west of the moon

plant tending.

The weather's been beautiful here, and I've been penned up indoors most of the time.  Yesterday afternoon, I took a break from indoors and worked on my plants a little bit.

I have probably talked about the plants before.  I never kept houseplants of any kind before I moved to California, but when I first came out here, a friend who was moving away me a begonia.  Or, more accurately, he cut the leafy tops off the top of his own begonia plant, stuck them in a cup of water, and handed them to me.  He told me to leave them in the water until they grew roots, and then put them in some dirt.  I did, and they not only lived, but they flourished.  Those original begonia cuttings grew, and they sent up new canes, and after a while I took new cuttings and expanded the begonia collection.  (This picture is the closest to what my begonias look like, although mine are far less scenic.)  I also bought some new plants, and inherited even more plants from another friend who was moving out of town, and, well, I ended up with a lot of plants.  My apartment in Oakland was perfect for them, flooded with light.

Since I moved to Berkeley, the plants haven't been as happy.  It's mostly about the light--this apartment doesn't get nearly enough.  The begonias grow new leaves, but they don't flower, and all of the plants are growing all crooked and leggy as they desperately stretch toward whatever sad sunlight makes it into this place.  (I am not, if you haven't noticed, fond of my apartment.)  The begonia matriarch, the original cluster of canes I inherited back in my old apartment, has gotten so big and so lopsided that it fell over onto my desk a couple of weeks ago.  Yesterday, I cut back all the big lopsided top growths.

Here's the plant before the operation:

And here's after:

Okay, that may not look dramatic, but judging from how many clippings I have sitting in cups of water right now, I feel like I took off a third to a half of its overall mass.

... and, having written this much of what must surely be the world's most boring weblog post, I have realized why I feel the need to go through this step-by-step description of the plant care I handled yesterday afternoon.  (Cutting back the matriarch was a minor procedure; more major work involved repotting a root-bound tree thingy and splitting another rootbound begonia into two pots.)  Everything I know about houseplants is essentially self-taught; I've spent a lot of time googling around for information, but most of what I actually do is based on either modifying advice meant for outdoor plants or just making stuff up.  But I've learned a lot about cane plants, tuber plants, and root plants.  (The biggest thing I've learned there, unfortunately, is that every time I try separating out and replanting tuber plants, they die.)  I learned how to stake weak stems (like so: before and after) in a way that's stable but also gives the stem room to grow, I learned how to pack the soil in the pot so that the roots won't rot, and I learned that plants can live just fine even in environments (like this apartment) where they aren't going to thrive.

I like to think that someday I'll have a garden, even though I know that a garden is a lot more work than houseplants, even a small army of houseplants like mine.  Sitting out on the front steps yesterday, hands full of potting soil, surrounded by things that have grown in my care, that's not just a good feeling.  That's a little window of peace in the afternoon sun.

good fences.

When I was growing up, I knew all of our neighbors, and we all knew each others' business.  I don't want this to sound all halcyon-days rural-utopia; I grew up deep in the heart of suburbia, and I think that the local culture on our street was an exception rather than the rule, even for my hometown.  But we did know all the neighbors.  (My mother still does, and still keeps that network active.  When I finished my doctorate, I got congratulations cards from families up and down the block back home, including at least a few people who I don't think I've talked to since my last trick-or-treating run in eighth grade.  My mother has a real gift for keeping people in touch with each other--it's one of the things I admire most about her.)

That connectedness of the old neighborhood hasn't really carried through anywhere else I've lived, though.  In the last seven or eight years, in particular, it seems that I only get to know anything about my neighbors when some kind of calamity strikes our neighborhood.  Back in my old apartment in a slightly dodgy part of Oakland, the little garage unit behind my building caught on fire, and that brought out the whole block.  One of the women from the building next door came running over, banging on our doors and windows, and people up and down the street were standing on the sidewalk, calling the fire department from cordless or cell phones.  Three strangers helped us evacuate the collection of parrots from the upstairs apartment, and everyone had suggestions for how to get the smoke smell out when we were finally allowed back into the building.  (The fire never spread from the garage to the main building, thankfully.  The people in the upstairs apartment had been using the garage to store their SCA equipment, and they lost several thousand dollars' worth of costuming and pavillion tents, but there were no injuries, either human or parrot.) 

A year or two after the fire, not long before I left that apartment, one of the women who lived in my building was held up at gunpoint on our front steps.  Three in the morning, I was woken up by someone screaming, the loud thumping of a door being pushed shut, some shouting.  It was over before I was fully awake, but when the police came, they asked me to wait a while and give them a statement.  I sat out on the stoop for over an hour, talking with another neighbor who'd heard a similar jumble of noise and was also waiting to give a statement.  By the end of that hour, I knew more about his life than I knew about most of my friends from graduate school--something about the quiet middle of the night running up against the jangled nerve-ends made it easy to talk.  That was nearly five years ago, and I'm not sure I'd recognize him if I saw him on the street tomorrow, but I remember that night, bare feet on the concrete steps and the smoke from the cigarettes he lit with slightly shaking hands. 

There's nothing that profound that happened today, just the run-of-the-mill hassle of my car being broken into.  Again.  The passenger-side window was smashed to bits, small crackled rafts of safety-glass all over the seats.  We didn't notice until late afternoon, when Matt was on his way out to work, but god, it feels like I should have the auto body shop on speed-dial by now.  (And it's a holiday weekend--I won't even be able to get in touch with them until Monday, which is New Year's Eve, so who knows when I'll be able to get a new window?)  Nothing was stolen--there was nothing in the car but books, honestly, and the thieves/vandals apparently weren't interested in Thomas Pynchon and David Liss--but Matt can't take it to work like this, leaving it window-less in the parking lot at his store, and how can I go buy groceries tomorrow when everything is covered in glass and open to the rain? 

By the time I was done collecting case numbers and badge numbers and claim numbers, I was too irritated to do anything else, but later in the evening I finally wandered out to see about rescuing the books from the wreckage and taping some plastic to the window.  While I was out there, one of the neighbors from my building came out to talk.  It's the guy in the parking space next to ours, and our interactions so far have been limited to waving and smiling when we cross paths while parking.  Tonight we had a nice little chat about the cars and the neighborhood and the crime--he's been hit much worse than us, and much more often.  He does construction work of some kind, and has a locked tool-case in the back of his pickup truck.  A few months ago, he says, someone came in the middle of the night and sawed through the titanium lock.  That's not some crazy drugged-up teenager, that's premeditation, that requires something like a battery-operated sawzall.  They took five, six hundred dollars' worth of tools, including a crowbar that they used to pry open a storage unit in the parking area and steal some more stuff.  He had suggestions for us, and some ideas about why this keeps happening, but mostly it was just a shared venting of frustration, which was nice. 

I'd still much rather that the stupid car hadn't been attacked again, of course.  But if I have to look for a bright side, it was nice to get a chance to talk to my neighbor.

Feast of the Two Fishes

You know how some family traditions don't even really look like family traditions until you get some distance from them?  If it's just what everyone does, you don't even notice.  I've said before that I never really felt Italian until I left New Jersey; after leaving the East Coast entirely, I've felt more Italian than ever before.  One effect of this is that family traditions (some of which aren't even that strictly observed in the family proper) start to feel more important.  One of those traditions led me right into tonight's adventure: the feast of the twelve fishes.  Or seven fishes.  Most of which aren't fishes, technically, but other seafood. This is a problem with these immigrant-culture traditions that have been filtered through several generations of cultural assimilation and reclamation--we often don't know quite what we're doing.  (It puts me in mind of something Peter wrote on the old Secret Kings webjournal, about a traditional Korean holiday, where one executed a long series of ceremonial activities "for, uh, luck?  And more luck?") 

Somewhere back in the cultural DNA of one branch of my family, there was a tradition of eating a set number of seafood dishes for Christmas Eve.  The number may have been seven (for the Sacraments), or twelve (for the Apostles), or something else, but the point is, on Christmas Eve, you gather your friends and family and you feed them fish.  The last few times I spent Christmas Eve with my parents, we did the fishes up right: shrimp cocktail, shrimp scampi, clams oreganata, steamed king crab legs, and lobster.  It's hugely extravagant, but I think that's part of the point, holidays as feast days.  Matt and I haven't quite been keeping this up--we've had people over for Christmas Eve the last few years, but we serve them non-fishy food, grilled flank steak or peanut noodles or lasagna.  This year, it's just the two of us tonight, and we're having our own little Feast of the Two Fishes, starting with baked stuffed clams.

I've never made stuffed clams before.  My parents have a few different recipes for these, all of them good, but this is a whole new cooking experience for me.  Mark Bittman makes it sound so -straightforward-, so -easy-.  Get some fresh clams, pry them open, scoop out the meat, mince it, mix it with garlic and breadcrumbs and spices, stuff it back in the shells, bake.  Easy-peasy.

I'd like to draw your attention back to that "pry them open" part.  Everyone (Mark Bittman, the guy at the fish counter, my parents) said to steam them first, just a little bit, just until they open.  I, naive, didn't realize that even after steaming them open, I'd still have to wedge a knife in there and sever the little muscles holding the clamshell shut.  It was a surprisingly brutal process, and I learned a whole lot about clam anatomy.  I was on the phone with my parents for part of it, leading to the following exchange:

Me: Oh!  Damn it.
Dad:  What?
Me:  The clam.  I steamed them a little, so that they'd open, and I swear this guy was open, but he just shut again.  I can't get the knife in there at all.
Dad: Oh, they do that.  They'll open and close on you.  Just reminding you that they're still alive in there.
Me: I don't want to think about that too closely.
Mom: Oh, just put him back in the steam, he'll open up.  But get in there quick next time, don't give him a chance to get closed again. 

In the end, I triumphed over my little bivalve nemesis, and our Feast of the Two Fishes seems on track.  The second fish, a spicy shrimp dish out of the Williams Sonoma New Orleans cookbook, is entirely drama-free, as long as one buys shrimp that are already peeled and de-veined.  (In this I deviate from the cookbook, but life is short, and I don't want to spend it de-veining shrimp.)   Melt a lot of butter, pour in some olive oil, use it to sautee a whole lot of onion and rosemary, add garlic and cayenne pepper, spoon the sauce onto some shrimp in a casserole dish, bake for twenty minutes.  Simple and tasty.

Three shopping days.

Hash browns.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi

Bette's is one of those places that's crowded even on slow days, sitting right in the middle of the brunch culture around here, Bette's and Mama's and Rick & Ann's and Lois the Pie Queen, a handful of other places.  This particular Saturday, three days before Christmas in the heart of Berkeley's tiny-but-luxe Fourth Street shopping district, was not a slow day, and by the time I showed up, tables for two were an hour and  half wait.  A person by herself, willing to sit at the counter, could find a space in fifteen or twenty minutes, though, and I read while I waited, standing in the sliver of space between the jukebox and the coatrack, soaking up holiday cheer.  The special today was gingerbread pancakes, and when the waiter brought mine (calling me darling and winking), I could smell ginger and molasses before I even started eating.

I'm sure there's a pattern, some kind of economic indicator, in the uneven distribution of shoppers throughout Fourth Street, but the correct reading for these particular tea-leaves escapes me.  Sur le Table was mobbed, Aveda grimly empty.  I spent a while poking around a crowded boutique filled with lovely ornate-looking things of indeterminate purpose, hand-carved wooden gnomes in hand-carved tree habitats, four-hundred-dollar fountain pens, glass bottles filled with what I first thought was glitter but might actually have been shavings of gold and silver.  The European-style travel-goods store was full of people examining the shrink-wrapped towels and bright plastic suitcases, while the specialty paper store had only one or two people checking out their hand-crafted gift tags and art-stamped wrapping paper.  The staff at Kiehl's, all wearing white lab coats, were handing out mimosas to customers.  In the large gallery space near the parking lot, belonging to a co-op of local artists, nothing had prices marked, no one was there to answer questions, and they hadn't even bothered turning on the overhead lighting.  (Oddly enough, I used to date someone who worked in that space, but it wasn't an art gallery then.  It was a tech startup, back in 2000 or 2001, all Aeron chairs and sleek cinema monitors, with a wall of windows looking out on the shops next door.) 

Last night, on our way home from dinner, Matt and I were discussing some of the Christmas lights on houses in our neighborhood.  Not many houses are decorated, but the ones that are decorated look nice. (With a few exceptions--too many people have blue lights.  Blue lights aren't festive, they're creepy and sinister.)  I realized while we were talking that even the nice decorations feel incomplete, though.  Trees and bushes wrapped in Christmas lights are pretty, but they're even better when the lights are all blurred and glowing from underneath a layer of snow.  When I first moved to California, people told me that I'd miss winter, that I'd miss the snow and cold and ice, but I didn't, not until this year.  It took seven and a half years, but finally it's true, I miss the snow and the cold and the ice. 

Behind the Scenes, or, the real reason the SH podcast updates so infrequently.

This week's issue of Strange Horizons is the last issue for 2007--our regular end-of-year hiatus is two weeks this year, for arcane calendaring reasons.  This week's issue also has a new episode of the podcast, featuring an interview with Maggie Hogarth, in which we have a great time talking about how the internet is affecting the relationship between writers and their audience.  This episode of the podcast nearly killed me, and I need to explain why, because I think it goes a long way towards explaining why there aren't new podcast episodes more often.

The podcast process starts with asking someone if they'd like to be interviewed and setting up a time for the call.  Our "digital broadcasting" operation is decidedly low-end.  When I first floated the idea of the Strange Horizons podcasts, it was on an experimental basis, and I didn't think it was appropriate to invest magazine funds in a project that I wasn't sure was going to work out.  So we record with Skype, which is either free or very cheap to use, and a headset microphone that I already owned.  I spent a small amount of money on call recording software that integrates with Skype, and figured out how to edit the audio using GarageBand, which came pre-loaded on my computer.  (Shameful confession: the real reason that the SH podcasts are all split in two parts?  The version of GarageBand that came with my computer has a finite file-size limit, one that works out to just under 35 minutes.) 

In a strictly technical sense, the interview with Maggie was much easier than any of the previous interviews--this was the first interview where Skype didn't drop the call even once, so we actually were able to have a long uninterrupted conversation.  About an hour and forty minutes, all told.  We talked on Saturday afternoon, and I really wanted to get the final version done in time for Monday's issue of the magazine, so I figured I'd set aside Sunday morning for editing.  I got up bright and early, set up at the kitchen table (we had a houseguest staying in my office) with my laptop and a fresh cup of coffee, and set to work.  And here's how it went from there:

• Open the "saved calls" folder and suddenly remember that the call recorder I'm using saves the calls as QuickTime, which needs to be converted to an audio format before I can do anything with it.
• Open the file conversion tools that came with the call recorder and realize that I have no idea whether I wanted to convert it to AAC, AIFF, or MP3. 
• Decide that it probably doesn't matter, and ask the conversion thinger to convert the QuickTime file to AAC.  Because it was first on the list.
• Several minutes later, notice that the AAC conversion program is hung and needs to be force-quit.  Try again, this time with the AIFF conversion.
• Again, after several minutes, see that the AIFF conversion has hung as well.  Force-quit, try again with MP3.
• Ten minutes later, that hasn't worked either.
• Delete the conversion tools, go to the call-recorder software site, download the updated version of the tools.
• Fire up the AAC converter.
• Ten minutes later, the AAC converter pops up an error message and quits.
• Five or six minutes after -that-, the MP3 converter finally outputs a file.
• Get a bowl of cereal and open up GarageBand, ready to import my audio file.
• The audio file takes about a year and a half, or at least another five minutes, to import. 
• When it finally finishes importing, it's broken.  Normally, audio tracks show up as cheerfully-colored bubbles (this is Apple, after all) in the GB display, complete with the audio waveform and all.  What is happening here is that I can hear the audio when I play the GB file, but the track is not showing up as a bubble.  I can't edit the track unless I can see it. 
• Try to save the file, figuring that maybe it's a display quirk that will be fixed if I quit and re-start the program.  At this point, learn that GB doesn't think there's an audio track there at all--it thinks the file is only six seconds long.
• Convert the QuickTime file into all of the other available formats, import each of them individually, get the same result each time. 
• Conclude that the problem here is just that the file is too long.  Wish that GarageBand would -tell- me that, rather than silently and inexplicably fail.  Remind self that this is one of the trade-offs I've made by choosing to stick with Apple.
• Start looking around for software tools that will split my large file into smaller files. 
• Remember that many software download sites are extremely sketchy, and decide that I want no part of downloading and installing software from sketchy sites.
• Ask my good friend Google to find me some advice on how to split large audio files.
• While reading through the (mostly useless) search results, notice that everyone seems to speak very highly of an audio-editing program called Audacity.  Decide to check out Audacity, since at the moment I would just as soon never speak to GarageBand again.
• Audacity is available at SourceForge--yay open-source people!  I trust SourceForce. Yay non-sketchy sites!  Download and install Audacity.
• First glance at Audacity reminds me why I stopped being a Linux person, lo these many years ago.  It's very functional.  It is, in fact, so relentlessly configurable and functional that I can't figure out how the interface works or what any of the options mean. 
• Importing the podcast intro wrap (music and "hello, welcome to the podcast!" chatter) goes smoothly.  I start to think, okay, this is ugly, but maybe it will do the trick.
• Importing the audio file of the interview also goes smoothly, except that it imported into a separate track, and I need it to start after the end of the first track.  I try moving the second track, but can't figure out how to make it move. 
• Ten minutes later, I've read through all of the menu options, and none of them seem to be useful for moving the audio track.  I've also read through all of the online documentation, which I have to assume makes sense to people who already know how to use this software.  I am not one of these people. 
• A second read-through of the menu options reveals something called "align", which looks promising.  After three or four tries, it looks like it's moved the track to where I want it.
• Press "play", preparing to edit, and discover that moving the track also sped it up, and Maggie and I both sound like chipmunks.  Decide that GarageBand wasn't that bad after all, that there must be some way we can work out our disagreement.
• After a little bit of trial and error, get enough of a handle on the Audacity controls that I can successfully cut the hour-and-forty-minute audio file into smaller, presumably more managable, chunks. 
• Ask Audacity to save the four smaller audio files.  It tells me that no other software can read its files, so I should maybe export to a different file format.
• Ask Audacity to export my four smaller files into MP3 format.  It tells me that it's missing the necessary .lib files for MP3 conversions. 
• Ask Audacity to export my files into AIFF, which is the only remaining option.  It complies.
• Try to import the AIFF files into GarageBand.  GarageBand says it has no idea what format those files are in, but it sure as hell isn't AIFF. 
• Try to import the files into iTunes, which has some file-converting capabilities.  iTunes, which I -know- recognizes AIFF files, won't even acknowledge that these particular AIFF files exist. 
• Stare blankly at the computer for a while.  Quit all the programs, shut the computer down, and go wash some dishes.  When that's done, start everything up again and try importing the files again, hoping iTunes and GarageBand were just being quirky.  No luck--they still don't recognize the files.
• In desperation, go back into Audacity and comb through the menu options and preferences again.  Here I make a great discovery--Audacity, since it has more options than anyone could possibly need, has an option for different styles of encoding AIFF files.  I have no idea what these encoding styles mean, but it's the only damn thing I can think of to change, so I change it, and re-export all four files.
• Hooray!  GarageBand now recognizes this as a valid file format!  Minor celebration ensues.  It is now mid-afternoon, and I am finally ready to start editing! 
• THINK AGAIN.  The newly-exported valid-format files?  Chipmunks again.
• Ask Matt to listen to the files, just to make sure I haven't entered into some weird hallucinatory state where I can't tell the difference between normal sound settings and broken ones.  Matt starts singing the Chipmunks Christmas song, which remains stuck in my head for the next two days, damn him. 
• In an attempt to diagnose whether the problem was in Audacity or in the file conversion, import the files into iTunes, and they sound JUST FINE. 
• Remembering that iTunes has mad conversion skillz, ask iTunes to convert all of these to a different file format. 
• Export out of iTunes and back into GarageBand, where the files sound perfect.

All of this is just to get to the point where I can edit the stupid files.  Editing the hour-and-forty-minutes conversation down to two half-hour podcast segments takes another three hours or so, then I have to tweak the sound levels, track down links for all of the stuff we referenced in the interview, put together the podcast information page, upload the files to the server, edit the XML feed, and notify the web team that the podcast info page should go live with the new issue. 

I'm not kidding, this took me all day.  I had other things I needed to get done on Sunday.  (I was able to get a fair bit of other work done during the bits where I was waiting for various programs to convert or import or export, but there's only so much you can do in five- or six-minute bursts.

Also, I know that my process had a lot of trial-and-error, and as a result it undoubtedly took a lot longer than it needed to.  That said, in order to get from the original recorded call to the final edited podcast, I had to jump through a lot of stupid hoops.  To recap: the sound file started life as a QuickTime file, was converted from QuickTime to AIFF, imported into Audacity (which converted it from AIFF to .aup), cut into smaller pieces, exported to the desktop (as which point it was converted to AIFF again), imported into iTunes, converted in iTunes to MP3, exported to the desktop, imported to GarageBand (which converted it to .band), edited back together, edited down to the right length, exported from GarageBand to iTunes (converting it back to AIFF in the process), converted by iTunes back to MP3, exported from iTunes to my desktop again, and only then was it finally uploaded to the Strange Horizons web server.

There -has- to be a better way to do this.

two weekends.

Matt told me the other day that it's frustrating when I say, at the end of a day, that I didn't really feel like I got anything done.  "You're always working," he said.  "You've always done a lot more than you think you have." 

And I laughed, because he's right, but still.  "But there really are entire days where I don't think I've done much!  Answered a few emails, cleaned up the kitchen, but mostly sat around and watched television and played computer games." 

"Susan.  Seriously.  Most people call those -weekends-."

So, weekends.  Sometimes they even happen right on schedule.  I've had two great weekends in a row, and I just want to, I don't know.  Recognize it somehow.  I'm realizing more and more often how time just slips past, days and weeks and months have gone and I don't think I even noticed.  The semester's almost over, it's nearly Christmas again already, it's Tuesday night and I meant to write this yesterday, and I don't want to just lose track of all of it. 

The weekend before last, I was in Washington for a conference, the annual meeting of the History of Science Society.  It was a busy weekend--I gave a paper, threw a party, got a couple thousand words written on my next book, and finally met a new friend who had just turned ten months old.  (Oh, and lost two World Fantasy Awards, but that's fine, the winners deserved the wins.)  Over the course of three days, I spent time with a friend from middle school, friends from college, friends from graduate school, and a number of professional colleagues; if we count the long phone conversation I had with a friend from high school, then pretty much all the phases of the last twenty years of my life were represented in one weekend.   A chance encounter with a woman I first met when we were both bridesmaids in the same wedding was just the final flourish I needed to convince me that I really do live in a dense and heavily interconnected social world. 

This weekend that just ended, it was more or less the other end of the pendulum.  While the weekend in DC was very professionally-focused and extremely social, this weekend was very personal and restorative.  I spent a lot of time with Matt, I started (and made some good progress on!) a small quilt, we did a lot of cooking (a new stew recipe, a relatively new black bean chicken that's rapidly becoming a favorite, that kind of thing), cleaned the house, slept in.  I also was lucky enough to get to meet wee River Shaw at just a few days old, making that two new friends in two weekends.  This weekend was a good antidote for the mid-semester blahs, the creeping malaise that seems to settle in on college campuses in this period where the shiny newness of the semester has thoroughly worn off but the end isn't quite in sight yet.  You can see it everywhere--student attendance and participation dips, the graduate students look thoroughly exhausted, the lecturers aren't quite hitting on all cylinders.  And then, suddenly, there's a lovely three-day weekend, and (with luck) we're all a little bit refreshed.

Midway Airport

Midway Airport
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi.

The flight attendant's announcement was, as one might expect, our first sign of trouble.

"Sorry for the interruption, folks, but we've got a passenger who isn't quite feeling one hundred percent, and we're looking for any medical personnel that might be on this flight.  An M.D. is preferable, but if we have any registered nurses on board, that would be great too."  We all hear the "ding" from a call button, and the flight attendant did too, because he said "great, thanks!" and clicked off the intercom.

We were about half an hour out of Oakland, I think?  Maybe only fifteen or twenty minutes.  We'd just passed over some hills, filled in with fog or clouds on both sides until the ridges of the hills looked like the shoreline of a thick white lake.  A minute or so after the announcement, the pitch of the engines changed slightly, and I felt a drop in altitude.  The plane tilted, starting a turn, and my seatmate turned to her husband and said, "I think we're turning around."  Which we were, of course, a heavy banking turn that brought the ground into a strange angle relative to the plane, but it wasn't until the final rushed descent that the flight crew officially informed us of what we'd all figure out already--our flight had been diverted for a medical emergency.

It's the kind of thing one wants to make a big dramatic story out of.  How often are you on a plane that's diverted for a medical emergency? It's the kind of thing that happens in movies.  Unfortunately, there was little drama to work with.  The plane landed, and the first two people on were a police officer and a man in a shirt reading "Oakland Fire".  Following them, two EMTs, and the four of them filed slowly down the narrow aisle towards the back of the plane.  A few minutes later, they filed out in reverse order, one of the EMTs holding a man (presumably our sick passenger) by the arm.  Then we waited.  The flight crew told us that we needed to refuel, that we needed to restock the medical supplies used during the medical emergency, that paperwork needed to be filed.  The flight crew told us that they'd spoken to the operations people, and that we'd all make our connections, that planes would be held for us.  Finally, the flight crew told us that it was time to leave again, and corralled back into their seats all of the restless passengers standing in the aisles.

That bit about making our connections and holding planes?  That bit turned out to be a lie.  I landed at Chicago Midway about ten minutes after my connecting flight was scheduled to leave, and learned that it had in fact left on time.  I had three hours in Midway until my rebooked flight, and I confess, I gave in to the Airport Consumer Demons and bought a trashy suspense/thriller novel to help me pass the time. 

system failure.

There's a particular kind of sinking feeling that comes when your computer dies.  Sometimes it's a slow build, the gradual recognition that a particular noise or behavioral quirk is actually a sign that something's wrong.  In this particular case, there was no such ambiguity.  Saturday morning, bright and early, I sat down with a cup of coffee to check my email and start my weekly computer maintenance routine (backing up my documents, checking for software updates, cleaning the desktop clutter, that kind of thing).   There I was, paging through the new email, when it happened.  The cursor froze and a dense network of tiny parallel lines covered the now-flickering screen.  No warning, no early signs of trouble or strange noises or triggering events.  One minute, everything's fine, and the next minute my computer is dead.  Rebooting didn't help--the lines and the flickering persisted, and it hung on the loading screen--so I resigned myself to spending my morning (or possibly my whole day) at the Apple store.

As it turned out, I was able to get my computer looked at after only waiting in store for an hour and a half (the appointment queues for the Genius Bar are insane, but they do have a standby list), and the guy who helped me was friendly and competent.  If you're ever in the Bay Area and need to deal with the Apple support people, I strongly suggest going to the San Francisco store instead of the Emeryville one.  Even leaving out of consideration the long saga of problems I've had with Genius Bar techs at Emeryville, there's the plain fact that the San Francisco store has a place for you to sit while you wait for your appointment, while the Emeryville store doesn't.

Once I finally got seen by a tech person, the news was, well, not good, but much better than it could have been.  He ruled out a software-based origin to the problem, and he confirmed that my hard drive is healthy and my data intact.  The computer is being shipped off to a repair center, and I should have it back by the middle or end of next week.  It could have been a lot worse, and it could have been a lot more expensive.

That said, I'm still without a computer for possibly up to a week.  I'm using Matt's old laptop, so I have access to email and websites, but I don't have any of my files, and my whole workflow process has been (obviously) disrupted, so if you're expecting email or work from me this week, I may need a few extra days and some extra prompting.  On the silver-lining side, I guess this is as good a time as any to really focus on work that doesn't need the computer!  Sigh. 

What I Did With My Summer Vacation, Part I.

Somewhere back a few weeks ago, I passed a milestone of sorts--the end of my first year teaching.  I almost missed it, in the middle of everything else I was trying to keep track of.  Presented for your amusement and edification, a brief (and certainly incomplete) accounting of what I've been up to in the last six weeks or so.

• Wrapping up the semester, academically.  I've been really impressed with my students this year.  I see it more clearly with my seminar students, because I know them better, and I've seen more of their work up-close; my seminar students turned in a set of well-written, well-researched senior thesis papers, each of which was a pleasure to advise.  There weren't as many opportunities to interact with the students in the lecture class, but they asked great questions in class, which goes a long way towards making the whole classroom experience more enjoyable.
• Attending Commencement, as a member of the faculty.  More than just a great excuse to wear the regalia, it was a great opportunity to really feel like a member of the community.  I met the parents of some of my graduating seniors, got to say goodbye (and good luck) to some grad-school colleagues who are moving on to other things.
• A few days of vacation with friends in Madison.  First a couple of days with T. in his gorgeous condo near the capital building, then a couple of days with Karen and her family in their lovely home.  (The latter being the source of the Battleship story.)  I had two different kinds of house-envy that week; I also had a great time, welcoming and relaxing. 
• WisCon!  Wonderful as always, and thought-provoking too.  Barring catastrophe, I expect to post more about it in the next week or two.
• A few days of vacation with my family.  I had a chance to meet my new cousin (second cousin?) Sophia, and to spend some time with my best friend from high school. 
• A wedding, in upstate New York.  Matt's cousin got married, in a beautiful historic old chapel, and we had a fun couple of days with his family. 
• A joyful reunion with my apartment.  I know I've said mean things about it, but after nearly three weeks living out of a suitcase, I was genuinely thrilled to see this place again.

It's left me a little bit exhausted, and I've been sleeping a lot since I got back, trying to sort out the email and paperwork that accumulated while I was on the road.  I'm starting to get back into a normal routine again, which is nice.  (Just in time to set off on some business travel, week after next!  More on that later.)

appropriate presents.

My baby cousin graduated from college last week.  (No, she's not a child prodigy, nor is she actually the youngest of my cousins, and she's well past the age where I should still call her my baby cousin.  But when she was two and I was ten, we were like -best friends-.  I used to read her books, and drag her out of her crib to come sit on my lap, and I taught her how to walk down stairs without falling.  And she doesn't remember any of this, but I do.)

When she graduated from high school, I bought her a copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's.  (The book, not the movie, although I like them both.)  It had been my favorite book when I was that age, and I remember reading and re-reading it during the summer between high school and college.  In a quirk or coincidence that sounds rhetorical but is actually true, while I was giving her Breakfast at Tiffany's, most of the rest of the family was giving her jewelry from Tiffany's.  And I'm pretty sure she never read the book.

Speaking in very general terms, I believe that you're supposed to give gifts that the recipient would actually want, rather than what you'd want in their place.  But I can't afford gifts that she'd actually want, so I'm going to keep giving inappropriate ones.  I have a few books in mind--The Privilege of the Sword, mostly, and maybe one or two others.  Books about young women who find a way to make their own choices, books about people who find a way off of the path of least resistance.     When she was two years old, the biggest obstacle she faced was the set of stairs separating her from the rest of the house.  Now that she's twenty-two, I don't know as much about her life as I'd like, but I'm going to guess that (whether she knows it or not) the biggest obstacle she's about to face is the weight of expectation.  Everyone else in her life knows what they want from her, where they want her to be going, how they want her to behave.  She'll need to learn to navigate that.  I can't do much to help, but I do what I can, which apparently means I give her books she'll probably never read.