Productivity yesterday: fairly high.
Productivity today: medium, but still higher than it's been.
Still to grade (in depth, not just check-and-return): a whole class-and-a-half's worth of rhetorical analyses, which were supposed to come back to them by yesterday at the latest. Lord have mercy.
Finally done this evening, after multiple days' failed attempts to make the time: my laundry.
Things I still have no time for, and will probably have no time for until November: dish-doing, room-cleaning, cookie-baking, using up the five leftover self-picked apples that haven't rotted yet, sleeping for more than six hours at a time, going anywhere outside of Broome County, attempting to acquire another teaching-friendly outfit, anything not involving an undercurrent of guilt that I'm not working.
What will happen probably less than a week after I give the rhetorical analyses back: the stack of op-eds to grade will come in, and the whole process will start all over again.
Currently trying not to: eat chocolate chips right out of the bag...particularly after all the other sugar I've taken in today, including, though not limited to, the wrapped "cinnamon bun" pastry I succumbed to at church this afternoon, which may be the least healthy wrapped snack ever (though, knowing humanity, I doubt it).
Okay. Back to work...or sleep. One of the two. Or maybe chocolate chips. We'll see.
10.27.2009
10.23.2009
This has to stop right now:
I cannot be teaching nine credits (with the fifteen-to-twenty hours a week that whole production entails, though goodness knows how many hours it averages out to when you throw in grading), working twelve-to-fifteen hours a week at church, helping with the youth ministry, captaining a soup-kitchen team (for the record, I genuinely attempted to escape that responsibility, but apparently some have greatness thrust upon 'em), doing Red Cross work, going to InterVarsity meetings, and doing all the everyday things I am supposed to be doing (which include, but are not limited to, shopping, cooking, laundry, room-cleaning, dish-doing, some housecleaning, and the kind of exercise a twenty-four-year-old is supposed to get ANY EXERCISE AT ALL) at the same time, to say nothing of time left over for doing anything I actually want to do, since right now I get it by way of stealing time from the above things I'm supposed to be doing.
It does. not. work. It will. not. work.
I am going to have to disappoint some people and cut waaaay, way back on all the stuff I am doing. From this point forward:
-No more blood drives during the semester, or any other goshdang Red Cross thing besides helping Cathy Haycook, no matter how desperate Veronica is.
-I'm sorry, truly, but, with the exception of Nathan's human-slavery awareness demonstration, both because I already promised him I'd do it and because I really genuinely want to do it, no more InterVarsity until further notice. It's, odd as this sounds, too big a temptation, time-management-wise, and, frankly, my heart hasn't really been in it lately because I already spend so much time at church, plus I'm in Bible study with Andrea (that one I'm keeping, of course).
I may also, depending on how things go, have to scrap helping Ife with youth group and/or volunteering for the soup kitchen.
I may also have to suspend my Facebook account AGAIN, and maybe even close down my Google-reader feed, because when I'm on the internet I leak time like broken faucets leak water - time in absolutely senseless, absolutely irresponsible quantities, and I just don't have that time or the sleep to lose anymore, which is a ridiculous statement to the extent that it assumes that at any point over perhaps the past five years I ever have. It's not even AIM, it's just...everything. I just can't do as much as everyone else can right now. I don't have the time-management discipline that that demands.
And I cannot keep failing when it comes to serving my students. They are the ones who suffer most when I do this kind of crap.
It does. not. work. It will. not. work.
I am going to have to disappoint some people and cut waaaay, way back on all the stuff I am doing. From this point forward:
-No more blood drives during the semester, or any other goshdang Red Cross thing besides helping Cathy Haycook, no matter how desperate Veronica is.
-I'm sorry, truly, but, with the exception of Nathan's human-slavery awareness demonstration, both because I already promised him I'd do it and because I really genuinely want to do it, no more InterVarsity until further notice. It's, odd as this sounds, too big a temptation, time-management-wise, and, frankly, my heart hasn't really been in it lately because I already spend so much time at church, plus I'm in Bible study with Andrea (that one I'm keeping, of course).
I may also, depending on how things go, have to scrap helping Ife with youth group and/or volunteering for the soup kitchen.
I may also have to suspend my Facebook account AGAIN, and maybe even close down my Google-reader feed, because when I'm on the internet I leak time like broken faucets leak water - time in absolutely senseless, absolutely irresponsible quantities, and I just don't have that time or the sleep to lose anymore, which is a ridiculous statement to the extent that it assumes that at any point over perhaps the past five years I ever have. It's not even AIM, it's just...everything. I just can't do as much as everyone else can right now. I don't have the time-management discipline that that demands.
And I cannot keep failing when it comes to serving my students. They are the ones who suffer most when I do this kind of crap.
10.20.2009
A Late Present to My Seventeen-Year-Old Self
Six-thirty PM: I snagged the last available space in the parking lot nearest the Anderson Performing Arts Center on campus and followed an old lady in, hoping she'd unknowingly lead me to the Osterhaut Concert Hall (there're several auditoriums in the place, and some of them take a little bit of wandering to get to), where Mike Farrell, otherwise known as BJ Hunnicutt from M*A*S*H, was giving a free talk on activism at 7. As it turned out, I could have found the place without her help, since it was right in front of us, but instead I followed her all the way in, too, sidling by her only when she stopped to talk to an usher.
For such a big hall, there weren't that many people: his visit got much less campus hype than I expected, given that many of us are familiar with M*A*S*H via the wonders of syndication. I got a seat in, I dunno, maybe the sixth or seventh row back? - something towards the front, but not actually the front - and in the center. I looked around...hardly any college students. The advertising that must have been done in the Binghamton paper (I hadn't seen it, but sure enough, there was an article) and at River Read Books (which sponsored the night) had worked, for there were people, but most of them were my parents' age and older. The few other college students there were tended to be right up front, in groups with their friends. Though, yeah, I get the demographic: Farrell is now seventy years old.
And how did I feel about finally getting to meet a M*A*S*H actor? Relatively calm. At sixteen or seventeen I would have been tingling with excitement for days preceding; now, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, I can't summon the adrenaline level I could during high school, and at first I wasn't sure I'd go: did I really want to hear about a bunch of topics I'd already heard so much argument about for so many years (the death penalty [his stance on which, don't get me wrong, I agree with, but still], the war in Iraq, election rights, etc.)? I've long felt, if anything, too little, not too much, when it comes to life in general. If this was going to be all righteous anger - as Gallagher's visit to Alfred was, to take a lesser example, and one much less self-giving - would I end up wishing I hadn't come? I feel like a bad person for not wanting to hear more about social justice (especially me, who was Miss Community Service for so long and who still tries sometimes to help Nathan Bixler, may he be richly blessed both now and hereafter, with his Social Justice Ministry projects), but I did two years of grad school and I've lived in America for the past eight years and I am therefore burned out on people's self-righteous anger. That shouldn't be so, but it is.
Yet that high-school-junior self would have jumped at the chance, and even though I'd maybe like to say that it was for love of Mike's causes, or even my real secondary reason of wondering if I'd be inspired, in the end, I guess you could say that it was primarily for that past self that I went.
Remember, I spent months of eleventh grade, after the whole Cory debacle, lost in M*A*S*H as a way to cope. I can hardly put into words anymore what that debacle was (even were it mine to fully explain, which I think it isn't), but it stands out as my first taste of what it was like to try to rescue someone who was clearly in trouble and pain, but end up not only defeated, but even to some degree betrayed. As one of Churchville's most idealistic high schoolers, it nearly broke me. I made Hawkeye, BJ, Radar, and the rest into imaginary friends, making up a complicated system part out of Star Trek: TNG, part out of Narnia, and half out of The Giver, that brought them out of their world and into mine, made them able to read my mind and feelings, but made it so hours in my time were only seconds away from theirs. I remember dark mornings in March, the worst month of that so-exceptional, so-dramatic year, huddled over my heating vent, thinking about Mere Christianity, having conversations with a mental-holographic Father Mulcahy, trying to - to what? I hardly remember now. To hope, I feel like saying, though I can't explain why the incident damaged mine so much. To be brave.
And I'm not gonna lie - when Mike arrived, those imaginary friends were there, too.
When he arrived - forty minutes late; he was driving here all the way from Maine and hit traffic - he'd clearly rushed out of his car to meet us. He was in a suit coat - but under it was a standard-looking, thickish cotton t-shirt, and the rest of his outfit, which he hadn't had time to change, was sweatpants and sneakers. He was so sorry, he said. He thanked us all for waiting.
What followed after his preliminary few stories, it turned out, was basically a Q-and-A session - people came up to microphones set up on either side of the room and asked him things, he answered. Some of it was about M*A*S*H. Some of it was about his travels around the country on behalf of various groups for change. Some of it was political. As it turns out, he is very liberal. Very polite, and very careful to think and research before he decides on his positions (thank God), but very liberal. I am a moderate (or at least I've long hoped I am, since my personal sympathies lie with neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party), and I kind of wished he'd criticize, just for the sake of balance, someone besides the right, though he never did. I think that for all he sees conservatives as suppressive of critical thought, he is a little quick to paint that whole large group with one brush.
But I like him. He was very kind to everyone he spoke to, including the two lunatic-fringe people who monopolized the microphone for minutes at a time, basically to talk at him about themselves instead of ask him anything (I would have found not cutting them off something of a challenge, but he was a perfect gentleman). He made complex and measured points. He found ways to courteously express his own views when they disagreed with those of the audience. Besides being an excellent model of good rhetoric, he is, much more importantly, a man who appears to have been the inspiration for much of what is good in his characters. The more you see of Mike Farrell, the more you realize that he didn't have to move far away from himself to play BJ.
I actually thought about asking him if he had any advice for my students about how to write for an audience that starts off disagreeing with them, since he's been on very conservative talk shows to defend liberal points, but I never got the chance. Which turns out to've been just fine, since after the talk ended, I heard Dr. Kinney call my name - turns out that she and her husband were there. She is, might I remind you, the director of composition, my favorite grad-school professor but also, now, my highest-up boss. To've asked that kind of question as my question to a celebrity might well have looked like major sucking up, so I guess I'm glad it didn't happen. (I can always e-mail him if I want to and hope for an answer, right?)
I ended up in line with Drs. Kinney and Henkel eventually, as we waited to get our copies of his new book signed (I bought mine about twenty seconds before I got to him, but never mind that). They left for home, and I was next.
I'd ended up thinking, on my way to that line, how my fourteen-year-old self wanted to act if I ever met Colin Mochrie. I wanted to be cool, to not bother him. I mean, I also desperately wanted to have an actual conversation with him, but if I ran into him in some casual setting - goodness knows what that would have been - I wanted him to know I knew who he was, but to leave the communication to his opening.
I thought, too, of what my mom had said once while we watched Good Eats together - that she wouldn't want to bother Alton Brown, but she wanted to shake his hand sometime, tell him she enjoyed the show. That had seemed a bit anticlimactic to me at the time, but I understand it now.
So I got to Mike Farrell, who played a larger part than he'll ever know in my junior year of high school. And I looked at him, said something like, "Hi, so nice to meet you," and shook his hand, suddenly feeling a bit shy. I spelled my name; he signed my book. To [Laurel] - Peace! He gave it back, shook my hand again. A nice handshake, too - lively, sincere. "It's a pleasure to meet you," I think he said, and he has a talent for sounding like he means it.
"Thanks so much for coming out here," I said, probably turning a little too quickly, the whole transaction a bit too businesslike from my end. But I did say it, and then I turned and let the next person go. And so it was that I saw and met Mike Farrell, who played one of my favorite characters on my favorite TV show ever.
Junior-year self: merry Christmas, happy birthday, or anything you choose.
For such a big hall, there weren't that many people: his visit got much less campus hype than I expected, given that many of us are familiar with M*A*S*H via the wonders of syndication. I got a seat in, I dunno, maybe the sixth or seventh row back? - something towards the front, but not actually the front - and in the center. I looked around...hardly any college students. The advertising that must have been done in the Binghamton paper (I hadn't seen it, but sure enough, there was an article) and at River Read Books (which sponsored the night) had worked, for there were people, but most of them were my parents' age and older. The few other college students there were tended to be right up front, in groups with their friends. Though, yeah, I get the demographic: Farrell is now seventy years old.
And how did I feel about finally getting to meet a M*A*S*H actor? Relatively calm. At sixteen or seventeen I would have been tingling with excitement for days preceding; now, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, I can't summon the adrenaline level I could during high school, and at first I wasn't sure I'd go: did I really want to hear about a bunch of topics I'd already heard so much argument about for so many years (the death penalty [his stance on which, don't get me wrong, I agree with, but still], the war in Iraq, election rights, etc.)? I've long felt, if anything, too little, not too much, when it comes to life in general. If this was going to be all righteous anger - as Gallagher's visit to Alfred was, to take a lesser example, and one much less self-giving - would I end up wishing I hadn't come? I feel like a bad person for not wanting to hear more about social justice (especially me, who was Miss Community Service for so long and who still tries sometimes to help Nathan Bixler, may he be richly blessed both now and hereafter, with his Social Justice Ministry projects), but I did two years of grad school and I've lived in America for the past eight years and I am therefore burned out on people's self-righteous anger. That shouldn't be so, but it is.
Yet that high-school-junior self would have jumped at the chance, and even though I'd maybe like to say that it was for love of Mike's causes, or even my real secondary reason of wondering if I'd be inspired, in the end, I guess you could say that it was primarily for that past self that I went.
Remember, I spent months of eleventh grade, after the whole Cory debacle, lost in M*A*S*H as a way to cope. I can hardly put into words anymore what that debacle was (even were it mine to fully explain, which I think it isn't), but it stands out as my first taste of what it was like to try to rescue someone who was clearly in trouble and pain, but end up not only defeated, but even to some degree betrayed. As one of Churchville's most idealistic high schoolers, it nearly broke me. I made Hawkeye, BJ, Radar, and the rest into imaginary friends, making up a complicated system part out of Star Trek: TNG, part out of Narnia, and half out of The Giver, that brought them out of their world and into mine, made them able to read my mind and feelings, but made it so hours in my time were only seconds away from theirs. I remember dark mornings in March, the worst month of that so-exceptional, so-dramatic year, huddled over my heating vent, thinking about Mere Christianity, having conversations with a mental-holographic Father Mulcahy, trying to - to what? I hardly remember now. To hope, I feel like saying, though I can't explain why the incident damaged mine so much. To be brave.
And I'm not gonna lie - when Mike arrived, those imaginary friends were there, too.
When he arrived - forty minutes late; he was driving here all the way from Maine and hit traffic - he'd clearly rushed out of his car to meet us. He was in a suit coat - but under it was a standard-looking, thickish cotton t-shirt, and the rest of his outfit, which he hadn't had time to change, was sweatpants and sneakers. He was so sorry, he said. He thanked us all for waiting.
What followed after his preliminary few stories, it turned out, was basically a Q-and-A session - people came up to microphones set up on either side of the room and asked him things, he answered. Some of it was about M*A*S*H. Some of it was about his travels around the country on behalf of various groups for change. Some of it was political. As it turns out, he is very liberal. Very polite, and very careful to think and research before he decides on his positions (thank God), but very liberal. I am a moderate (or at least I've long hoped I am, since my personal sympathies lie with neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party), and I kind of wished he'd criticize, just for the sake of balance, someone besides the right, though he never did. I think that for all he sees conservatives as suppressive of critical thought, he is a little quick to paint that whole large group with one brush.
But I like him. He was very kind to everyone he spoke to, including the two lunatic-fringe people who monopolized the microphone for minutes at a time, basically to talk at him about themselves instead of ask him anything (I would have found not cutting them off something of a challenge, but he was a perfect gentleman). He made complex and measured points. He found ways to courteously express his own views when they disagreed with those of the audience. Besides being an excellent model of good rhetoric, he is, much more importantly, a man who appears to have been the inspiration for much of what is good in his characters. The more you see of Mike Farrell, the more you realize that he didn't have to move far away from himself to play BJ.
I actually thought about asking him if he had any advice for my students about how to write for an audience that starts off disagreeing with them, since he's been on very conservative talk shows to defend liberal points, but I never got the chance. Which turns out to've been just fine, since after the talk ended, I heard Dr. Kinney call my name - turns out that she and her husband were there. She is, might I remind you, the director of composition, my favorite grad-school professor but also, now, my highest-up boss. To've asked that kind of question as my question to a celebrity might well have looked like major sucking up, so I guess I'm glad it didn't happen. (I can always e-mail him if I want to and hope for an answer, right?)
I ended up in line with Drs. Kinney and Henkel eventually, as we waited to get our copies of his new book signed (I bought mine about twenty seconds before I got to him, but never mind that). They left for home, and I was next.
I'd ended up thinking, on my way to that line, how my fourteen-year-old self wanted to act if I ever met Colin Mochrie. I wanted to be cool, to not bother him. I mean, I also desperately wanted to have an actual conversation with him, but if I ran into him in some casual setting - goodness knows what that would have been - I wanted him to know I knew who he was, but to leave the communication to his opening.
I thought, too, of what my mom had said once while we watched Good Eats together - that she wouldn't want to bother Alton Brown, but she wanted to shake his hand sometime, tell him she enjoyed the show. That had seemed a bit anticlimactic to me at the time, but I understand it now.
So I got to Mike Farrell, who played a larger part than he'll ever know in my junior year of high school. And I looked at him, said something like, "Hi, so nice to meet you," and shook his hand, suddenly feeling a bit shy. I spelled my name; he signed my book. To [Laurel] - Peace! He gave it back, shook my hand again. A nice handshake, too - lively, sincere. "It's a pleasure to meet you," I think he said, and he has a talent for sounding like he means it.
"Thanks so much for coming out here," I said, probably turning a little too quickly, the whole transaction a bit too businesslike from my end. But I did say it, and then I turned and let the next person go. And so it was that I saw and met Mike Farrell, who played one of my favorite characters on my favorite TV show ever.
Junior-year self: merry Christmas, happy birthday, or anything you choose.
10.16.2009
QPQ: Your Source for News Not Involving Hot-Air Balloons (Except Maybe During the Binghamton Spiedie Fest)
I just got done with the epic nap I've been craving for days...
...hopefully my students will soon catch up on sleep themselves (is it still midterms, maybe? We don't work on that kind of schedule in WRIT 111, so now that I'm not a student, I don't really know), since two or three of them pre-gamed on it during my classes today. Oral presentations began this morning - there're four groups, each taking 20-30 minutes, but only one group goes per day - and I had to follow today's up with a lesson on citation because, frankly, I was too tired and out of ideas to do anything else (though I did also let both classes out early). I took a stab at creativity via drawing my textual examples out of A Wrinkle in Time, but probably a lot of them haven't read it, so even though I gave them enough context to get by, even children's literature couldn't save my topic. (In my own partial defense, not all of the sleeping went on during my part of the lesson.)
On a more satisfying note, this past week has also involved two separate makings of this quite-tasty dish. Read this recipe: it does not work how you'd expect. My first pan (what with five housemates, plus Joe and Andrea coming over and that sort of thing) disappeared in less than a day, and I've still got a bunch of apples anyway, so I made the second one last night with some crescent-roll dough I grabbed out of the church fridge because it'd been weeks and no one had used it. Read the recipe. Try it. We all recommend it, though I'm in favor of cutting the sugar down to 1 1/4 cups or even slightly less if you want, especially if (like me) you're using apples less tart than the Granny Smith she suggests. Decrease the butter proportionally. It'll be fine.
Okay, so that's your update. I'm'a get myself some dinner, and then, if I have an ounce of sense in my head, I will at some point do some WRIT 111 paper-commenting, since I took so long on it the first time that I only got one free weekend before the next unit's essay came due and now I have to do up thirty other papers. I'm skipping IV because of all my work, so I intend to do some work, and I ought to do the work I should do instead of just other less-important work that keeps me from boring work yet still salves my conscience (I have discussed this kind of work in the past, I think).
Yeah. Sigh, how boring and too-fast and anticlimactic adult life can be. Yet how good it feels to not be writing the papers myself.
...hopefully my students will soon catch up on sleep themselves (is it still midterms, maybe? We don't work on that kind of schedule in WRIT 111, so now that I'm not a student, I don't really know), since two or three of them pre-gamed on it during my classes today. Oral presentations began this morning - there're four groups, each taking 20-30 minutes, but only one group goes per day - and I had to follow today's up with a lesson on citation because, frankly, I was too tired and out of ideas to do anything else (though I did also let both classes out early). I took a stab at creativity via drawing my textual examples out of A Wrinkle in Time, but probably a lot of them haven't read it, so even though I gave them enough context to get by, even children's literature couldn't save my topic. (In my own partial defense, not all of the sleeping went on during my part of the lesson.)
On a more satisfying note, this past week has also involved two separate makings of this quite-tasty dish. Read this recipe: it does not work how you'd expect. My first pan (what with five housemates, plus Joe and Andrea coming over and that sort of thing) disappeared in less than a day, and I've still got a bunch of apples anyway, so I made the second one last night with some crescent-roll dough I grabbed out of the church fridge because it'd been weeks and no one had used it. Read the recipe. Try it. We all recommend it, though I'm in favor of cutting the sugar down to 1 1/4 cups or even slightly less if you want, especially if (like me) you're using apples less tart than the Granny Smith she suggests. Decrease the butter proportionally. It'll be fine.
Okay, so that's your update. I'm'a get myself some dinner, and then, if I have an ounce of sense in my head, I will at some point do some WRIT 111 paper-commenting, since I took so long on it the first time that I only got one free weekend before the next unit's essay came due and now I have to do up thirty other papers. I'm skipping IV because of all my work, so I intend to do some work, and I ought to do the work I should do instead of just other less-important work that keeps me from boring work yet still salves my conscience (I have discussed this kind of work in the past, I think).
Yeah. Sigh, how boring and too-fast and anticlimactic adult life can be. Yet how good it feels to not be writing the papers myself.
10.06.2009
::ga-a-a-asp::
Guess, just guess what Sara and Megan saw at Stratford this past weekend! Oh, I wish I could have come! I saw Colm Feore play Coriolanus when I went with the English department three years ago; I didn't understand the play well enough yet to judge his performance, but in retrospect I think he was good (I mean, his reputation would apparently suggest that anyway), and I bet he'd be even better in this.
Man.
Man.
10.03.2009
On a Different Note
Recipe for Three-L Stew (lamb and lentil, made partly with leftovers), which I had for dinner tonight and which was more or less of my own design:
1. Take a little over a half-pound of bone-in stew lamb (which you can get for cheap at Wegmans, or at least that's what I did) and about half a big onion. Put them in a Dutch oven and cover them with cold water (cold, rather than hot, helps the collagen in the bones come out instead of getting plugged up inside. Or so claims Alton Brown about chicken bones, and I am not about to question that man when it comes to collagen) and turn on the heat. When it boils, turn the heat down and simmer for what you think is going to be about an hour.
2. Halfway through that hour, take the lamb back out of the pot, brown it in a pan because you forgot before, then put it back in. Or do this before Step 1, if you'd like to be more efficient than me. At some point, by the way, add some salt, pepper, coriander, and a little bit of thyme.
3. Round about the one-hour mark, throw in the following: a sliced carrot; a sliced half of a potato; between 1/3 and 1/2 a bag of red lentils; as much in the way of regular lentils as you feel like; and some celery that you would have chopped, except that everything in your house's crisper drawer freezes, so you got lazy and just broke it into ugly uneven pieces.
4. Cook 'til soft. Remove lamb bones (chop up the meat before you put it back in) and any vegetable matter you find excessive (I removed most of the onion and part of the carrot) - or, if you're more virtuous than I am, just put in less of those things to begin with, or just man-or-woman up and eat everything you put in the pot.
5. Taste the broth. Add more spices.
6. Ladle into a bowl. Pour yourself a glass of milk. Eat stew and drink milk and read from Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 2.
7. Have chocolate chip cookies and more milk for dessert.
Serves between 1 and 8. Or maybe more, who knows.
Or maybe fewer, if you don't have that many chocolate chip cookies.
Also, here in my third semester of teaching, I am pleased to say that I have personal-essay grading down to a greater art than ever before. Most of them now take me between twenty and thirty minutes to read, grade, and give fairly-extensive end comments (the essays themselves are three to four pages long). This is not yet the ten minutes I'm supposed to be able to stop after (how?!), but is a big improvement from the much longer time I was taking in semesters past. I think I may have graded eight papers today, which is not my all-time record, but is remarkable considering how easy it felt to do so (though I didn't do them all at once). I could even have graded one or two more if I hadn't stopped to blog.
1. Take a little over a half-pound of bone-in stew lamb (which you can get for cheap at Wegmans, or at least that's what I did) and about half a big onion. Put them in a Dutch oven and cover them with cold water (cold, rather than hot, helps the collagen in the bones come out instead of getting plugged up inside. Or so claims Alton Brown about chicken bones, and I am not about to question that man when it comes to collagen) and turn on the heat. When it boils, turn the heat down and simmer for what you think is going to be about an hour.
2. Halfway through that hour, take the lamb back out of the pot, brown it in a pan because you forgot before, then put it back in. Or do this before Step 1, if you'd like to be more efficient than me. At some point, by the way, add some salt, pepper, coriander, and a little bit of thyme.
3. Round about the one-hour mark, throw in the following: a sliced carrot; a sliced half of a potato; between 1/3 and 1/2 a bag of red lentils; as much in the way of regular lentils as you feel like; and some celery that you would have chopped, except that everything in your house's crisper drawer freezes, so you got lazy and just broke it into ugly uneven pieces.
4. Cook 'til soft. Remove lamb bones (chop up the meat before you put it back in) and any vegetable matter you find excessive (I removed most of the onion and part of the carrot) - or, if you're more virtuous than I am, just put in less of those things to begin with, or just man-or-woman up and eat everything you put in the pot.
5. Taste the broth. Add more spices.
6. Ladle into a bowl. Pour yourself a glass of milk. Eat stew and drink milk and read from Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 2.
7. Have chocolate chip cookies and more milk for dessert.
Serves between 1 and 8. Or maybe more, who knows.
Or maybe fewer, if you don't have that many chocolate chip cookies.
Also, here in my third semester of teaching, I am pleased to say that I have personal-essay grading down to a greater art than ever before. Most of them now take me between twenty and thirty minutes to read, grade, and give fairly-extensive end comments (the essays themselves are three to four pages long). This is not yet the ten minutes I'm supposed to be able to stop after (how?!), but is a big improvement from the much longer time I was taking in semesters past. I think I may have graded eight papers today, which is not my all-time record, but is remarkable considering how easy it felt to do so (though I didn't do them all at once). I could even have graded one or two more if I hadn't stopped to blog.
It's Like Fagin's Gang Over Here or Something
So Kelly, in defiance of the "no pets" clause on our lease, decided to get another rabbit. She had one last year, but it died, and now this new one, Peanut Butter, is the replacement.
It'd been in the house for only a few hours when our comeuppance for that rule-ducking arrived, in the form of a screaming band of hooligan children - I think there are five of them, but I can't really tell, there're so many and they're everywhere - from next door. They'd apparently come over a lot last year while the old rabbit was alive, and now that they'd heard about the new one, they were completely and utterly unstoppable.
They are, without question, the rudest children I have ever encountered. They came en masse into the house. They didn't listen to us when we told them things.
Then they wouldn't leave. Once they were shown out, they banged on the door, they climbed up the ledges, shoved up the screens, opened the windows. They climbed on and pushed one guy's car, a friend of Kelly or Kelsey's, until I came outside and yelled at them myself, despite their having met me only half an hour before. (One boy did take it to heart, but one girl just said, "It wasn't me!" and the other girl just laughed.)
Ben shoved them bodily out the door shortly after the car incident because they charged the door and leaned all over it to keep us from closing it after we let someone in (or out, I can't remember which), and I gave them a warning look. Shortly thereafter, they delivered us a crayoned note saying that Ben and I were about to get sued, Ben because he pushed them, me because I rolled my eyes.
Kelly, who found it rude but also found it funny, wouldn't do anything to discipline them, and she's the one they really respond to. So when they heard me telling her to stop talking to them (since our ignoring them is our only chance at getting rid of them - otherwise they just bang on the door and come to the windows and whine), they told her that she shouldn't follow me, that she should be a leader and not a follower. Then they started pushing up the screen and the window again, whereupon I pulled the screen back down, shut the window, and locked it this time, to an indignant whining chorus of "You're me-e-e-ean!" They chanted at Kelly, "Follower! Follower! Don't be a follower!" They banged on the panes for the next several minutes and left handprint streaks all over the glass. They talked to each other about me.
I'm not even kidding. All of this has happened over the past couple of hours. And I can hear them again outside, like a nightmare. None of us wants to go in or out because to attract their attention is to attract their whining, their scolding, their melodramatic crayoned notes (we got more, too, that I didn't mention).
I don't care if this should be funny, if they're only kids. I can't believe their rudeness. All I can say is, this had better never happen again.
It'd been in the house for only a few hours when our comeuppance for that rule-ducking arrived, in the form of a screaming band of hooligan children - I think there are five of them, but I can't really tell, there're so many and they're everywhere - from next door. They'd apparently come over a lot last year while the old rabbit was alive, and now that they'd heard about the new one, they were completely and utterly unstoppable.
They are, without question, the rudest children I have ever encountered. They came en masse into the house. They didn't listen to us when we told them things.
Then they wouldn't leave. Once they were shown out, they banged on the door, they climbed up the ledges, shoved up the screens, opened the windows. They climbed on and pushed one guy's car, a friend of Kelly or Kelsey's, until I came outside and yelled at them myself, despite their having met me only half an hour before. (One boy did take it to heart, but one girl just said, "It wasn't me!" and the other girl just laughed.)
Ben shoved them bodily out the door shortly after the car incident because they charged the door and leaned all over it to keep us from closing it after we let someone in (or out, I can't remember which), and I gave them a warning look. Shortly thereafter, they delivered us a crayoned note saying that Ben and I were about to get sued, Ben because he pushed them, me because I rolled my eyes.
Kelly, who found it rude but also found it funny, wouldn't do anything to discipline them, and she's the one they really respond to. So when they heard me telling her to stop talking to them (since our ignoring them is our only chance at getting rid of them - otherwise they just bang on the door and come to the windows and whine), they told her that she shouldn't follow me, that she should be a leader and not a follower. Then they started pushing up the screen and the window again, whereupon I pulled the screen back down, shut the window, and locked it this time, to an indignant whining chorus of "You're me-e-e-ean!" They chanted at Kelly, "Follower! Follower! Don't be a follower!" They banged on the panes for the next several minutes and left handprint streaks all over the glass. They talked to each other about me.
I'm not even kidding. All of this has happened over the past couple of hours. And I can hear them again outside, like a nightmare. None of us wants to go in or out because to attract their attention is to attract their whining, their scolding, their melodramatic crayoned notes (we got more, too, that I didn't mention).
I don't care if this should be funny, if they're only kids. I can't believe their rudeness. All I can say is, this had better never happen again.
I Think I May Have a Problem
So I left the post-large-group InterVarsity activity at 10:30 so that I could do some dishes or hang out with my roommates or, shocker, actually grade some more papers.
Instead, I've been on the computer (though not, as I originally thought, solely the internet) for the past TWO AND A HALF HOURS.
I wouldn't be so concerned, except that this is the SECOND TIME TODAY that I've done such a thing.
Instead, I've been on the computer (though not, as I originally thought, solely the internet) for the past TWO AND A HALF HOURS.
I wouldn't be so concerned, except that this is the SECOND TIME TODAY that I've done such a thing.
10.02.2009
10.01.2009
Binghamton: Our Logic Will Astound You
To be honest, I didn't even know until tonight that our basketball team had anything going on. I also didn't know that "E-Mails From Crazy People" existed.
Now I know.
http://emailsfromcrazypeople.com/2009/09/30/zoos-more-functional-than-a-sports-team/
Now I know.
http://emailsfromcrazypeople.com/2009/09/30/zoos-more-functional-than-a-sports-team/