Asides

I’m tired, dirty, stinky, and my hands look like hamburger. But with immense amounts of wonderful and generous help and guidance from my dad and brother, and a whole lot of work this morning and a long, long day yesterday, my house looks eighteen billion times nicer. Here’s the link to the flickr photoset, which I duplicate below with some narrative.

First: some “before” shots.

The ugly old shed with pretty grape vine on the back of my house.

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I woke up Sunday around 5 in the morning from a dream about cats. Tink, I dreamt, was hurt and complaining, in a very small-cat voice. I stumbled downstairs and found Tink sleeping on the chair, perfectly fine. I went back to bed.

Sunday evening, around dusk, I was washing dishes in the kitchen with the windows open and heard the same complaint. I looked outside.

Kittens in the garden. Two tiny kittens.

I put some litter and some food and water in the pantry, and they’re happy now. I surveyed the neighbors — everybody saw them, nobody wants them — and I did a careful look around the house for an injured and/or hiding mom. I’m not going to let them back outside because of hawks, because of traffic, and because of some bad neighborhood kids. But I’ll take them to the no-kill shelter in Beacon when it opens on Thursday.

Until then, my two (allegedly) grown cats are terrified of two tiny kittens who stumble and totter and mewl.

Took the train into NYC today with a friend, for the glorious weather and to visit some restaurants we’d been reading very good reviews of, among other activities.

One word.

Mmmmmomofuku.

It was the best lunch and the best restaurant meal I’ve had in years. Do what all the reviews say and get the pork. You will be happy.

We walked and walked and covered a good portion of central Manhattan by foot and subway, spending some fine time at the Strand (“18 miles of books”) until we realized that we have far too much to read already without any of the selections from those voluminous and precarious shelves, knocking around the East Village and northwards and southwards through various other neighborhoods in a sort of big loop until we found ourselves on Curry Hill for a not-bad Indian dinner. Afterwards, we walked about a block and a half up Lexington and found ourselves in front of Kalustyan’s. It was closed, but you could smell those glorious spices even from outside.

The next time I take the train in, I’m bringing a backpack. A big one. And I’m going to Kalustyan’s to stock up and get myself lots of exotic things to experiment with.

You can have too many books to read. You can’t ever have too many spices to work with.

As I’ve described before, Tink the cat has a gimpy knee.

I don’t really know why I’m posting this, aside from it being ongoing life stuff, but it gets gross and unhappy quickly after the break.

Two nights ago, that gimpy knee started acting up again, and contributed to the perfect storm of a screaming cat freak-out: the perfect storm like when all the things that can distress a cat come together in a single moment of terrible coincidence and make her batshit howlingly insane.

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Saturday night, twenty-two of us went to see the Franco Zeffirelli production of Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera (click for a larger version):

At intermission, we were taken backstage and allowed to watch the mechanics and massive coordination involved in changing Zeffirelli’s glorious sets, and met and talked with the charming soprano Erika Sunnegårdh, who sang in the title role.

It was a pretty good Saturday night.

Sick with the burbly chest-cough. I want to post my last CCCC notes, but I keep getting too tired, doing curriculum stuff, trying and failing to read. Tea’s no good, and all the leftovers suck when you feel like this, even the gumbo, which has good fresh okra and shrimps and peppers in it, and which I’m not even interested in right now.

Cadets: “You don’t sound so good, sir. Maybe a short class today?”

On the good side, Tink and Zeugma seem to like that I have something approximating a nocturnal purr/gurgle, and curled up with me the last couple nights.

Amy and Joanna both tagged me with the “success” query, and I’m partial to Amy’s scare quotes around the word “success” regarding that prompt: list five things you do every day that contribute to “success.”

I don’t know about that word just yet. I’m a new PhD and a new assistant prof, and perhaps like (or unlike) other members of my graduating cadre, I remain uneasy, uncertain, ambivalent, worried about that term: don’t jinx me, I want to say. I’m not yet a success. Not by a long shot.

But here’s what I’ve tried so far.

1. Teach. For me, five days a week. Before everything else, the pleasure of time spent in the classroom is the reward for my work. The pleasure of working with others on writing.
2. Talk. I ask colleagues what they’re working on. I talk about what I’m doing. Talk about pedagogy; talk about scholarship. Collaborate.
3. Write. I write it down. Blog it. Write through it. Take notes. Keep journals; take notes. Always carry a pen and something to write on. Always.
4. Cook. Put things together in a pot. Experiment. Season. Eat. Repeat.
5. Learn. I try to have a sense of the present state of the literature and what I’m unaware of. Have a sense of the gaps, both in the literature and in my knowledge. There’s a tension there: that sense of incompleteness is a source of anxiety, but also a condition of possibility.

Clancy asks, “What books are on your coffee table?”

Left to right: magazines, mostly Atlantic and Harper’s. Then The Times Atlas of World History and Past Worlds: The Collins Atlas of Archaeology, which feature enormously cool maps of things like “The Mongol Empire 1206 to 1405” and “Trade and Empire in Africa 1500 to 1800” and “The Disintegration of the Ottoman Empire 1800 to 1923”: these books, with their visual representations of data and textual commentary, are things one can pick up and get lost in for hours at a time. Below them, volumes 5-9 of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. (Best. comic. Evar.) And, at far right, Worldchanging, a wonderful book of ideas for promoting sustainability and being green.

After ten years and four days of imprisonment, David is — as the saying goes — back on the block.

My brother’s back.

With reports in from Ice Station Echo, Ice Station Delta, Ice Station Sierra, Ice Station Alpha, Ice Station Hotel, Ice Station Bravo, and Ice Station Juliet, I figure I’d best add mine. Here at Ice Station Zebra Zeugma, the snow started late Tuesday night, and I was Staff Duty Officer the next day, which meant I had to be in early. Highland Falls did a wretched job of plowing, so I put on the Matterhorns and went in on foot at about 6:40 Wednesday morning. The snow kept going all day, alternating with some sleet and freezing rain, and I made it home around 4:30 yesterday afternoon with work to do.

Ninety feet of driveway by a swath eight feet wide, plus forty feet by three feet of sidewalk, front and back and porch. Roughly an area of 840 feet. Multiply by maybe six inches of accumulation, not all that much, but it was ugly because it was big dry flaky powder followed by a layer of ice and sleet followed by more powder and then more ice. It’s aggravating wedding-cake snow; each shovelful at somewhere between 3.5 and 4 square feet weighing around 7 pounds-ish, but often more like 9 with the effort of breaking the ice crust. Call it 8 pounds average, with 2 shovelfuls per 6 inches of depth, sometimes 3 because of the crust. And then there’s the stuff the village of Highland Falls plowed up onto my driveway and front walk, roughly 60 square feet of wet and heavy snow at 12 pounds and 4 square feet for every shovelful, but requiring 4 shovelfuls for every 4 square feet. Practically a berm. Overall, 60 square feet of heavy snow plus 780 square feet of light snow, at varying shovelable volumes. All told, a conservatively estimated total of something like 3720 pounds of snow moved via shovel in a bit less than two hours last night.

I’m anticipating some serious Motrin-munching today.