Mr. P has graduated! Yay! I'm so very, very proud of him. He graduated, on time, with honors (magna cum laude, suckers!), while working, teaching, having shows, and making art. *And* the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts recently purchased one of his pieces from Flight Patterns for their collection.
Yay!
We moved to Richmond almost five years ago with the plan that Mr. P would be going to school. (There is a long, amusing story associated with the series of oblivious decisions we made in association with this. The take home lesson of which is that there are times when the universe rewards you for being oblivious). Now that he has completed that mission, wheels are in motion to send us on to the next chapter, new adventures, and a whole new part of the country. Details soon, but let us just say that it is perhaps a good thing that my years in grad school got me used to lake effect snow.
So I haven't been around these parts for a while.... the last couple of months have been a bit like this:
Nothing too earth shattering, mind you, just constant. Highlights?
New professional responsibilities-- some super interesting ones, but new always = extra time, right?
I have now learned what IRB is. FEEL MY PAIN.
An opera! We went to see Aida. I've always wanted to see Aida. I probably should not have made Richmond my first Aida experience. I should have realized from the last time, but hope springs eternal in the human breast. This time around, no ninjas. Yeay! Singing okay, but.... it was a bit like watching an opera-Menudo video mashup. Or, actually, it was kind of like watching the cast of Aida get lost on The Reflex set.
Got to go on a work trip to Chicago that involved visiting lots of museums-- exicting!
Went to see Wicked. Which was a much better production than Aida. The woman who played Glinda was HI-larious.
Took on extra projects that all have deadlines in the middle of all the other deadlines. Sigh.
Went to an awesome museum geek conference where I got to embrace my secret love of data.
Basically, in the last few months I haven't had a single day where I didn't have to work on something for someone that was due immediately. It's Thanksgiving, and I have five looming deadlines of things that need to be done by Sunday morning, plus pies to bake. (Also, as a sidenote, I had an epic journey trying to get a Tofurky. Not because, as I would have expected, it is not a product carried by the grocers of, ahem, Richmond, but because every. single. place. sold. out. I'm not kidding. Even Whole Foods. I did, finally, find the one place that hadn't-- yeay Trader Joe's! Not that you should get any ideas here-- on this journey Richmond went ahead and performed true to character in the form of two redneck-hiphop styled teenaged boys who were filling out job applications at one of the grocery stores. After explaining to the customer service folks what Tofurkey was one of them looked up and said, "I could kill you a turkey." Which was, you know, 1000000% the opposite of what I was looking for. And he was not being ironic. Five minutes later he asked the customer service person how to spell Charlottsville. Which is apparently something important to his personal history-- you know, his residence is there, or he worked there-- as it was something he needed to put on a job application. Please file under: Not Impress Potential Employers, How To). At one point I hadn't spent more than 18 hours in Richmond, but had been to the airport three times. The upside of this is that we have finally figured out how to use the unmarked secret airport exit that will send us to the road headed toward our house and not the opposite side of town. The downside of it is that, you know, who wants to be at the airport that much?
Here is how hairy it has been:
Why yes, those are my glasses. Not the ones I usually wear, mind you. Those, well, those I broke twice in the last two years and Phil super glued them together. But in September things got so wild that I lost them. LOST THEM. I've never lost a pair of glasses. So I went to the back up pair. Which, within a couple of weeks, had split down the middle. Which left me with the back up back up pair, which sit crookedly on my face and slide down to the end of my nose so that I'm constantly poking myself in the face to push them back into place. It took me two months to get to the eye doctor to get a new prescription. His office is literally around the corner from my house. And? He's open on Saturdays.
So, yeah. Busy. Need to go make pie. And get back to these deadlines. Wish me reprieve! And how is everyone I haven't been able to talk to since the summer?
This summer has been a wild, wild ride, on all levels, with a whole lotta work to boot. Some big changes that have left me scrambling just to hang on-- but exciting things on the horizon if I manage to do that. In the meantime, it's a bit of a bumpy ride. Which is all to say that if I haven't answered an email you sent me in June...
Speaking of bumpy rides, we made it through the Week Of Natural Disaster (TM) in Virginny, starting, of course, with the earthquake. I know a 5.8 isn't much to old hands at these things, but it was big doin's down here. Not nearly as big as some people seemed to think (yelps that the end times had come seemed, well, misplaced), but big enough to knock things off shelves at work and at home. There've been aftershocks, but I've only felt two, one of which was a 4.9 that woke up Mr. P and The Kitteh. I, however, was already awake, despite it being 1 in the morning. In both the lead up to the actual earthquake and to the late night, sizeable aftershock, had a headache that went away immediately after the earth started shaking. Which either means that I'm like the cats and dogs that freak out just before an earthquake, or it's just a coincidence.
Then five days later, Hurricane Irene. While we were in it, it really didn't seem all that bad-- very, very wet, and sometimes pretty windy, but we left the front door open (just the glass outer door closed) through the duration, so it didn't seem too worrisome. Later, we found out we were just lucky.
I took this on the way to work on Saturday-- a week later. That's the roof leaning against the front of the house. Mr. P passes this way most days and said for most of the week the top was open and you could see right in-- for the first couple of days with the tree still inside. We know quite a few people who lost power-- some for more than a week. We only lost it in short bursts (when we heard transformers blowing up nearby-- probably from trees landing on them). We did lose internet for a week..... Yeah, really not anything to complain about.
The storm blew away our internet, but also brought in a lot of rain and a whole week of cooler tempertures, which was actually pretty awesome. The garden did Not. A. Damn. Thing. this year, pointedly refusing to thrive. I got beans. That is all. Not one tomato (despite having a dozen plants, different varieties). No cucumbers. Even the flowers have refused to bloom. Actually, most things have looked terribly diseased. But, weirdly, some things seemed to like the abuse of Hurrican Irene dropping ten inches of water and little (and not so little) branches all over them.
I've planted these flowers for three years and this is the first time one has bloomed-- which it has done four times since Irene.
All summer I've had morning glory vines, but no flowers....
And then there's the tomatillo plant, which grew very tall and looked healthy, until we got back from Maine and found two thirds of the leaves had been stripped off, by this:
An enormous tomato horn worm. Since the plant hadn't done aaaaaanything, I just left it out there. The day after Mr. P and I investigated this thing it disappeared.... we assume some bird's super duper dinner. Two days later? Hurricane. Two days later? Three tomatillos finally started growing. Perhaps I just have masochistic plants?
Sadly, neither earthquakes nor hurricanes can disrupt my insomnia. This week's 4:30 am project? Knickers! (American ones, not British ones).
Black courdoroy. I saw a picture of some chick in a magazine wearing knickers and thought, hmmmm.... those look kinda cool. I mean, they kind of remind me of being a kid in the 70s when I feel like I saw people sporting knickers. But I thought, where would I be able to get knickers? Wait! I know! I'll make some!
So I did. I put a shiny button on the cuffs.
Spent a looooot of time reading theory and philosophy today for a project that totally snuck up on me.... Damn those stealth academic projects! In between reading I put some of my haul from the farmer's market into action:
First apple pie of the season. And it is yummy, boy. Ohmnomnom. So I guess all in all not a bad weekend. I had to go to work on Saturday, but got enough done that I didn't have to go in today (the day of the labor), which would have been kind of depressing. Here's hoping that things let up so I can catch up with laundry and novel reading and maybe even blogging and not going into the office.
I spend a lot of time in elementary schools for work. Occasionally frustrating, most of the time it's pretty entertaining listening to small children attempt to make sense of the world with incomplete knowledge and not-completely-baked reasoning skills. I'm often told that wool comes from wolves (which makes complete sense, even while being completely wrong) or that mummies are dead people wrapped up in toilet paper, the apparent universal misconception held by every second grader in the state. Sometimes the things said are strange-- one child thought that buffalo spin silk-- sometimes just depressing. Some are personally depressing-- many third graders believe that "ancient," as in Ancient Greece, refers to "things from the seventies." As a thing from the seventies....
But sometimes it's more generally depressing. This week I had a confusing interaction with one group. I held up a copy of a 19th century painting showing children playing in the snow, a quaint, snow-covered village in the background, and asked them to look for clues that told them the picture was from the past, old-fashioned things. The first girl to raise her hand gave me the same, rather inexplicable answer she'd given when I'd asked for winter clues. The first exchange went like so:
Me: Does anyone see any winter clues in this painting? (As an aside, there is snow everywhere in the painting, there are kids bundled up, sledding down a hill.)
Little Girl: I see trees!
We then had to have a conversation about how trees are around in every season. I tried to get her to tell me something about the tree-- i.e. the missing leaves-- that was germane, but she was insistent that trees were a winter clue. I probably shouldn't have been surprised when, seven minutes later we had this exchange:
Me: Does anyone see any clues in this painting that tell you it's from the past?
Little Girl: I see trees!
I explained that we still have trees, and we're in the present, so trees can't be a past clue. She was pretty sure they were, though, as much as she was sure that trees meant winter, too. Still looking for a past clue, and hoping for better luck with the next kid, I asked again and got this:
Me: Does anyone see any clues in this painting that tell you it's from the past?
Little Boy: I see that boy laying on the tree! (there's a boy laying on an exposed log on the ground)
At this point I'm starting to think that this class is weirdly tree-obsessed. I think I understand how the girl arrived at trees for her two answers, even if she hadn't really articulated it (leaf-less trees signify winter, the leaf-less tree had dead branches, was therefore an old tree, and an old tree was from a long long time ago, therefore the past). But I can't even figure out what the boy is trying to get at, so I try to get him to tell me. The rest of the class is totally on board for boy laying on tree= the past. I say that sometimes boys might still lay down on a tree. Eighteen pairs of eyes look at me with a mixture of horror and incomprehension.
Me: You don't think so?
Them: NooooOOOOOOoooooo! No one does THAT anymore!
Me: Really? I used to do that! Don't you sometimes lay down on things outside when you're playing? (Vigorous head shaking in response) Like the grass? Don't you lay down in the grass?
Them: (Even more vigorous head shaking) NOOOOOOooooOOOOOO waaaaaaaaAAAAAAAyyyyyy!
Me: What? Why not?
Them: You'll get sick! You might die!
The teacher, who said that she, too, laid in the grass as a child, told me that their parents were probably worried about ticks. And certainly I understand worrying about ticks, but convincing six year olds that any interaction with nature will, literally, kill them is crazy. Ticks are an issue, so check your kids for ticks when they come inside. But raising them to fear the natural world is terrible. And if they aren't going outside into nature, one assumes that they are probably sedentary, inside all the time, which is terrible for their health on all sorts of levels. One could also posit that if they are being taught to have a fraught, fearful relationship with the natural world, it is unlikely that they will grow up to be good stewards of the land.
The week before-- on Earth Day, no less-- I had an equally troubling explanation from a ten year old. I was showing the class a photograph of the last commercially run steam engine train and asking why the photographer might have wanted to make the picture. One of the kids got the answer right away-- he did it to remember steam trains so that people in the future could see what they were like. That's when another girl said, "Ohhhhhhh..... it's like when people make videos or pictures of wild animals, like lions and stuff, so that people in the future will know what they were like when they're all gone."
I could have cried. At ten years old she's already accepted the idea of a world in which the only predator left is man, and prey is raised by the millions on factory farms, and lions and zebras and giraffes are things of the distant past. She's already conceded the fight. And if she's already conceded before she even started, I'm not sure that there is much hope for a world where some animals are still wild. Perhaps by then nature will have been stomped out completely, alleviating the threat of sickness and death that comes from laying in the grass. It's enough to make me grateful for being an ancient thing from the seventies so that I may not live to see that day.
I was trying to make a picture of Mr. P and Mr. Tibbs, but Mr. P was feeling uncooperative, so this is what I got. It is, however, a painfully accurate rendering of what life is for both me and Mr. P at the moment. We are both kind of ready to get off the roller coaster. Life for Mr. Tibbs, however, has not changed. It is still mostly like this:
On the upside, many of the things that are making life a blur at the moment are good. Sadly, not all, but for the most part those will pass. Not soon enough, mind, but they are temporary. Or that's what I tell myself....
It's Wednesday morning of a holiday week, so how many things can have gone wrong, really, when I, like many people, stayed home for two of the days thus far and went to work for one? I'm kind of shocked at the answer, myself. Let's just say that I do not have high hopes for the week. I had a series of enlightening conversations and messages yesterday... is there a word for negative enlightenment? A bad epiphany?
SIGH.
So let's look at something pretty! I bought this on sale at the start of summer for like five bucks and the thing has just bloomed and bloomed, the only thing thriving in the super dry super hot weather.
Coming back from vacation is the pits. Mentally, you're still on some other schedule, in some other place, and yet, there you are, at your desk, thinking wistfully of where you were the week before. Meanwhile, the annual budget is due and there are seven thousand emails in your inbox, most of which are cc'd responses to everyone in a group agreeing to a two o'clock meeting eleven days before when you weren't there. It is almost enough to convince one that they should never take a vacation. Though I'm thinking that it would be a better plan to become independently wealthy so that I never have to not take a vacation. Gonna get working on that right away... as soon as I finish going through my inbox.
Someone sent me this link yesterday and it is just the Coolest. Stuff. Ever. I so want the monkeys. And the surprised kangaroo. The deer. All of it. Crocheted, people, that stuff is cro-cheted.
Other than that it's been a crazy busy couple of weeks. Mr. P is still in Louisiana getting his art on. I'm glad he's doing the project, but I'm ready for him to be home. The house refuses to clean itself, and the garden refuses to weed itself. Or grow, really, except the weeds, which grow like... uhm.... weeds. And then there's work where things just won't write themselves, data won't gather itself, reports won't complete themselves, budgets just won't balance themselves. Ah, the end of the fiscal year, sliding into the same week as one of our biggest programs of the year, in the same week that a multi-faceted complicated and important grant application is due. Why won't someone come serve me cocktails?
I did get to watch a hummingbird yesterday morning, though. It was flitting around while I was watering the plants. I'd say that was the highpoint of my week.
again. I have a whole week of driving around in store next week... after which I slide back into my office for last bits and pieces before the grand opening-- whoo hoo! Art! On view!
This week I visited a school for work where a kid asked me, "So you work at the museum?" I nodded. "When are you there?" I found this question both kind of weirdly stalkerish, though I doubt that he, eight years old, meant it as such, but also kind of depressing... like right. When am I there? He then followed it up by asking, "Are you going to work today?"
Well, gee, kid, since it appears that the three hours I spent driving to your school and the six subsequent hours I've spent here DON'T COUNT, I guess maybe I'm not gonna work today. Admittedly, I laughed. I then told him that I was working right now, which befuddled him. Apparently all those grown ups are hanging around at the school because it's fun. Later, they will all go to an office somewhere for actual work drudgery.
