how disjointed we are in our buddyship. But that's another story, one I won't be telling.
But Mel? She calls yesterday morning and says "quick, what's your
Myers-Briggs type?" Now come on, you don't just call and say that without wondering something along the lines of, oh, what did I say? I think it was, "the hell?" or something like that. Since I don't carry my M-B type around in my head I had to think a little bit. I know Mel is an INTJ and I knew I was 3/4 the same but couldn't remember which letter was different. I finally did—I'm an ISTJ—and thus began this whole conversation about M-B and differences and so forth, with Mel trying to "figure things out" about our friendship and what not. I kept saying things like "Dude! We've been friends for
sixteen years. We're friends because we are. There's nothing to figure out. It isn't going to change."
I believe I was a tad on the mean and bitchy side because I totally wasn't taking it as seriously as she was. Ooops. Then I realized later if my buddy knew of this conversation, she'd start pointing and laughing at me because
I do the exact same thing to her, only in Mel's role. I don't know my buddy's M-B type, but it sure would be interesting to know now. So I have sort of a different outlook on things, I guess, when really there aren't "things" on which to have outlooks, "things" just are. I'm nothing if not consistently inconsistent.
Labels: life
those random bullets of crap...
I was so overjoyed at the end of the semester AND the spectacular ending to CSI (it's about damn time they got it on, don't you think? jeebus) that I never did manage to get back to the blogging. Here we go. It's really random stuff.
- Why does my Starbucks put java jackets on cold drinks? They're
cold, not burn-your-fingers hot. It's wasteful! The only reason I could think of was to keep the condensation from dripping on you, but the java jackets don't absorb the condensation. weird.
- I just finished reading James Houston's
Snow Mountain Passage. Good stuff. He was the author-in-residence in our MFA program this year and seemed like a swell enough guy, and I heard the book was good (although apparently critics were perturbed that it didn't get into details about the cannibalism. whatever. it's not freaking
Alive for chrissakes. gah.)
- I wrote about a pirate in the essay that was due yesterday (in Byron's
The Bride of Abydos), so when I went to the class party/talk about your paper/turn in your paper extravaganza, I wore my pirate t-shirt. Arrrrrrr.
- I'm presenting at a
conference tomorrow. In the grand tradition of scholars everywhere, I bought new pants (and a shirt).
- I haven't seen my geese today, at least not during the daylight. They were around this morning. The gosling is still going strong, but boy do those suckers take awhile to grow up. Watching the family interaction is fascinating. The gosling is in its teenage gangly stage—legs as tall as an adult but with this wee puffy yellow body. Soon it should lose its puffiness and grow some actual feathers. It's quite a sight to see the little puff try to mimic his parents, especially with the stand-up-and-stretch-your-wings motion...because it has no wings! Little thing looks like a puffy T-Rex with its wee arms waving around.
- Some jackass in the condo complex lets his dog run off leash...and usually right toward the waterfowl. The geese fend him off, but it's still uncool. I yell at the kids who throw things at the birds, but I'm not going to yell at adults because if they're "off" enough to find enjoyment in watching their animals go after the wildlife, I don't want to pick a fight with them.
- I don't do calendar applications or personal organizers or mind-mapping software or any of that stuff. But I keep stuff on a sticky note, at least I did until I recently found my new best friend,
ReminderFox.
- My friends' boy reached a sports-related milestone in his soccer-playing career, and I couldn't be more proud of him. I love sports of all kinds (
SJSU represents!) and like to keep track of all the sports-related events in the lives of the kids of people on my blogroll. I was going to link to all of you, but there are just too damn many. So, if you're on my blogroll and your kid plays soccer or baseball or lacrosse or wrestles or swims and so on and so forth, and you write about it on your blog, rest assured that I care. I also care when your kids reach academic milestones like being class valedictorian or spotting the letter O on a map (just to be clear, those are two different kids).
- So, the plaintive quack-wailing. Very sad. Let it be known that humans with hearts understand the sound perfectly well...it's not just for ducks. We had three sets of ducklings this season: 5 3-week-olds who are just now getting their voices and wandering further away from mom, 4 2-week-olds who are just beginning to get real feathers, and just a few days ago (not even a week) 7 more ducklings popped up. There are now just 6 of those ducklings. When I was listening to the ducks yesterday, I heard a sound I'd never heard before—much squawking concern and fear. I got up to see what was going on (because it was a new sound) and at that moment one of the neighborhood cats trotted across my patio with one of the 5-day-old duckings in its mouth. The plaintive quack-wailing of a mother duck unable to keep all 7 of her babies safe, it was just heartwrenching. Stupid circle of life. :(
- Must end on a high note, because that bullet above is just depressing. Um. Aha! I changed the birdfood to more of a songbird mix (because more of it drops to the patio for the squirrels to get) and lovely yellow songbirds now come to visit. Nothing against the plain brown or black and white sparrow-type birds, but yellow is purty. Also, the other day I swear to god I saw a great blue heron swoop around the pond and fly away. Seriously.
Labels: gradschool, life
living with nature is stressful
I am totally protective of the wildlife in our fake ponds. I was sad when the gosling population went from three to one, but I was happy when I saw the four (and then five more) ducklings.
When kids start yelling at the ducks/geese or throw things at them (like sticks, not breadcrumbs), I holler at them. When adults sit down and watch them, I watch the adults...most are really good with the breadcrumb-feeding and the picture-taking, but there are a few sketchy people who concern me.
I yell at the few outdoor neighborhood cats when they get too stalker-y. I know, I should let nature run its course, but I don't think a well-fed indoor/outdoor cat needs to be stalking ducklings for survival. Thankfully, my cats are 100% indoor cats and like to
watch the wildlife, not eat it.
Just now, I performed traffic-cop duties for the goose family. For a visual aid,
this Flickr photo has notes that indicate the pond, the driveway, and the 4-lane (busy) city street on the other side of the driveway.
I heard some goose-honking, which isn't unusual, except it was
at my front door, which does not face the pond. I have a sliding-glass back door that goes to the patio which goes to the pond. The front-door opens to the driveway/parking, the other side of which is a really busy 4-lane city street. That's where the mama, papa, and baby geese were standing...at my front door.
So of course I tried to shoo them gently and quietly back around the buildings to the pond. The papa hissed at me, but didn't get all flappy like he does when there are mean, yelling guys throwing things at him. The mama stuck to the baby. I could have bent over and picked up the gosling, that's how close I was to them. I got them turned around and then realized that standing behind them and shooing them wasn't necessarily going to get them where I wanted them to go, so I ran ahead and cut off their path to anywhere besides where they needed to be.
They walked along the sidewalk and back to the pond, and I went back inside. Message to my geese: don't come around the front! The front is dangerous!
Also, goslings don't seem to grow quite as quickly as ducklings, so I'm concerned that they'll start wandering again before the gosling can get it together. The ducklings, they seem to grow exponentially each day. But the little yellow goose puff sure is cute...
Labels: life
nature!
It's difficult to concentrate in...um...the entire springtime. Case in point, the following instant messaging exchange between my buddy/boss and myself. Also during this timeframe was a work-related phone conversation with her, in which I also stood at the back window and talked about the squirrel in my tree, and the birds at the feeder, and the hummingbird staring right at me. And people wonder why I'm writing about Muir.
jcmeloni (5/3/2006 9:54:17 AM): we have three goslings!
my boss (5/3/2006 10:14:57 AM): neat
jcmeloni (5/3/2006 10:16:38 AM): except for the stupid bastards across the pond, they're trashy and loud and have a yippy dog. today I saw/heard the loudmouth guy go out and go "rawr!" and flap his arms to scare away the daddy goose. it was only then that I saw the little yellow puffs run toward their mother (and the daddy spread his wings to protect them). if those fuckers do anything to them, I'll do something about it. don't know what, but something.
[deleted: work-related messages]
jcmeloni (5/3/2006 10:43:06 AM): i just lured the goslings & parents over with food. hopefully they'll get the hint that this side is safe (and they all swam over)
my boss (5/3/2006 10:43:30 AM): good for you
[deleted: work-related messages]
jcmeloni (5/3/2006 11:05:45 AM): and four baby ducks!
my boss (5/3/2006 11:06:21 AM): it's a regular nature preserve! now stop looking out the window and get back to work! :)
jcmeloni (5/3/2006 11:06:26 AM): no shit
Labels: life
sickly
Sometime around last Wednesday, I came down with some sort of crud. Really achy, feverish, coughing, the whole deal. It sucked. Still sucks. But I went to class on Wednesday because I had a presentation and wasn't really feverish yet. By the time Thursday rolled around, I knew I wouldn't be going to classes that day...but I had to go to campus for a brief meeting, so at least I could put the essay due that day in my prof's box. I made a lame joke about not being able to go to either the Romanticism or Victorian seminars that day because I was consumptive. No, I don't have consumption but that's how crappy I feel and I thought it made for a good chuckle.
But now it's Saturday and I still feel crappy and I still have a ton of things to do. Guess what? They're not going to get done. Oh well.
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When my dad gets a cold or the flu, he always takes that opportunity to eat whatever he wants. For instance, once he had some sort of bug and he took that opportunity to eat a bag of potato chips. When asked what he was doing, he (innocently) said something along the lines of, "What? They're for my throat." Of course, that makes no sense because if you have a sore throat the last thing you want to eat is a handful of sharp crunchy things, but in my family it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
So yesterday when I went to the store to get kleenex and toilet paper and orange juice and so on, I also picked up some cream cheese brownies. What? They're for my throat.
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Thanks to the folks who patted my head and also relayed stories about their first conference experiences, in the comments
to this post. I talked to someone in my AmLit seminar who presented at this conference last year, and she said it was really stress-free and a lot of fun. So that's cool. Plus, it turns out there are no less than
five of us going this year. Three undergrads proposed a panel that was accepted, and another grad student (also in my AmLit seminar) was accepted too, so there will likely be car-pooling. Rob, the other grad student, has the same goals I do: read my paper without passing out from nervousness, and hope to god no one asks any questions. So we can bond on that, even if his paper is something Shakespearean and mine is all 19thC AmLit. The undergrads are doing something medieval, I think. I don't recall. I just hope that our things aren't scheduled at the same time, so I can be all supportive for them. Go team!
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I'm going back to my couch now. Everyone celebrating a holiday of some sort, have a nice one. I should have picked up some Peeps when I was at the store, but I forgot. Have you seen the
Peep Research site? Funny stuff.
Labels: life
