the universe really just likes to mess with your mind sometimes

I was at a holiday party just before Christmas where a number of colleagues were guests and I met several faculty I had yet to meet. I'm having a lovely conversation with a grumpy old English professor (not really grumpy but I'm pretty sure he'd be pleased if people viewed him that way) about my sweater (the silk garden tie-dye number for those who have seen it) and trading pedigrees as academics are wont to do when he looks at me and asks "Do you want to go on the trip?"

I of course stared at him blankly in reaction to this complete non-sequitur and then proceeded to give many looks suggesting that he should continue since I hadn't the foggiest clue on what he was talking about (I'm sure the lacking a clue bit dominated most of the looks). Well it turns out that this guy has a grant from NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) to take faculty from our little college on trips. They go once a year and each trip starts out with a seminar series at Cambridge (including as many Nobel prize winners as they can dig up apparently -Hawkings has participated) and then traveling with the seminar speakers to two other locations. This year the trip will include Vienna so that we can go to the opera and ballet and then Prague just because it sounded like it would be fun (his words). Apparently nearly everyone else in the room at the time knew about it since they were primarily in the humanities (and have right of first refusal for these trips), but every year they grab a few folks from other disciplines to round out the group. The guy in charge loves nothing better than to find unsuspecting new faculty who seem like they might be fun and to invite them to come along. That would appear to be me this year.

The grant pays for everything during the two weeks except for souvenirs and he just followed up his invite with an unofficial, once-all-of-the-humanities-folks- are-signed-up-and-it-isn't-unseemly-to-invite-the-outsiders-I'll-get-the-formal-invite, written invitation to go on the trip.

Holy shit! Karma just can't possibly explain this one...

the end of the semester

Phew. It's nearly over.

I have a couple of marathon days of grading and then I'm done. I know students think that studying sucks, well grading sucks eggs big time.

Not only is it the least enjoyable part of teaching but it can be downright painful when a student you like does poorly.

There are always bright spots in a black humor sort of fashion. I am still amused by the fact that a student showed up to take my exam that I didn't know. Now, I sometimes mix up the names of a couple of my students but I know them all by the end of the semester. This kid had literally skipped all but the first couple of weeks of class including the three semester exams and all of the weekly quizzes and homework assignments. He could have qualified for a WF which is an automatic withdrawal (but failing) for which students who disappear before a certain date qualify but he disqualified himself by showing up for the final. I haven't graded it but it would be really sad if he does well on it and fails anyway.

That's not what was funny about the interaction though (perhaps obvious given that it is rather sad). What's funny is that he walks in and says that he is there to take the final. I ask him for which class. He gives me the call number for my class (at intro. and non-majors levels we have up to eight lecture sections for a given call number) so I ask him who his professor is. He tells me that it's me and so I ask if he's been in my class during the semester. He tells me that he's been in and out (yeah, right). Ultimately I have to ask his name. Amazingly enough I remember his name from the list of students who vanished so I gave him an exam. This is probably a situation where you had to be there but seriously, it was the most surreal exchange I've had in a while with a student.

Can you imagine the balls this kid has? He hasn't shown up for months and then pops in to take the final. Apparently this happens regularly here and so all of the faculty had a good laugh over how far I took my questions. Apparently they are all in the habit of handing out exams to anyone who walks in for finals and then they check to make sure the name isn't that of a student that they know.

my week

I've had one of the more interesting weeks of my life.

Many of you know I was offered a position at Dixie State College of Utah (name will be changing in the next few years for those confused by the Dixie bit, we'll be the Univ. of Utah, St. George). What some of you don't know is that while they tried to offer me a tenure track position without interviewing me, they found out that it was sorta against all of the rules. So instead I've been working on a one year contract with the promise that they would do a formal search. First the search was supposed to happen within weeks of my moving out to Utah but that didn't happen. Then it was supposed to happen in early fall and they even did an entirely new search for that one. Of course, faculty being who they are, the process of going through the applications took months longer than they had planned and so I finally got to interview for my job this past Thursday.

Maybe I'm letting my ego get carried away but I wasn't too worried about being offered the job based on the fact that they had already tried to give it to me (and everyone was being excessively supportive and encouraging about my chances of getting it with the formal review process). What I was REALLY nervous about was making all of these lovely supportive folks who had been reassuring me that they wanted to keep me around, regret it. I really am a fairly decent teacher most of the time (and a really excellent one sometimes) and I wanted my talk to reflect that. So I put a ton of pressure on myself to try and do a really nice and polished talk as part of the interview to the point that I was making tiny little changes the morning of my interview as I was practicing.

Here is where everything goes south of course. I normally allow my students access to my lecture slides before class so that they can print them out and bring them to class if they have a hard time concentrating while taking notes, so I printed out the final version of my talk to hand out to the audience. What I didn't do was save that final version to my thumbdrive. Yup, that's right. I opened up my talk and hit the second slide only to find that the heading wasn't quite right.

There wasn't anything incorrect in the talk, it's just that the final version was a little bit smoother and less prone to repeating information than the slides I was projecting. Oh yeah, and the slides I had up didn't match the handouts of course. The talk went fine aside from the minor differences (literally just a title on one or two slides and a rearrangement of topics for another two slides) and the fact that I went a bit over the alloted time. Everyone was very complimentary about it but I spent the entire afternoon kicking myself over the mistake with the files.

I was so ticked off with myself that my stomach even hurt. I got home that night and realized I hadn't eaten all day but couldn't eat anything even though I heated up some soup. So I went to bed in the hopes that it would all get better with a little sleep. I woke up at 2am with a raging fever and it turns out that my stomach pains were because I went and caught a stomach flu that Marius had had earlier in the week. It's the sort of flu where you feel intermittently fine and crappy but you feel like you need to die if you eat anything. As a weight-loss diet it's highly effective; I've lost five pounds in 36 hours. For everything else (like being alive) it sucks.

Of course last night an interested third party got the low down on the job and called to find out if I had gotten the call yet and I could really only muster an "oh good" upon hearing the good news. I'm sure it was highly gratifying for her, poor woman.

Grading entertainment

I have a large number of students in my non-majors class that have been raised in a Creationist or semi-Creationist form of faith and so I make a big deal about evolution.

As a homework assignment I ask them to describe the theory of evolution by natural selection and summarize the evidence supporting it. There is more to it but that is sufficient to enjoy this little quote given as an example of evolution. Try and get past the really poor writing, this really was written by a fairly intelligent student although you wouldn't know it from this assignment. I've added the ellipses to cut out the less entertaining bits.

"...for example two big guerrillas their offsping would probably also be large... if that large of guerillas could either scare off the smaller guerillas [sic] and ensuring that their offspring would also have that advantage. Continuing in this thought experiment, those smaller species of guerillas [sic] by chance find a new environment where their smaller size might help them survive and adaptive radiation would occur and in if the population of guerillas became isolated for a long enough time sympatric (should read allopatric) speciation would occur..."

I just have this image of really fat (or buff) and really petite guerrilla fighters competing for resources, reproducing and evolving to form new species of guerrillas.

And now for something completely different.

In the spirit of Laurie's Drunken Cat Sweater Contest:


This is from I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER, and it's the best I can do given that I would not knit a sweater for my cat (or any other) ever.

why should you care about farm subsidies?

Congress has recently been involved in passing a new farm bill that largely maintained various farm subsidies in spite of violating international law. This seems all very esoteric and we can all get behind the feel good idea of supporting our domestic family farmers but there is another side to it all. You could read Omnivore's Dilemma or just check out these two food pyramids.

For those wondering, I have basically fallen off the face of the planet. I (big surprise here) have completely over committed myself at work and am spending 12-14 hours a day at school.

Have I learned my lesson? Probably not, but if I survive spring semester, I might finally get a clue.

Forget football!

Earlier today we found out that S. Africa will play England in the final game of the Rugby World Cup!!!!

To give you a sense of what this means to S. Africans, here's an ad that was sent to us by a friend in S. Africa. While it isn't really appropriate for children, I suspect children are not reading this blog and that, even if they were, they won't get it. Just to be on the safe side, you'll have to scroll down quite a ways to see it.

Just to prove my point....

I handed back the second exam of the semester to my majors introductory biology class. While some improved from the first exam, at least 50% showed no improvement. Given that their average on the first exam was below a C, it sort of put me into a bit of a depression.

Instructors go through a series of emotions when their students are not doing well. I personally tend to start asking what I could do differently do help them. Then I figure out that I have held review sessions, made suggestions on how to study and how many hours they should expect to study and realize that there isn't much more I can do. At that point most instructors then get frustrated and maybe even a little angry with their students. After we bitch and moan to our colleagues about the situation, we tend to calm down. We accept that students have the right to fail a course and try to develop a more Zen-like attitude about the entire thing (yes, I hate the whole Zen-like thing too, but the phrase works here).

So I got to class last night and explained that I had expected to see higher grades and reiterated what the students will have to do to improve their grades. Instead of the bitching and name calling that I have experienced at other institutions, I saw heads nodding. I had several students come up to me at the end of class and ask for help. I had several others come up to me just to let me know that the exam had opened their eyes and that they would be working harder in the future. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy just remembering it. Life is so much better and teaching is so much more enjoyable when you genuinely like your students.

Please note, do not interpret this to mean I did not like my students at other colleges and universities. Okay, there were some individuals I really didn't like, but they tended to be the exception to the rule.

Exclusive private colleges vs. open admission state colleges

It's interesting, now that I've had some time to observed students in both environments, to note how very different they are.

I really enjoyed teaching at the Claremont Colleges. My colleagues were interesting researchers still focused on student education. The students were bright, worldly, well prepared for college and highly motivated.

Now that I'm at a state college with a largely open admission policy (actually all Utah state schools have to have an open admission policy, we just offer our remedial, make that developmental, classes on campus whereas many send their students to local city colleges for such courses), I have to say that my students are VERY different, however not necessarily in the ways that you would expect.

Obviously my new students are much less well prepared for college and I am regularly amazed at what they think is acceptable college level work. I will get homework assignments that have been written in IM code or even worse, terrible English. I am fairly certain that I have a student or two that may qualify as illiterate but who were not caught by the tests that funnel students into the remedial classes. Despite having a very clear policy about making up exams, students will forget what they have been told (and what is written on their syllabus) and assume I will do what they want. They also fail to listen to directions in class AND fail to read the written instructions for assignments and are then surprised when I take points off of their homework.

That being said, these are some of the hardest working people I have ever met. We have a mix of traditional and non-traditional aged students and they are all likely to have families (this is a very Mormon town after all) and full time jobs in addition to attending school full time. When they don't do well on an exam, they never (okay, rarely) blame their professor but quite willingly admit that they needed to study more. They also like their professors even when they aren't doing well in a class. As a result, while I sometimes want to tear out my hair in frustration over some of the things that they do, I really find my new students to be a breath of fresh air.

Back in California, I had a few students who thought I was wonderful (because they came to me for help outside of class typically) while the rest hated my guts because it wasn't easy to earn an "A" in my class. Here, my students respect me for making them earn their grades.

Granted, I still do have whiners who will never be happy but they are largely in the minority.

The one thing I never expected though, is that school isn't necessarily a priority for many of these students. I guess I can understand when they have families to support but I am still disappointed when students miss class entirely or leave halfway through because of work. It certainly makes it harder for them to succeed, although many fail to understand that.

Even more surprising are their parents' attitudes about their education. Marius actually had a student come to him and ask to be allowed to take a make-up exam. The reason this kid needed to miss the exam was because their parents had booked a holiday and didn't want to drive through Vegas rush hour traffic. Yup, avoiding traffic came before their child's college education. To add insult to injury, the kid's mother emailed Marius to see if she couldn't convince him to change his mind. What a wonderful woman.

Pine Creek

Sadly our camera died when we did Keyhole but we did have the opportunity to finally do Pine Creek this past weekend. A friend took some pictures but unfortunately most of the shots look like these. We weren't in a cave but the slot canyon was so deep that very little light got down there at times. The best part was a 100 foot free rappel where you just lower yourself down without touching anything. Once I figured out that I couldn't die doing it, it was great fun. These photos also prove that I do go on these hikes with Marius despite all prior photographic evidence to the contrary.

Slot canyons

Two weeks ago we got permits to do both Keyhole and Pine Creek in Zion. Keyhole is a short beginner rappelling canyon and a great way to get your feet wet before Pine Creek which is a bit hairier. Although we live in the desert, flash floods were predicted for the afternoon so we had to be satisfied with just Keyhole. This is maybe only a mile or two in length but with a short but steep uphill hike in to the slot and a series of rappels to get through it took us nearly the whole morning.

Here I am on my very first canyon rappel ever. The inner tube is for a friend's eleven year old daughter who came along for the fun.

Confessions

So many of you know that I really like my food and I tend to like it to be high quality. I've been introduced as a tea snob or food snob or [insert your favorite here] snob not infrequently in spite of my protestations. So I figure it's about time to disillusion some of you with a series of confessions.

Until recently I would develop month long cravings for Cheetos. It's only gone now because I think I really overdid it right before the summer.

I still have cravings for fast food burgers with the exception of McDonald's.

I HATE truffles and stinky cheese. I have that "OMG it smells/tastes rotten and I think I'm going to gag" response to those flavors.

I am happy to drink 2-buck chuck and Trader Joe's brand teas (in tea bags even!) but I can't stand poor quality coffee and I have no idea why except that the taste of bad coffee bothers me much more.

I have frozen pizza and t.v. dinners in my freezer as I type.

One of my favorite comfort foods is grilled cheese and not no stinkin' gourmet version either. We're talking Wonder bread and processed yellow cheese here folks. Grilled cheese served with a bowl of condensed cream of tomato soup is like being five again.

Okay, this is getting old and you've probably lost all respect for me so it's time to quit while I'm behind. Hope your week has been more worth writing about than mine.

pseudoscience homework

I asked my students in my non-majors biology class to find examples of pseudoscience and explain why they are pseudoscience as a homework assignment.

This is what I got from one student, verbatim:

"Global warming"

"Recent year's people have witnessed a series of over the top pseudo-scientific methods. Few scientists would dispute the fact that climate is changing on a huge scale. There are good reasons to believe that some of the changing features are not part of a natural variation, but consequences of man made pollution. What many scientist will dispute, is whether this is a on going change. Scientist believe that one, there's an upward change in the atmosphere's mean global temperature. Two, whether the mechanism is responsible for the CO2 fossil fuel combustion. Today climatology is vulnerable to these kinds of faddist dogmas. They are pushed forward to the political and media driven agenda. Because it lacks a functional, broad, orderly and unified understanding of the nonlinear system formed by the atmosphere. The oceans, the land mass and the biosphere, provide inroads towards developing such an understanding. Starting with the sun and the solar radiation in the weather patterns over short and long term scales."

For those uncertain about this, I have no clue as to what they were trying to say here and now that I've met with them to go over it, it's clear they didn't either.

I have great new neighbors

I'm still catching up on posts.

A few weeks ago I lost sight of Sam (our cat) long enough that he left the yard. He didn't come home. That night we had a big thunder storm and I was in a complete panic.

The next morning I reported him missing to all of the local shelters and we posted signs. Our neighbors called to let us know that they had seen him in their yard but that he had left in the direction of home (they didn't know we were neighbors yet as they also just moved in). They very kindly promised to keep an eye out for him and grab him if they did see him.

It rained again that night and the water ruined the signs. We replaced them and got our neighbors hopes up that he had been found. I was spending most free moments walking around our subdivision and a few neighboring ones. I even found a lost dog in the process and met more of our neighbors as well as many of the construction workers working in the area. Everyone I met promised to keep an eye out for Sam.

So he went missing on a Monday. By Wednesday I was losing hope. We figured he must have been eaten by a coyote or something up in the tortoise reserve (not far from our house).

Amazingly enough, on Thursday evening I got a call around 9:30pm. A family that lived up the street from us had gone on a hike in the reserve and had seen Sam!

I surprised them a bit by running up the street to meet them at the gate into the reserve from our subdivision and they explained where they had seen him and that they tried to catch him but he kept running away from them. I started to climb up a cliff to where they had indicated and suddenly I was flooded in light. This lovely family and moved their car into an empty lot where they could shine their brights up on the cliff to help me.

I found him in just fifteen minutes hiding in the rocks within ten feet of a young couple (who seemed awfully relieved to discover that the person running toward them with a flashlight wasn't one of their parents). I managed to grab Sam and walk home with him. Sam, of course, was not thrilled to be leaving the reserve. Apparently it is the equivalent of Disneyland for cats. He cried and fussed the whole way home and, to this day, he still bolts for any open door in the house.

It turns out that the family who found Sam had the same thing happen with one of their cats. Their Rocky stayed in the reserve for three months! I am so glad our ordeal lasted less than a week. I don't know what I would have done had Sam walked up to our house after another three months.

So thanks to many of my neighbors, Sam is safe and sound at home and appears to be only slightly grumpy that we won't let him go back to the tortoise reserve.

What I would love to play for my classes...

I teach biology. This means that within the first day or two of any introductory class, I cover the basics of evolution. This is because the only way to understand life is through the process of evolution by natural selection. Now mainstream Mormons are all in support of evolution so I don't often have to get into debates with creationist students. However, the are fundamentalists in any movement and I've been told that there are even some Mormons who think the world and everything in it was created by a deity in seven days.

I would really love to be able to just play this clip in class and move on but, of course, it would be inappropriate I suppose. So instead, I'll subject you all to this great piece by Lewis Black. I should warn those of you who are not familiar with Lewis Black that his language makes this clip inappropriate for kids (and perhaps some adults).

Here's a direct link for folks who can't see it on this page.

Ways to put a smile on a teacher's face

In the hallway today I was approached by a young student who asked:

"Um... so like, um... are you a teacher here?"

I didn't say it was a nice or friendly smile did I?





(for the record I did manage a straight face and then went running to our department secretary's office so I could share and laugh appropriately)

Road trip!!!!

I've been a bit absent but life has been interesting.

Two weeks ago I realized that the entire week before school started was filled with meetings. So I quickly contacted folks in California and drove out there to catch-up, plan future work, return equipment and just hang out. The trip was busy but good. I got to see everyone I needed (and even some I didn't expect to see!), stocked up on all of the things that are hard to come by in Utah (wine, good olive oil, lemon tree, you get the idea) and headed back with a full car. I left in plenty of time to get back in time to get a decent night's sleep before my week of meetings the following morning.

Around Zzyyxx (if you've ever driven this stretch of the I-15, you know where I mean, for the rest of you, this is the middle of nowhere), my temperature light came on. I pulled over and waited a few minutes and it went off. I started up again. Less than twenty minutes later, it came on again. Fortunately I was approaching Primm, NV and pulled off there.

I eventually reached my long distance mechanic/honorary brother-in-law on the phone. I had a leak in my coolant system. We were hoping it was small. It wasn't.

For future reference, if your temperature light comes on but the temperature gauge hasn't budged above normal, one of two things has happened. 1. Your temperature gauge is broken. 2. You're leaking coolant. The tank that holds the coolant apparently has a sensor in it that triggers the temperature light to go on if there isn't enough liquid in the tank. To find out if it is due to a big or small leak (or a busted fan), get some bottled water and fill up the tank. Turn on the car and look underneath for any leaks. If you don't see anything obvious and the temperature light stays off, you probably have a slow leak and as long as you immediately top off the coolant tank with clean water whenever the temperature light comes on, you can probably drive to the nearest mechanic. If there is so much water leaking out that you can hear it splash over the sound of your motor, this would be a BIG-a** leak and you are screwed if you are far away from a mechanic. Oh, and if there is no leak and the water levels holds but the light stays on, you are seriously screwed because you need a new part that costs much more than a simple hose.

It was pretty dark by the time I had figured out that I was dealing with a serious leak. While Primm has no mechanic, it does have three casinos so I was able to get a room easily and relatively cheaply. I say relatively cheaply because this same car had problems in Vegas when I moved out to California and the hotel cost nearly $200/night.

The next morning I found out that I was pretty lucky. The leak was in a short molded hose that I could easily see and reach. This meant that I should be able to patch the leak with duct tape. Did I have any? Of course not. Did any shop I visited have any? Of course not. Did the neighboring outlet mall have a shop that could sell me some? (all together now) Of course not.

However, the outlet mall did have a helpful guy who sent me to the other side of the highway where the gas station convenience mart actually sold convenient things (like duct tape). They even had a heater hose emergency repair kit so I got that too since Paul told me that, if it worked, I could drive all the way home. Did it work? (one last time....) Of course not. Did I mention the big-ass leak before? Yes, well, my leak was so big that if I had cut out the damaged part, there wouldn't have been enough to stretch back together to attach to the emergency patch. So I went all McGuyver and duct taped that sucker until it was nearly doubled in diameter. Since this probably wasn't going to completely block the leak, I also picked up an extra four gallons of water and started off toward Vegas.

A friend's father and stepmother, who live in Vegas but were out of town (hi Deb!), had helped me locate a VW dealer in a town next to Vegas and presumably the closest to my location. Was it? (okay, okay, dead horse, beaten, I get it) However, I did such an impressive job with the duct tape that it held without any problem the entire 60+ miles to the dealer.

I got a case worker (I don't know what else to call them since they don't work on the cars -you all know the people I mean) who was wonderful (at Findlay VW in Henderson for anyone else prone to getting stuck near Vegas) and he even had someone bring all three cases of wine, the olive oil and the lemon tree, that would have all been ruined in the heat, into the air conditioning. After looking around for a real replacement part (it did turn out to be a molded hose part instead of a basic heater hose), they found a hose that did the job just fine and I was on my way after about five hours, just about the time my first day of meetings was coming to a close.

Let me just say that my car will never see Vegas again if I have any control over it.

Anyone in need of a large quantity of bottled water?

A break in the heat wave

It finally dropped below 100 this week. Perfect timing really, as I was in Chicago last week visiting friends and getting a little work done. They were in the middle of a major cold period with highs only in the 70s and 80s for my entire stay.

Don't tell my PhD advisor but the main reason I went was to meet this little person:



She arrived in the U.S. early this spring and while I have a ton of photos, it's not the same as being in the same room. Here she is with her Mommy at Brookfield Zoo. She doesn't look too happy here but we got dippin' dots before we left and I now have a new friend (ice cream covered hands precluded any photos).

I was only gone a week and flew back into Vegas. While I was waiting for the St. George shuttle I hit the small Borders inside and found the new Thursday Next novel nearly a full week before it's official release date. Woo-hoo! If you haven't picked up a Jasper Fforde book yet, do so.

Unpacking

Happy 4th everyone!

I've finally emptied every possible box that we could unpack (there are always a few that just need to stay packed oddly enough). Of course we moved during an unusually warm June. Normally June doesn't get much hotter than the mid 90's but for some reason we didn't even have a week of days with a high below 100. Murphy's Law and all I suppose.

To escape we went to Cedar Breaks National Monument and Bryce Canyon. We ended up camping at Bryce but Cedar Breaks is really nice right now. It's the peak of the wildflower season there (peak being relative since southern Utah is in a 13 year drought) and it doesn't get much warmer than the 80s while Bryce is a bit warmer and crowded with summer tourists. I won't have my laptop connected to the internet until Friday so you'll have to wait until then to see photos.

We don't start teaching until the end of August so in the meantime, I'm exploring our new town, cooking and knitting (again photos will have to wait) when I haven't been unpacking. Marius brought home a roast the other day so, in spite of the heat, I actually made a pot roast. You know you're in a small town when the cashier at the supermarket picks up your turnips and exclaims "Turnips!" Apparently no one buys them hear even in the winter. Odd since they taste so good in a pot roast. I guess I should be happy that the store even carries them. Fortunately I have discovered that we have the equivalent of a corporate milkman and so we are getting decent milk, juice and organic produce delivered weekly now and Jeanette discovered that there is a local cattle rancher who produces grass fed beef and delivers for free in our county so I can't say I'm hurting for good food.

I love jam too!

Most of you have probably never heard of jam. No, not jam, jam. Jam is made by Eric and Phineas who have a single Blenheim apricot tree in their yard in Santa Clara, CA. The Blenheim is listed as endangered by Slow Food USA because the land where it has traditionally been grown was more valuable as subdivisions during the dot-com boom. Fortunately their neighbor also has some Blenheim trees and agreed to let them use the fruit this year so the run should actually be larger than the usual 100 jars/year. This is great news for you since they would have been down to just 96 as of last night.

99 jars of jam on the wall... (okay, I'll stop there).

They opened pre-orders yesterday to their waiting list and sell on a first come, first served basis from that list. If you think you might need some jam, go to their site (www.welovejam.com) and get on their waiting list asap before it's too late!

The below review is from Food and Wine Magazine this past February.
Yes, I've already ordered and it's highly unlikely that I'll share (they limit you to just 32oz., hence the whole 96 thing up above).

I'll be away for a few days while we close on the house and lug our stuff to Utah but I should be ranting about how awful it is to move by next weekend.

hmmm....

As Jeanette said, this person has too much time on their hands. Then again, I'd probably have done it myself when I was in college and if I were to walk past it on the street (before it got gunked up), I'd definitely smile.

Apparently this person lives in Stockholm and has littered that city with knitting "graffiti" and has recently started a world tour.

Knitta please has some serious competition in the world.

Knitting challenge

Thuy issued a knitting challenge last week to replicate some cute baby booties she found. There is an apostrophe in the address so blogger doesn't want to link to it properly. To view them go here: http://www.papastour.com/products/children's-gifts/baby-booties/

She likes the blue, yellow, green and brown pair since they don't appear to require any sewing.

So I emailed her a pattern and started knitting a test version. Here's the result (almost finished). They're cute but they will only stay on a baby for a fraction of a second. I think they would be much improved if they had an i-cord tie.


If you can't tell from the photos, you start out by casting on the number of stitches required for the final circumference of the bootie. You work it for about three rows in stockinette stitch and then start a short-row heel.

Once you have increased back to the full set of stitches you join to work in the round. After two rows of all k, you start with a single yo right at the same location as the join and then for every row after that you k2tog, yo, k (however many needed), yo, ssk so that you have an increasing set of yo's forming the cute triangle over the toes.


Here's a close-up of the yo's:

They just need to be kitchener stitched (see, I always thought it was "kitchner" but I jfgi'd and knitty.com says it's kitchener) at the end and you have a bootie. You could easily finish a pair in an evening if you were going for the newborn-6 month size listed on that site. Or you could drop 25 pounds (!!!!) on a pair and wait for them to be shipped to you. Yeah, right.

more house pics

M uploaded some photos of the house today so we don't have to rely on the ones from the listing.

This is the subdivision:


And here is a nice view of the front gate:



And lastly, a photo of the biggest selling point for this subdivision, the massive desert tortoise reserve that is just a 2 minute walk from our front door with hiking trails that stretch for miles:



Gee, do you think I'm excited?

And for those who are getting bored with all of this talk about houses, M went on a hike that ended at the Narrows of Zion NP the day I had to leave Utah. It included slot canyons. I'm kicking myself for having to return to California and missing this hike now.

We got it!

The appraisal came in over our final price so we can actually buy the house. I'm still waiting for something to go wrong but I think we may finally be out of things that can.

(Erin begins breathing again for the first time in days...)

the house

Perhaps I'm jinxing things but here are some photos of what we hope will be our new house. They are from the official listing so they are small. I deleted all that I had when negotiations fell through.


This is the dreaded front door that will soon be replaced by something that won't warp. It doesn't look 4'x8' in this shot but it is. The vines to the left are all jasmine so the entry courtyard smells great right now.


I'll limit the inside to one shot. The fireplace is double sided so you have a similar view of it when you enter the foyer. It's one of the more charming features of the place.

The Subway

I'm still playing catch up. During all of the house hunting insanity we had a chance to join some folks hiking The Subway in Zion. We had amazing weather and a great time. Because you have to swim through pools that never warm up, wet (or dry) suits are necessary and M and I ended up being the only two with dry suits. Unfortunately I haven't received copies of the photos taken of us prior to putting on the protective cover-alls but I will try my best to find them. We only needed red pyramid hats to be in a Devo video. They were truly crimes against fashion and just good taste in general.

The only real excitement (in a bad way) was when one person slipped and fell backwards several feet. It was not nice and I'm sure she had a more than impressive bruise the next day, but fortunately she wasn't seriously hurt. The rest of the day was just full of amazing scenery.

The hike in:



Our group before the truly macho took off and left the rest of us in the dust:



Here is our fearless leader, Kurt, hitting one of the last pools on the route:



Kurt's lovely wife, Janet prior to losing that very nice walking stick:



And finally the famous subway:



Along the way we regularly saw these cute little canyon tree frogs. I'm not sure if these white ones are the Hyla arenicolor species since we also saw brown ones (which H. arenicolor is supposed to be) but they appear to be close relatives given the many physical similarities. One even sat on my hand for a while. I suspect it was wondering why I hadn't eaten it yet as opposed to the Snow White moment most people imagine (yes there is a story here involving me, a hungry squirrel, some friends and my hip) but they really are pretty.



The hike through the "slot" canyon (it's a VERY wide slot for most of the hike) ends after a series of short falls:



At the very end, you get to climb back out of the canyon so that everyone who isn't in the best of shape comes out looking like they had their butts kicked in spite of the fact that it a very reasonable hike for most of the 9 miles.

Could it get any crazier?

We had an appointment to sign an offer on a new house today at 3pm. We show up and our agents sit us down and say they have something to discuss. Apparently someone went and talked some sense into the sellers of the first house and they are willing to give us everything we want.

Our agents were very smart and gave us lots of room to run away screaming which immediately required that we think about it all logically (even though emotionally I wanted to run away screaming). I have no idea how they know these things because my parents would have run away screaming whereas this was the perfect way to approach us.

We agreed, the sellers agreed and as of a few hours ago all of the paperwork was signed. We are still waiting on the lender's appraisal and we have promised to run away screaming if the appraisal is less than the purchase price. In the meantime though, we are somewhat hopeful that this could all be over soon and that we could have a new house in just two weeks.

Everyone warns you that buying a new house is an exercise in insanity but most of the horror stories we hear are about money grubbing agents and demanding lenders. Our agent couldn't have been nicer or a better advocate and the mortgage broker all but signed our names to make the process as easy (and as competitive price-wise) as possible. The sellers were our hurdle. They apparently have other issues beyond selling their home and had an agent who bought into all of their issues so that no one on that side was seeing quite right for a while. Supposedly that's all fixed now and we can all only hope that the lenders see it that way as well.

I do feel badly for the owners of the house we would have bought though. We met them both times we went to see the place and so they know that a couple was seriously interested in the house. Now, they will wonder what happened to us. I don't feel badly enough to turn down the deal we were looking for originally, but badly none the less.

The moral of this story is that, even in a buyers' market, buying a house is an exercise in insanity and you should always be prepared to run away screaming.

So...

So, I just realized that I appear to need to start my recent posts with "so." I just wanted to let you know that I've noticed and I should have it under control soon.

so much for extra time

So, like a fool, I went back to the online databases of homes for sale. We've now found another house that M has seen in person and likes enough that I need to drive back out there today so I can see it tomorrow and decide if it's worth the extra money it will cost us. By the time we finish this house buying nonsense, my car will be ready to fall apart I suspect.

So I won't be posting any more pics today and I won't make knitting tonight. However, this should be my last trip to Utah before the move so I should be more reliable in the next few weeks.

888 Seafood

So during the long break in blogging, my semester ended. To celebrate I took my TAs out to dinner at 888 Seafood in the San Gabriel Valley. If you're in the area, you should go.

When you arrive for dinner (not dim sum, you are just surrounded by carts then), they place a few small things to nibble on while you decide on your order. Who knew that the South had something in common with China? We all love boiled peanuts!!!!!



My wonderful TAs:





We somehow managed to show up on an evening when there was not one, but TWO weddings taking place at the restaurant (hence the lovely bows on the chairs in the background). We had cheesy elevator music on one side competing with electronica and hip hop on the other. We couldn't really talk over the noise but it definitely kept us entertained.

We ordered a few things none of us had ever tried before.

Sea cucumber with dried fish and mushrooms:


Frog hot pot (definitely the best of the night):


And shrimp with walnuts (as a back-up):


It was all great although sea cucumber has a very subtle taste and will give people with texture issues some problems.

Sadly I don't have any photos of their wonderful dim sum but if you google the place, that's what all of the reviews will rave about.

Where in the world is Erin?

I know I've been really bad and not posted in exactly one month today. So what the heck happened?

I got swamped with students who were worried about failing my class in the last few weeks (note to any college students reading this, your professor can do very little to help you improve your grade in the last two weeks of a semester!!!!!!) and then we went house hunting in Utah.

And we even found a house. In fact, we found it almost immediately.

Did we buy this house?

Of course not!

Instead I have spent the past two weeks more often in Utah than in California trying to negotiate this deal with "motivated" sellers who thought our initial offer was way too low (despite the fact that the asking prices of other homes in the same subdivision -8 out of 10 of them to be precise- were even lower than our offer) and then wouldn't pay for a new front door that wouldn't warp when the home inspection showed that it was warped to the point of not closing unless you threw the dead bolt.

Needless to say there wasn't any middle ground in spite of our agent's valiant efforts.

So this weekend she will be figuring out an appropriate initial offer on the next house on our list.

Ah, the joys of buying a home...


Fortunately I did get to do more than deal with contracts during those two weeks. We were invited to join a group on The Subway hike in Zion. You probably haven't heard of it as it is accessed from a side street in a neighborhood that borders the park and you have to apply for a permit several months in advance during the slow season just to get in. The bright side of losing our first choice house is that I will have time tomorrow to start posting all of the photos I've been collecting over the past several weeks.

For my local knitting group, it also probably means that I'll be around for a few more weeks and we can finish up that sock class after all.

Hokie Healing

In case you've missed the gazillion mentions of this on other blogs, I just wanted to point you toward Hokie Healing. Mosaic Yarn Shop in Blacksburg, VA (home of VA Tech) is asking for 8x8" squares to be used in memorial blankets for the families of the Tech shooting victims.

The squares need to be knit or crocheted and the shop is asking you to use the softest and nicest yarn you can afford. They suggest using the school colors of Maroon and Burnt Orange, as well as White and Black and you can send any and all squares to the shop at this address:

Mosaic Yarn Shop

880 University City Blvd.

Blacksburg, Va24060

Virginia Tech

For those of you who haven't heard the news, there was a shooting at Virginia Tech this morning. The information we have from friends there is that the total number shot is around 60 with 32 deaths as of a few hours ago. My brother did his undergraduate degree there and we both have friends who stayed on in Blacksburg after they finished college. It's a wonderful community.

All good thoughts, dpns, and prayers would be welcome.

Sheep art

For those who haven't seen it yet:

Woo-hoo!

I've been corresponding with the folks in St. George and the head of the department is not only willing to fund building me a greenhouse but is also quite willing to have my position shift into one with a lighter teaching load so that I can do research once they fill a few more positions.

Utah, here I come!

still quietly freaking out

But I've emailed the folks in Regina to feel them out and asked for a phone conference with the head of the department in St. George.

With the help of the gazillion or so folks I talked to about this yesterday (and the great comments people have left) I've at least figured out what the key issues are for me in making the decision. Now it all depends on the answers I get from various folks.

I'll keep you posted.

-------
While I was writing this, the guy in Regina wrote back saying he was fine either way. So now it's all down to St. George.

So where will I be next year?

My life is nothing if not interesting.

Early this year I was offered a post-doc (research) position at the University of Regina. This would be a year long position and would give me an opportunity to focus on my research as well as another year to apply for tenure-track faculty positions.

As some of you know, my husband teaches at a college in southern Utah. His department just offered me a faculty position this afternoon. They hadn't gotten funding approved for new faculty but then managed to squeeze it out of the administration due to a faculty member taking an indefinite medical leave of absence. Of course it would start three months after the job in Canada making them mutually exclusive.

We like St. George as a place to live and the job comes with a decent salary and amazing benefits but a teaching load that would restrict research to the summers if then even. Plus I have committed to going to Canada and I'm not sure how the folks there would take this sort of change in plans. I figure I should determine how I feel about the new job offer before I talk to them about this new situation.

So, what do you think?

While I wait for your response, I will just be sitting here quietly freaking out.

Global warming solved!

In an article released April 1, 2007* by RealClimate.org, a website run by climate scientists to address global climate change issues, the authors highlight recent research that shows global warming is due to sheep albedo feedback. The number of sheep in New Zealand has dropped over the past several decades and so the darker color of the land they used to cover with their white wool, is now responsible for absorbing more of the sun's radiation.
So forget about your hybrids and biking to work, just raise more sheep. Soon I expect there to be sheep subsidies to encourage even Americans to cover their land with white wool.




*for those who missed it, the article was published for April Fool's Day

Canary in a coal mine

Many of you don't know this but I have a reputation as a canary in a coal mine.

For what you might ask? For food poisoning.

And I lived up to my reputation this weekend after nearly two years free of bad food (okay, I've had crappy food but nothing that made me literally vomit at least).

Somehow I have developed a very fragile little ecosystem in my digestive tract and all of my happy little symbionts are VERY susceptible to food poisoning, making me equally susceptible to all of the loveliness that this involves.

Want to try that hip new Indian place? Great! Let's bring Erin! If she gets sick, we just won't go back...

In fact, several years ago I spent a fabulous New Year's Eve in the bathroom of the friend of a friend because my dear friend took me to that hip new Indian place for dinner and I got hit bad. I'm still convinced that her friends from graduate school think that I'm just a sloppy drunk.

And it's a shame too as it can really spoil and otherwise lovely place to eat. I normally have a bad meal once or twice a year although there was a year or so in graduate school where I was getting nailed by something every month or two. Only once has someone else been afflicted by the same meal.

This weekend was probably my own fault. Sunday I was running late on my way to the office and I wanted to grab something I could eat at my desk, so I stopped at a local Burger King. I even ordered a burger when it's normally the chicken that will get me at a fast food chain (there's a chance that the afore mentioned New Year's Eve was actually ruined by a sketchy chicken mcnugget). I finished my work and got home.

So I'm sound asleep when around 3am I wake up with the awful feeling that my run of good luck had just run out. Of course I had to lecture at 9am and I am so seriously behind my syllabus that there was no way I was cancelling class. Fortunately I managed to not run to the bathroom for about an hour before class so I went in and just hoped for the best.

There is probably nothing like your professor warning you that she could vomit at any moment (oh, but don't worry, it's just food poisoning) to wake you up at 9am on a Monday. Well, at least that's what the expressions on my students faces were saying even if they didn't say so.

Amazingly enough I made it through an hour lecture with only brief pauses to make sure I didn't need the trash can I had placed strategically next to the lectern. Of course I immediately went back to my office, told the wonderful woman in the office next door what the situation was and gave her permission to call me at home if students came looking for me, and drove home to sleep through the rest of it. By the evening I was able to hold down simple food and life was looking better.

Oddly enough I spent the next day with the stomach pain (but not the nausea it is important to note!) and hardly ate anything. However, Ruth suggested we meet up with someone from out of town for dinner. I ordered possibly the most idiotic thing I could have without getting a burger, a BLT with avocado and a giant order of fries for the three of us to share. I figured either I was okay or, failing that, sitting on the outside of the booth with a direct line of sight to the bathroom. Well it turns out that the pain was because I was so hungry that it was no longer recognizable as hunger and by the end of the 1.5 lbs of french fries, I was feeling surprisingly better.

Good times, good times...

The only bonus is that the head of my department overheard me laughing about it with someone else in the department and now thinks I am a stud for teaching under the circumstances. Of course I was just teaching out of fear that I wouldn't get through the material in time for the next exam but hey, I'll take what I can get.

Back to the grind

So I had a lovely spring break and I even have photos but I'll have to post those later.

Today I want to describe one of my classes for you. Several folks have asked me in the past to write about my experiences teaching. I must admit that other than the ever present slacker and brown-nosing students that are in every class, I haven't felt that I've had much to write about.

That was before this semester. This semester I have a lab class that is worth writing about (and no, not a single one of my students or TAs has the address to this blog, nor is it listed anywhere except by friends' blogs) .

Normally you get a good mix of all sorts in any group of students you teach. Sometimes you get groups that are so enthusiastic that it makes teaching a real joy and sometimes you get that apathetic group that is so soul sucking that you consider leaving academia all together. This lab class fits neither description.

But this one group I teach this semester is either so funny I can't help but laugh or so sad it makes me want to rip out my hair. I still haven't made up my mind which it is. This is the kind of class about which people write sit-coms. My students fit every possible stereotype and have formed little cliques that seems to accentuate these stereotypes. Now realize that I teach at a fairly selective school and that these students were definitely the cream of the crop in their high schools and generally do have a clue (of sorts) so all of these statements are relative.

1. I have the cute blond girls who must have been wearing some sort of short cheerleading type skirt not too many years ago. They spend a great deal of their time talking about anything but class. They are the last ones to arrive any place we need to go during class time (but always with an excuse). And they generally seem to look down on everyone else in the class (I'm fairly certain I am included in that "everyone else"). However you often hear them wondering out loud and VERY loudly if other students in the class are talking about them. So here you have the typical, cool but with a low self-esteem group that people probably love to hate (I would not be included in these "people" -I am a professional folks! And besides, they were probably the nerdy cheerleaders in high school so you can't really hate them).

2. Then you have the awkward, geeky kids that will never be picked first for anything and will never win a beauty contest plus the lone black student of the class (who is neither as brilliant nor as geeky as her clique-mates, in fact she's very cute but in a school as white as Wonder Bread, the black kids fit in where they can). These kids are very smart (even for this place) and will probably go far if they can ever develop their communication skills.

3. Next there are the stylish, alterni-girls who have wardrobes that most of us would kill for but with an edge. These are the ones who tend to shoot nasty looks over at the blond cheerleaders most days. By an odd coincidence, this is also the group that has the one student (there is one every year) who wants to have her hand held through every step of every exercise. This seems like a bit of a contradiction to me but perhaps it is just one of the joys of the selective liberal arts college.

4. Of course it wouldn't be a sit-com without the group that somehow manages to contain both the class clowns and the most uptight girl of the entire class. Much hilarity ensues as I'm sure you can imagine.

5. And then there is the seemingly catch all group that isn't really catch-all as it will reliably form with similar members every year. This is the group of the rather effeminate gay boys and the uber-self confident girls who don't wear quite enough clothing to avoid being labeled sluts regardless of their behavior.

6. Lastly you have the jocks who are never seen in anything but running clothes and are generally fairly outgoing and friendly to all of the other students but still manage to form their own little clique.

Now take all of these groups and make them form working groups limited to four people that then have to count bugs, grow plants, row out in small boats to take pond water samples and force their way through shrubbery to collect data. Obviously group 4 describes one of these working groups as the class clowns and uptight girls would probably avoid interacting under any other circumstance.

This last week we had our aquatic biology lab. This takes place out at the campus field station (just north of campus) and involves students using microscopes to identify a large number of pond organisms including leaches as well as the afore mentioned rowing of small boats. Do I need to even describe my day with this class? I'll just leave it to your imagination and then, just shy of students falling out of the boats, let your imagination go wild. You'll be fairly close to the truth.

Party!

Oh yeah. It's that time of year. As of 7pm today I am officially on Spring Break!


Woooo-hooooo!

Of course I am in complete denial about the large stack of homework and rough draft reports I have to take with me to Utah to grade. And I'm in even further denial of the three hour lectures on completely new material I have to prepare for the week following and the quiz, and, and...

And one of my students gave me the nicest send-off today by trying to get me to give him yet another extension on taking a make-up quiz that was really his fault (not illness or anything like that, he just missed the three lectures where the fact that there was going to be a quiz was discussed because he didn't feel he needed to be there). His current reason for the extension? He didn't study. That is one lucky kid that he has a good memory and he still pulled off an 'A.'

I just adore such opportunities to express what a terribly grumpy and nasty witch I can be sometimes.

Oh yeah. This Spring Break is gonna rock!

(I'll be in Utah for most of the week and will probably even spend some time not grading. If this happens, I promise photos.)

freshman fifteen and cooking with intention

I mentioned in the crab cake post that I get all of my lunches at the many campus cafeterias as a perk (depending on your opinion of fake crab cakes) of my job.

So I got on the scale and discovered that I have put on about 4lbs since I have been on campus!!!!

Asking around, I have discovered that all faculty members here go through this their first year apparently. It's the exact same issue as being a first year student faced with a giant room of choices to which one hasn't grown indifferent with extended exposure.

On top of it all, faculty members then often go home to cook full meals for their families. So, before this gets out of hand (and because I have no family to cook for right now), there will be much less cooking in my house. There may be bread since it makes a good snack; but it's soup, salad or sandwich for the evenings from now on.

Last night it was a small bit of raw milk cheese, some slices of a chianti sausage (yup, made with the wine) and a tropical fruit smoothie (frozen fruit and apple juice from my own kitchen or this wouldn't qualify as at all restrictive as most commercial smoothies have as many calories as a big mac). So there may be a swing back to fiber heavy content as smoothie and salad recipes are often not as exciting as other things.
------------------------------------------------

And I've switched templates in blogger to account for the fact that I was sick and tired of trying to find a nice rounded corner graphic to widen the general text area to accommodate photos in the last one I was using. When I have a bit of time I'll mess around and insert photos into the title area like I did in the last one.

free audio book from audible

Audible is promoting a "Listen with your kids" month and in honor of this has made the audio version of "Where the Wild Things Are" available as a free download.

How fabulous is that? Go now.

Leave me a comment if the link doesn't work and I'll post a new one. I'm not sure if the link I had was connected to my account or the one for the general public.

fiber related?

Can you believe it? I'm finally getting off of my butt and posting about the fibery things I've been doing.

I spent some time over-dying some yarn that I had originally dyed with iron logwood.

The original color was a washed out version of this:


Unfortunately I didn't tell thuy what I was doing until I had already started so her helpful reminder to take photos missed the original color.

The dye pot:


And the final product. The color is almost accurate but it is more blue.


I finished up the gifts for Jen and Farooq's new baby, Zara. A good thing too since she was born about ten days before I mailed everything off.

So here is that linen stitch blanket that I've been working on for forever and a day. I decided not to rip it out and I'm glad as the pooled colors aren't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Of course Sam decided he was being neglected with all of the photos not involving him so he made sure he was smack in the middle of it all.



I added a simple crochet edge to finish it off.


And finally, this onesie has a baby girl to go to! I knit this years ago but not in time for the intended victim. Everyone I know since then has either had boys or adopted older children than this would fit.


A close up of the hat:


And the buttons that save this from turning a child into a giant purple and pink marshmallow.

ascad

This was taken with Marius' fancy DSLR. The only problem was that we didn't bring a tripod with us so most of his photos were out of focus due to the low light conditions. I think my little point and shoot has held its own fairly well in comparison. I'll try and get the yarn pics up tonight from stitches. They aren't nearly as exciting as the massive haul I brought home last year but were much more kind to the bank account!