I made a mobile! And not a popsicle stick one either. A real, abstract-pieces-with-wire-and-balance-so-it-moves-fantastically mobile! I see more of this on the horizon. It truly is the perfect antidote to paper-writing. I want to fill the entire apartment with them. The cats think it's pretty cool, too.

I am now officially done with my grading for the semester. Woohoo! (Please, please don't let me get any pleading emails from students.)

So I had my "pre-orals" meeting today, which is basically the hoop you jump through into a phase where you pretend you know where you're going with your bad academic self. And let me tell you, my academic self has got direction now. I have my future-job-market self heading in the job market direction, the dissertation self headed in the ( Read more... )

So it's Friday the 3rd, which I'd like to point out is not the 13th. So why, then, does my tire decide to self-destruct as I'm driving to teach along an empty part of the highway? In my favor was daylight and no rain, but the noise WAKTHUNKWAKTHUNKWAKTHUNK is still not particularly pleasant. To add insult to no-personal-injury, the brand/type of ( Read more... )

...and only this weekend did I discover the joy of New Jersey vinyards. Now our wine rack doesn't look frail and lonely!

So if you've listened to NPR, you may have heard about the 9000 Rutgers students who were recently, and correctly, registered to vote, only to be told at the polls that their registrations were not processed and thus they couldn't vote. Rutgers filed a suit and they were allowed to have provisional ballots, but geez! I showed up at my class not ( Read more... )

I voted when the polls opened at 6AM. I was the ninth person in my district! Things that are only possible in a small town....

REMEMBER TO VOTE!

Neither do I.

Because if there is, I totally earned some today. I thought I was doing well when I encouraged my poetry students to register, but I know I really earned some when I took some voter registration forms from the people who were literally swarming all over campus and brought them in to my class and...registered three students! It was a little sad ( Read more... )

Mine! All mine!! Well, technically not really, but I do have a certificate of stock power, which is good enough.