On the road

Parked at a hotel for a few days, seeing friends.  The Snork Maiden finds hotels a great treat and, I admit, so do I.  Our room has a canopy bed–we find this exotic.  (Growing up, I had a friend who slept in an old canopy fourposter that had been in her family for a few generations.  Like this hotel bed, it was rather high off the ground; unlike this one, it had a stool to climb up on.)

Our eating has been rather haphazard–some excellent meals, some missed meals made up for with snacks, some eccentric combinations of foods.  At our friends’ house, the Snork Maiden and their daughter made tomato soup, salad, and a mostly-bananas fruit compote for the adults for dinner. 

We got Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on CD out of the library for the car journeys and have really been enjoying it despite–or because of?–the fact that we’ve both read the book multiple times.  Jim Dale does an astounding job of voicing the U.S. versions of the Harry Potter audiobooks. 

More to tell, but no more time now, so more soon.

A spot of bother

Last summer, while passing through a particularly busy and difficult time, I mused that the pain of it would disappear once it was over, never to be properly remembered–but actually, here in a different chaotic moment, I find I do remember it–not perhaps in all its lousy glory, but with some clarity. 

The Snork Maiden has been so great on our travels–not that there haven’t been moments of tiredness and frustration, but overall things have gone surprisingly well.  We had a great day with PymFan, who was incredibly gracious about letting the Snork Maiden steer the agenda for much of the day.  On the train going back, we took turns writing sentences in our summer journal.  I wrote, “We forgot to ask PymFan to write something in this journal!”  The Snork Maiden wrote, “She had a good time.  We know that.”  Hee.

Some challenges lie ahead.  I know I will have to exercise patience with her.  And she with me, but I am supposed to be the grownup here.  Of course, there is no shortage of grownups around who need my patience as well…

A lost thing found:  I have one halfway decent bathing suit.  It was missing for a while and then turned up earlier this summer.  Then, a couple of weeks back when I actually wanted to go swimming, I couldn’t find it.  Tonight it turned up again, in a bag in the car.  Weird, but I’m happy to be able to swim for the rest of the trip.

Postcard

Hello from mid-conference-and-Hometown travels!  We’re having ourselves a good time seeing family and friends and doing things we associate with these places.  The Snork Maiden seems to have hit a middle phase of childhood in which she clearly remembers locations and experiences of previous trips to Hometown and Conference City and wants to repeat them as closely as possible.  Whereas in earlier years we tended just to haul her along wherever we wanted to go, now she’s got some decided, if conservative, opinions.  Mostly this is fine with me; I generally like these places, since I took her to them in the first place.

However, we are also doing new things, one of which is visiting a swimming facility that’s recently opened in Hometown.  It’s like a small version of one of those theme-park water parks, with a couple of slides, a whirlpool and a sort of swimming channel that loops around and has its own current, and it is the Snork Maiden’s new favorite place.  She’s going to miss it when we leave, and look forward to it on future trips.

Blog posting will probably be intermittent for the next couple of weeks.  If anything really fascinating happens, I’ll be sure to check in.  Although I am parrying a small stream of work-related emails and phone calls, I am curiously relaxed (for me).  It helps that most of what I’m dealing with is pretty pleasant: an offer from New RU to teach a second class next year, proofs from a literary magazine for something of mine they’re publishing, a few minor and non-emergency conference things.  (My disaster mentality steps in to remind us all that a conference-related emergency could arise at any moment!–and so it could, but what can I do about it until it does?)

By the way, in case you were wondering, my calf is still sore, but I can walk normally, or nearly so.  I guess it was a mild strain.  Hurt like billy-o for a day or two, but now a very minor inconvenience.

The things they carried

(In my mind, the title of this blog post ranks as the second most irreverent use of a book title in the history of this blog, right after the use of The Drowned and the Saved.)

By the time you read this, I’ll have left on my trip a couple of days ago, but as I’m writing it, I’m still in the thick of getting ready to go.  What I have to do next, now that all the laundry’s done, is sort out clothes for myself and the Snork Maiden.  She’s packed her backpack for the plane (Nintendo DS, stuffed animal friend, journal, and a few books) and put out clothes she wants to take; I just have to add clothes, toothbrush, etc.  For myself, I need to choose clothes (or not so much choose as assemble the four or five sets of clothes I wear over and over in the summer) and finish packing my carry-on (these books will definitely be in it).  I finally got a new ink cartridge for the printer this morning, so I can print a manuscript I’m supposed to be reading, our boarding passes, and a few other things that need to come along in hardcopy.

There’s no way around it: I am going to have to do laundry in Conference City.  I just don’t have enough suitable clothes to make it through the conference and the days before and after it, when I won’t be in Hometown or at home, but in the general vicinity of Conference City.  I realize this is probably not a really difficult problem, but it’s a small new wrinkle.  I could go to a laundromat, of course, but I’d rather be spending time with friends I don’t see often. 

I wonder would it be gauche to show up at a friend’s house for a visit and ask to put in a load of wash?  There are friends who are glad to see you when you show up for a visit, and then there are the friends who are glad to see you when you show up to do laundry. 

(Image from buzzymultimedia.com.)

Security is a thumb and a blanket

When I went away to college, my favorite aunt gave me her college laundry bag, emblazoned with the logo of the groovy Bard College, which she attended in the late sixties (contemporaneously with Chevy Chase and the guys from Steely Dan, who met as Bard students).  While I’ve lost many arguably more important items, this bag has stayed with me for years, even though I’m more in a hamper phase now and have both a regular laundry basket and my own washing machine.  (A life-changing purchase.)  I just ran across it and realized I could use it while traveling, since I’ll probably be packing dirty clothes at some stage in the upcoming travels.  So into the suitcase it goes.

I’m so happy that I still have this bag.  It reminds me of my favorite aunt, and of the great adventure of going off to college.  Like the Ori Yoki pencil box (which I still have, use, and love, even though now that I have a classroom of my own, I’m not so dependent on portable writing implements), it’s a material object that gives me real pleasure. 

Is there an object that’s been making you happy out of all proportion lately?

H.M.S. Surprise

As I was scurrying around packing, I stepped a little funny–I think I was changing direction abruptly–felt something in the back of my calf go zing, and was immediately hobbled by pain.  Oh, the things you shout aloud at such moments!  I think I yelled an expletive and my own name, something like “Sh!t, [–], this isn’t good!”  Of course, it would be on the afternoon of our departure.  Dagnabit!  I rushed to Dr. Google, and it’s got to be a calf strain.  I put myself on the couch with an ice pack and two ibuprofen, and a couple of hours later, I’m gimping around the house quite efficiently, finishing up the rest of the preparations.  We’ll see how it is after the trek through the airport and the flight.  Impeccable timing, no?

Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus!

I will be spending today in the usual fit of insanity that precedes a trip: doing necessary errands I neglected earlier in the week; embarking on tasks that I have inexplicably decided must be done before I leave even though, were I staying, I could easily continue to put them off; abandoning some of said tasks; and packing. 

An exciting new factor in the craziness is that there is effectively no downtime between Hometown trip and the conference, so I also need to work out what conference-related tasks may come up while I’m away and make sure that I have brought or uploaded the appropriate materials.

I will be bringing materials for projects I won’t touch while I’m away, as well as materials for projects I will.  I will pack at least one item of clothing that I will never wear, and one pair of shoes ditto, and I will leave behind something that I desperately need.

What will it be?

Anguished English

A quickie post because there’s lots to do today and I was away yesterday, dealing with conference stuff.  One of our conference participants has published two books of genre fiction–maybe I won’t identify the genre–and sent me a copy of one.  I read the first three chapters on my way home, and I can’t believe how poorly copy-edited the book is–or, more likely, not copy-edited at all.  It started with tussled for tousled on page 3 (“I playfully tussled his hair”) and just went on from there.  Ugh.  That’s a flat-out error–and there were others!–but there were also lots of borderline usage issues that a copy editor would have questioned.  I will stop short of saying the whole thing is poorly written, but it’s not impressive.

And yes, I realize that if I had a copy editor for this blog, I would use fewer parentheses and em dashes, make fewer punctuation errors and be more precise in my verb-preposition pairings, but when I’m reading a published book from a reputable mass-market press, I do expect not to find three mistakes and eight or nine instances of questionable or infelicitous usage per (short) chapter!  Except maybe I should, these days?

More amusing: as I sat on the bus to Conference City, I listened to a twentysomething guy’s cellphone conversation.  There’d been some kind of regime change at the restaurant where he worked, and a couple of people had been fired, after which they’d all gone out to a bar and gotten hammered:

“Yeah, I tried calling him before I left this morning, but it was six a.m. and he’d gotten so drunk last night.  He was practically coma toast.“

This, I liked.

Have you got any funny or infuriating grammar and usage anecdotes to share?  Or any wonderful malapropisms?

The blackboard jungle

So, now that I’m a high-school teacher, I am thinking about my classroom style and practices with an eye to what I might like to try modifying, especially now that I have the opportunity to set my routines and expectations from the beginning of the year.  Three of my classes will be ninth grade, which means they should be receptive to clear direction about what is and is not acceptable in high school. 

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t like dealing with bad behavior in the classroom, and I’m not particularly good at it.  I can do it, because I have to, and over the years I have found approaches that work for me that fit well with my personality and philosophies.  By the time school ended, I was beginning to perceive that I might end up being better at it as a high-school teacher than as a college one, simply because I am less ambivalent about telling fourteen-year-olds to behave than I am about telling twenty-year-olds. 

And, of course, the atmosphere is more conducive to, shall we say, behavioral guidance.  They are minors.  They expect teachers to step on them when they are whispering.  They know the threat exists of “being sent to Mr. —” if they get seriously out of line.  Furthermore, this is a college preparatory school, and most of the unwanted behavior is pretty mild–e.g., whispering (typically girls) and showoffy antics (typically boys). 

At the same time, they are, well, kids, which is why one of my projects this summer is to read up on adolescence so that I can understand better whom I’m dealing with.  The Soul of Education, which can be seen in the books column on the right, was recommended by a colleague, and gives some excellent food for thought about how adolescence is partly a search for meaning. 

I’m thinking about my own teachers, too, and how they managed a classroom.  I don’t remember a lot of discipline incidents in high school, though.  (I do remember a sixth-grade teacher carrying a student’s desk, with the student in it, out to the hallway and leaving it there.) 

Mostly, I was in fairly challenging classes, and there was far more incentive to pay attention and stay engaged than to start goofing around.  And indeed, my honors classes this year gave me very little difficulty; it was the “regular” class that had whisperers and showoffs.  In high school, my “regular” class was Spanish, and I remember el maestro fussing and shouting at the offenders–mostly ineffectually. 

So!  I’m interested in your experiences (from either perspective, student or teacher) of humane, dignified, yet effective high school discipline.  Do you remember policies, routines, or responses that helped keep a classroom focused and behaving appropriately?  Mature, experienced, resourceful readers–what can you suggest?

One thing more

I was catching up with a few blogs that I left in my other Google Reader account, and stumbled across Bittersweet Girl‘s response to the books of consolation meme.  You’ll have to go over to The Bitter and the Sweet to see what she picked.  I particularly liked her coda:

I’m fighting off the need to conclude with some defensive statement about the fact that I do, really, read “serious literature” too. The fact is, while I love, admire, learn from, and teach a lot of “serious literature,” it’s not what I turn to when my heart is broken, my stomach aches, or I cannot sleep.

Yes.

Adding Anne Lamott’s Grace (Eventually) to my Currently/Recently reading list in the right-hand column made me remember that her Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life and Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith are other works of consolation reading for me.  Even though she is Christian, and I am not, I really like reading her essays on faith.  I liked C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, too.  And Lauren Winner’s Girl Meets God.  Whaddayagonnado?

So my question today for my clever, well-read, compassionate readers is–can you name just one book (or more, if you wish) that falls into the consolation reading category for you?