A Little Dancing

While much of my life this week revolves around visits to the rehab facility, quite a bit actually relates to writing things other than blogs, and a certain amount even relates to improving my dance skills.
My father continues to do pretty well at rehab, and the current estimate is that he'll be mobile enough to go home in about a week. The physical therapists put him through a good workout each day and he's learning about special devices that help people put on their shoes and socks when they're not allowed to bend over. We are pleased with the general level of cheer and helpfulness shown by the staff, and I'm told the food is pretty good too.
My friend Cesar, being fairly familiar with the dance scene around San Francisco's Mission, has kindly gotten me out a few times. Last Friday we investigated a free waltz and rhumba class at Cheryl Burke Dance. the instruction was good, the music not so exciting, so eventually we moved on to blues dancing on Heron, where the music was more fun.
Before leaving the Cheryl Burke premises, we signed up for free dance "consultation" (new students only). The school does this on a wide variety of dances, so I decided that since I had never done tango and everyone says it is difficult, I would try that. Of course, there's the problem that they teach three kinds of tango. I ended up having my lesson on American tango, on the theory that I would run into more people who did it.
I enjoyed my lesson and felt comfortable with my instructor, so I agreed to have a paid lesson the next day. It would be nice to learn dances in this manner all the time, with expert partners, but I'm afraid my income bracket dictates that most of my education will have to be in classes full of other beginners. After my second lesson, I met up with Cesar and we headed for one of these classes, at CellSpace. It was a good enough class, but we didn't get as far as learning any of the steps, focusing instead on getting the dancers used to paying close attention to their partners. I spent most of the hour walking backwards with my eyes closed. It was good practice and reminded me how differently less experienced partners lead, but I didn't really find out just how Argentine tango differs from American.
We have a plan afoot to gather a group to go dancing Friday. John says he wants to go and Megan is wavering on account (she says) of having biked all the way to Point Reyes over the weekend. I'm not sure who else is in the process of being gathered...

Sitting Around

When one visits a hospital patient, considerable sitting ensues. I suppose it could be worse, since no one says that visitors can't stand, or must refrain from walking around now and then, but no matter what progress the patient is making, the visitor tends to spend a great deal of time sitting there wondering what would make life more interesting for everyone. When the patient is conversational, that's something; when the patient is sleeping soundly, the visitor can actually read a book; but mostly the visitor just sits around keeping an eye on the situation, offering glasses of water, fetching nurses, reminding the patient to exercise in situ, and so on.
On the plus side, the patient in question seemed to improve considerably between 10am and 4pm, and even managed a journey out into the hall using the walker.
After all that excitement, I came home and let a pair of deserving rabbits out into the back yard and settled down to write some fiction since the likelihood of focusing my brain on matters academic seemed very small.

Ideas from the Blackboard Class

We completed our Blackboard/Courseweb training on Thursday afternoon, and I'm sure everyone was glad to get out of the basement of Alumni Hall and away from the surprisingly glary fluorescent lights. I'm not sure how the CIDDE people survive in this environment, although admittedly it doesn't bother me when I go over there to spend a couple of hours with the Digital Sender.
While at times it was tedious, I think we all learned a lot and were impressed with the instructors. Part of what a person gets out of this kind of class is an awareness of what can be done and that there are several ways of doing some of these things. The details can always be looked up in the manual later.
A nice bonus was that each person met individually with someone to discuss how best to arrange specific courses on Blackboard. The Intro to Modern and American Art courses I'll be teaching in the fall are relatively similar in style--both are introductory lecture courses that rely heavily on Powerpoint presentations of the works of art--but we decided that since Intro to Modern (in this iteration) is a once-a-week course (last time I taught it, it met three times a week!), the materials could be divided by week, whereas since American Art is twice a week and divided into units, the materials would be posted by unit rather than week. This would matter more if I had more online readings for American Art, but as it happens, most of the supplemental readings are in two anthologies that will be available at the bookstore.
The Blackboard training definitely gave me some new ideas. Last time I used Blackboard, I didn't use the grading function. Now that I know how it works, I will. More excitingly, there are possibilities for more effective teaching.
Both of these courses (neither being a large lecture) will have the students divide into two groups and each group present readings to the other group. In the past, the groups discussed their readings briefly in class before presenting. This took up class time and I had only a general idea which people were contributing more to the discussion. Blackboard offers online discussion groups, however. This means my groups can do most of their discussion in advance, I can read over their contributions and assign participation credit, and in class they should only need a few minutes together before presenting orally.
Blackboard also has built-in blogs and wikis. I don't see myself using these for my fall courses, but if I get to teach Czech Modernism in the spring, I think I'll have the students create a wiki. The Czech Modernism course would probably be done as one of our upper-division courses that stresses learning to write research papers, and as there are far fewer resources on Czech modernism than on something like Impressionism, having the students incrementally put their findings on a wiki throughout the semester would not only document the progress of their paper research for me, but would strengthen the entire class's knowledge of the topic because they would be building a group resource with citations to their sources. A student preparing a paper on the architect Otakar Novotný would benefit from sources located by a student working on Jan Kotěra, and vice versa. Each student would do his or her own project, yet benefit from the entire group's research.

Plunging into the World of Blackboard

No sooner had I returned from Minneapolis than I began a four-day intensive training on the system known to us as "Courseweb" and known to the rest of the world as Blackboard. (It turns out that the reason we call it Courseweb is that University of Pittsburgh was an early adopter of the system and it hadn't yet stabilized its name, so the university gave it one that was intended to stick.)
Blackboard, for those not in the academic world, is a means of preparing and disseminating course materials online. You can do everything from just posting the syllabus online to teaching an entire online course.
Blackboard is not mandatory, and I suspect many people in my department are still not using it despite the fact that they put parts of their courses online. I first used it several years ago, the last time I taught, when I used it to post the syllabus, a handout or two, and the Powerpoint presentations from class.
It seemed to me, however, that as I had only used Blackboard once and in a limited way, and as new versions had come out since then, I had really better see what it had to offer me. The university offers several different types and lengths of training, so I decided to go ahead and commit to four full days in the hopes that this would ensure I got more than just basics that I could have figured out on my own.
While tiring and sometimes slow-moving, this four-day version is thorough and goes well beyond Blackboard itself to address ways in which we might want to use it. We have learned, for instance, how to record ourselves digitally using the free software Audacity, and how to put the result up on Blackboard. I doubt I will be recording myself, but it did occur to me that I have mp3 files of some CAA panels and if I ever wanted to assign one of these instead of a reading, this would not be hard to make available. We also had a session relating to images, and while most of the information in that was painfully basic for me (definitions of pixel, JPG, GIF), it was well presented and not basic for most of the others, and I actually got advice on how to deal with the problems I encounter scanning many European books, which use a printing process that often causes a really horrible scanned result. Something about the arrangement of the dots can cause not a classic moiré pattern, but more of a nasty speckly effect, and this can be alleviated by scanning at 300 or more dpi and using the descreen feature, plus if necessary other tools.
We've also had a fairly long session on copyright, which was interesting but perhaps went into too much detail on some aspects of copyright and not enough on others, given what the participants seemed to know about the subject. People had a fairly good grasp of Fair Use, so it was good to have this refined regarding how Fair Use relates to classroom and distance education, but when it became clear that most people in the room (despite having published many articles and books) had no concept of the rights that can be transferred or retained in publishing, I thought that either this topic should have been left to a separate non-Blackboard training or that basic ideas such as First North American Print Rights and Work for Hire ought to have been explained. But I'm used to dealing with writers who have at least looked through Writer's Market or a comparable text before sending off a manuscript. Academic writers are notorious for ignorantly letting their publishers take ownership of their work in ways that no other freelancer would countenance, and this doesn't seem to have changed since I first began thinking about the problem in the early 90s (in a past life, shall we say).
Blackboard is in some ways a relatively complex delivery system, which while designed to give some amount of standardization so that students can easily find what they're looking for, also allows various arrangements of material. Part of becoming proficient at Blackboard is figuring out the best way to arrange the materials so that students can easily find and use them and not end up sending their assignments to the equivalent of Siberia, or send the professor messages that languish in a dungeon unknown to the professor. My needs are more straightforward than those of some teachers, since I rely heavily on Powerpoint, assigned readings, and a small number of writing assignments, but I want these things well placed, so I am looking forward to my private consultation with one of the instructors. I also want to learn how to set up discussion boards so that my students can easiily discuss their readings prior to coming to class and doing group presentations, as this will free up some class time and also give me a clearer sense as to which students are really contributing to the discussion.
That said, it's time to go to class.

Back and Away Again

The Spotted Pair and I had an uneventful trip to Jesse's, although I enjoyed it more than they did as they dislike car travel and were not too pleased about the heat in Jesse's apartment either. But a pleasant time was had by the human contingent.
The Spotted Pair will be staying home for my next trip, which involves going to Minneapolis for the gigantic Berkshire Women's History Conference, which should be rather exciting. I'll be giving a paper there on the New Woman in interwar Czechoslovakia, which is the last of my rather long string of conference papers. No doubt other tempting conferences will come along, but it seems time to turn some of those papers into articles... well, when not writing other things, like final bits of dissertation and chunks of fiction. Perhaps Ms. Spots could be trained to somehow turn conference papers into articles for me, picking through my notes to add on additional material and get rid of as many images as possible. She is, after all, an intelligent creature. On the other hand, I suspect her interest in my research is almost nil. She believes my time is best spent petting her and purveying yogurt and other treats on demand.

Summer Heat Comes Our Way

Summer, as people around me note, has finally arrived in Pittsburgh. And it's evidently going to be the standard Pittsburgh summer weather: when I got up this morning it was allegedly 78 degrees, with a high of 92 expected.
As the Spotted Pair and I are driving up to Ann Arbor today to celebrate Jesse's imminent PhD, one would think we might be escaping this excessive heat. But no. The Ann Arbor forecasts are pretty much identical to those for Pittsburgh. Fortunately the car is airconditioned.
I will now continue my packing and see if the Spotted Pair can be lured out from under the couch. I guess I should have left earlier in the day when they were lounging under the dining room window.

Pittsburgh Attained

The Spotted Pair and I reached Pittsburgh yesterday afternoon, entirely without meteorological incident despite the deposit of excess rain in many parts of the midwest. While towns hither and yon flooded and unfortunate persons were carried away and drowned, we encountered nothing of the sort during the midwestern portion of the journey.
Instead, we visited my friends Deanna, Jesse, and Brad, so there was considerable talk of dissertations and other Czech-related matters, and even of non-Czech personal matters. Deanna was my roommate one summer in Prague, Jesse was in my Czech class the following summer and of course also had a Fulbright grant for the Czech Republic when I had Fulbright-Hays, and Brad and I have known each other for eons (that is to say, since undergraduate days) but his visits to Prague have not coincided with mine. I may perchance say more of these visits when I have a chance to use my own computer (or I may not).
The new apartment seems all right, but the carpet-cleaners hadn't shown up by the time I did, so no one knows when the carpets will be sanitized and this means I would do well not to cover them with boxes and furniture. I also don't really want to have to capture the rabbits when the carpet-cleaners finally show up, so Orion and Calypso Spots are mostly confined to the kitchen, causing Ms. Spots to favor me with still more renditions of her now much-practiced baleful gaze. She is not disgusted all the time, however. She settled down considerably when we stayed at Jesse's and both rabbits got rather flopsy and rolled around comfortably on the floor. They also managed to push open the X-pen when Brad and I were out dining, so I live in fear that Brad will discover someone has chewed on a valuable puppet or other item. (Brad did not seem too worried. Like Deanna and Jesse, he was welcoming to the long-eared types and has nicknamed them Rorschach I and II.)
As it is likely that my parking meter has expired, I believe I must depart the library and return to the apartment, laden with miscellaneous items such as a mini-vacuum, a bag of hay, and a carpeted item designed for cats that might please a couple of long-eared, short-tailed cats.

Rabbits Detest Travel

Despite the fact that I was able to bring the rabbits into my motel room last night (before leaving, I got them a foldable exercise pen that can be put in any number of different shapes), they were not much pleased at our continued travel. Orion was relatively frisky inside the pen, but indicated that he thought he should at least have the run of the room and not be confined. Ms. Spots remained very irritable looking and wasn't sure she really wanted to be petted because, of course, it is my fault we are traveling. Both, however, ate greens with enthusiasm. They are not very interested in the apples and carrots I brought, but they do eat hay when we stop, and lettuce and parsley were extremely well received.
Still, despite having a good appetite, Ms. Spots has visibly lost weight. A year ago, she was much bigger than Orion. Now she looks about half his size, which shows that on the one hand he is overweight and not losing pounds, while she has certainly lost any remaining excess. I'm glad that her pre-trip vet visit indicated her to be in excellent shape, because otherwise I would be rather worried about this. She seems to feel that her task on the trip is to express their collective distress to me, and the fact that I don't provide the desired response (instant return to my parents' house) is taken as a sign of my bad faith.
I had thought this would be easier on them than plane travel, where they get cooped up in the carrier for about 13 hours and shoved under the seat, but Ms. Spots forgives me for plane travel.
We shall see how the rest of the trip goes.

Are We In Kansas Yet?

The Spotted Pair and I have been on the road for awhile now, but we're still on the Colorado side of the Colorado-Kansas border. For this, I particularly blame the hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic inching its way east to Denver on I-70 through the mountains. The scenery was gorgeous, and it was nice having some rain (I like places where it rains in the summer), but I really don't care to drive at a speed not much above that of your basic pioneer wagon train. I mean, if I had wanted to cross the country at that kind of speed, surely I could have found a historical reinactment group with a covered wagon to spare, and the rabbits could have spent their days climbing around the inside of the wagon chewing on boxes of books.
After all, most rabbits dislike car travel and Calypso Spots and Orion are typical of their species in this respect. They objected to being put in the back of the car in the first place, despite my having set up a nice little area for them with towels, litterbox, hay, and so on, and they spent the first day or two in complete rejection of the situation. Orion seemed to take the view that the world was ending or that at the very least he would soon be slaughtered, so he did not want to come out of the cage I had set in the rabbit area. Ms. Spots did not take quite such a dire view of the situation, but she was royally angered that her otherwise lovable human had planted her in the back of a car for an entire day and more. She was willing to eat the first night, so my only fear about her (a serious one) was that she might never forgive me.
Now that the Spotted Pair has kind of gotten familiar with the routine, they are still unhappy, but coping. They like to be out of the cage and resting on their towels, they gladly eat their hay, and sometimes they feel magnanimous enough to allow me to pet them. This evening, Ms. Spots clearly wished to be petted, although she was not quite ready to show her usual enthusiasm, so I had to be content with mainly petting her rump. She did incline her head somewhat in my direction, so I could tell that her heart was softening. Since she is normally incapable of being angry or distant for more than half an hour or so (this is about how long it takes her to get over a cross-country flight), I am relieved that we will probably be able to return to our usual relationship before long. Orion may have to be re-accustomed to his recent level of pettability, but I think that can be done. He is skittish but resilient. If Calypso Spots provides a good example, I expect he will eventually follow it.
I am displeased that we are now in the realm where flies want to join us in our travels, but since neither rabbit has wounds, this should not be a problem. Vigilance is the main thing when dealing with flies. I have had to deal with flystrike (maggots) on animals in the past, and I hope never to have to ever again.
But in general, I think we are traveling about as well as can be expected. The car was not really designed to travel laden with hundreds of pounds of Czech art books, but I did persuade it up the mountains, albeit sometimes in third gear at 40 mph.

Almost on the Road

The preparations for the drive to Pittsburgh are almost complete. Several of my friends have even confessed willingness to host me and the Spotted Pair on our way, for which we are very grateful.
I am losing track of my various last-minute activities, however. My sibling has taken up use of Dragon Naturally Speaking due to incipient carpal tunnel, and reports that it is an impressive piece of software. As I happened to have an unused disk for Dragon Naturally Speaking sitting around, I gave that to John since he is more comfortable lecturing than writing. It is to be hoped that it proves useful.
Cesar, meanwhile, persuaded me into trying a samba class. While I would not mind learning to samba, our class brought back recollections of why I used to abhor and avoid dance classes... I do not do well with "all levels" classes where everyone else already has a pretty good idea what they're doing and the instruction mainly consists of trying to follow along what you can see in the mirror. How am I supposed to "do four samba steps in each direction" if I don't yet know what a samba step consists of? I was disgruntled about this, but admittedly the attempt to catch on did involve getting plenty of exercise. I decided to regard it as a workout rather than a lesson, but I would have preferred to get some idea what I was supposed to be doing. Cesar had a better idea what he was doing, having seen more samba performed, but thought that the male body is really not designed for this dance. We concluded by drinking beer, and then, when John showed up after his Russian conversation class, drinking more beer. I gather the Russian class was more satisfactory, although John did think that it would have been hard to handle if he hadn't studied Russian previously.
The Spotted Pair has been repeatedly told about our upcoming trip, but as neither Ms. Spots nor Orion has any real experience with lengthy car trips, they have not shown any apprehension about it. Ms. Spots has, however, been preparing herself by molting. She has evidently been paying attention to the weather reports.
Many of my friends have inquired what prompts me to move back to Pittsburgh. The answer is actually relatively straightforward, if not all that brief. Apartments are considerably cheaper there than in the Bay Area (although not as cheap as sleeping on my parents' couch); most of my furniture and many of my books are there; my dissertation committee is there; I can get free interlibrary loan there; and I have friends there too. I can't say I am crazy about the weather in Pittsburgh, but other than that I tend to like the place.

Pears

The plums are all gone and now we're on to apples and pears. A good deal of apple pie has been made and consumed, so now with the pears ripened unexpectedly quickly (they have to be picked unripe, but they went ripe awfully fast after that), we are digging through the pear recipes. Or, rather, my mother is. I am ostensibly packing and returning library books.

Moving Right Along...

The weekend was more sociable than dissertation-focused, as it happened. As my birthday (and departure for Pittsburgh) approaches rapidly, John, Cesar, Megan, and I celebrated the birthday on Saturday by going out for Thai food and then taking a swing dance class at ODC. I wouldn't say that my dancing was quite at its best, but we all did fine at the class and those of us who stayed longer enjoyed additional dancing and the opportunity to watch those more adept than we are.
On Sunday evening I was invited to attend a graduation at Psychic Horizons. Oddly enough, I went to an introductory event at Psychic Horizons long ago; I suppose I heard of it through a shamanic-related mailing list or some such thing. At that time I had a reasonably positive impression, but one can only pursue a limited number of interests at a given time. The two graduates were suitably feted and congratulated, and afterwards they regaled me with some tales of a few of the more bizarre readings they had done during their course of study. One time, for instance, they were asked to find out why a house seemed to be haunted and see if it could be made to settle down.
Monday was notable mainly for Ms. Spots' excellent veterinary report. She is in fine shape, has lost a little weight, and ought to be in good condition to do the cross-country drive. Rabbits do not, in general, like driving or road trips, and she is no exception, so I am a little apprehensive about subjecting her and Orion to a week or so of travel. However, with familiar belongings around them and plenty of air-conditioning, they should be fine. The main thing is not to let them get too hot. We shall see.

El Cerrito Gardens, Part 2

I am quite certain that five or ten years ago there was nothing remarkably exciting about this yard. In fact, I am sure it used to be quite drab.
Not anymore. Perhaps inspired by the impressive garden that has long existed a short distance away (to be featured soon), the inhabitants of this corner house have planted lots of delightful things.

Dancing the Blues

Yesterday, while briefly rummaging through the offerings at the local bookstore, my eye was caught by a book purporting to tell me how I could remain fit and youthful after fifty, and not succumb to all the ills of my parents' generation (which is a much healthier one than my grandparents', I can assure you). The gist seemed to be that one must immediately begin to exercise six days a week.
It is unlikely that I will ever manage to exercise six days a week, as I have a prejudice against any form of exercise that is not also relatively enjoyable, and so many of the things I need or like to do are sedentary. On the other hand, I am opposed to the idea of sliding into physical decline, and I have been perhaps unusually sedentary since Christmas or thereabouts. I was pleased that Cesar and I had already made plans to go to a blues dance class that evening.
In the last two or three years, Cesar has become well acquainted with the dance-class scene in San Francisco, so I have been after him to clue me in on some of the better venues. I suppose I could have gone back to frequenting Berkeley's Ashkenaz, but it seemed like if I finally knew someone local who also liked to dance, there was no need to go alone. After all, until one visits a place, it's hard to know whether it is more a couples hangout or just full of people who like to dance.
The blues dance class was pleasant and pretty easy, since apparently blues dance doesn't require learning any steps. (I have an extremely poor memory for dance steps, although I can follow fairly well.) It was the first dance class I had attended where the instructor wanted participants to give a rundown of their dance experience, however. While few people had much blues dance experience, it sounded as though they all spent a lot of time doing swing, lindy hop, tango, and ballroom. While I did get good enough at west coast swing that several good dancers used to seek me out at the Live Oak Park swing dance evenings, this was at least seven years ago and there has not been much dancing in my life since then. My dance background is very spotty, considering that I really cannot recall how to do the pavane, the galliard, the minuet, or any other thing that requires my keeping track of what comes next.
After class was over, I got in a reasonable amount of dancing. The etiquette at this particular venue appears to be that one must not dance with the same person twice, which is a little more extreme than I am used to. At Live Oak Park, it seemed permissible to dance several songs with the same partner before moving on, although frequent exchange of partner was considered a good idea. It was even acceptable to return to a previous partner. Of course, I suppose I was in better form then too.
The atmosphere was pleasant, most of the music was good, and all of the dancers seemed pretty competent. I would have been happy to have danced a little more.
At the same time, I was most disconcerted to find that the parvovirus or whatever it was that afflicted me a month ago seems to have left its mark on my joints. I knew that I was still feeling problems in one of my fingers, but even the warmup, let alone the dancing, seemed to bother my back, and all of my joints seemed rather unhappy, and continue to today.
I take the view that my joints are just going to have to get over this viral residue and participate in dancing, skiing, and other activities, but it was a hint that I might need to exercise six days a week to convince them to cooperate.

Love in the Litter Box

Orion and Calypso Spots engage in another passionate grooming session. I hope that our upcoming drive across country doesn't unsettle them too much.

El Cerrito Gardens, Part I

There has been too much text and a dearth of pictures here of late. I therefore commence a long-intended series on Bay Area gardens.
Each of these is from a different garden passed on the way to Fat Apples (where the pumpkin pancakes are very fine).





These roses belong to what has always been a very charming yard. One year, if I remember correctly, it even won a local gardening award. It's the first time I've ever seen them quite like this, however. I guess too many people couldn't resist picking the blossoms. I'm not sure why else there would be netting over them.

This struck me as quite an enchanting vista.

This house, while its front yard is small, packs in a fine selection of colorful flora.

But, of course, at least half the yards still look pretty much like this. It used to be most of them.

Some Congratulations

A surprising number of my friends have either just started or are about to start exciting new jobs.
Megan, for example, having spent the past year doing an Americorps stint at Habitat for Humanity, is now an actual Habitat employee. I tried to get her to explain what the new job will entail, and she tried to tell me, but all I really comprehended was that it will involve policy, housing, land, and volunteers. It sounded like a good thing, though. Affordable housing is more and more difficult to find in much of the US.
Dawn, who spent last year teaching in Toronto, has gotten a job teaching German and, I believe, beginning Spanish and flute in Indiana. She's also bought what looks like a very fine house. We hope that this job, which makes use of several of her skills, will be really interesting and satisfying.
Cesar recently began a brand-new social services job. I gather he was applying for a job the organization had advertised, but was told that his qualifications were perfect for a new job they were in the process of creating. As with Megan's job, I am not sure quite what it entails, but I have heard a lot about it. In part, Cesar will be putting together a newsletter for and presumably by the clients, and/or a more literary effort. And in part he's supposed to teach (or find teachers for) the clients, who are, as they say, "at-risk." I am extremely curious what he ends up teaching. I grasp that elementary time-management skills would indeed benefit a population that tends not to wear watches or get to appointments, but Cesar is also pondering something about bird calls, although this is not at all one of his areas of expertise. He did say that the other night he persuaded a homeless Apache met on the street to demonstrate the call of an eagle. We'd like to know whether the recall of a tribal teaching turns the guy's life around, but it seems unlikely that we would find out.
Denise, one of the founders of my writing group, has finished her PhD and is starting a job at Cal State Chico, where apparently she'll start off teaching Spanish Phonology. Luckily Chico is not hundreds or thousands of miles from where she currently lives, so she can commute while she and her husband figure out their housing situation and what to do about their kids' schooling. Or perhaps they have already figured this out, being an impressively decisive pair.
April, who just graduated from my own PhD program, has found a teaching job in Iowa, while Naoko, who I believe will be graduating next year, was offered a tenure-track job and also two or three well-deserved fellowships.
I hope I have not forgotten to mention anyone...

Roaming the Mission Arts Scene, for Starters

I had sort of hoped that Saturday might be devoted to learning to kayak, but no one I suggested the idea to seemed to be available and it did cost money. So I went to the library instead.
Cesar did have a plan for the evening, however. We managed to get John to join us for burritos before he went off to see a movie with other friends (who are evidently more of a dissertation-distraction than we are), and then began roaming the open studios and such of San Francisco's Mission. It seems that the Mission is becoming less and less a working-class Hispanic neighborhood and more and more a place where the barbershops and dry-cleaners of yore are turning into small galleries. One can only have mixed feelings about that, as while small galleries are a fine thing, I'm not sure there needs to be more than one per city block. Once in awhile a person needs a barbership or dry-cleaners too.
But we enjoyed ourselves and saw some pretty good art, listened to some excellent Indian music, and joined the salsa dance party on the Casa Sanchez back patio. We also got to see some dancers on stilts who lit up the performance with fancy torch-handling.
Cesar says this neighborhood-wide arts extravaganza occurs every couple of months or so. He took some pictures, but I don't yet have copies.
On Sunday, my writing group met down in Los Altos, where the weather is warmer. Before I departed, I heard my father remark that if we were lucky, the sun might come out by 4 o'clock (my mother tells me that this did not come to pass). Usually things warm up as soon as I get south of San Francisco, but it was drizzly and cold almost all the way. Even Los Altos was cooler than usual, so my sleeveless dress was a bit unwarranted as I kept my sweatshirt on most of the day.
The company was agreeable, however. Betty put one of her Voyager Tarot cards under each person's lunch plate and, somewhat miraculously, each person managed to sit with a strangely appropriate card. Mine was one called Breakthrough, which Betty said was related to the Chariot in the major arcana. She said this one refers to having the momentum to leap forward and surmount obstacles or reach new understandings. It sounded like a good card to get when a person is finishing up a dissertation and preparing to go on the job market.
While our group is supposed to be a fiction group, we've listened to a good many nonfiction projects over the years. This time everything was nonfiction, as Janet presented a new version of something she's been trying to work out in the gray area between fact and fiction (we argued for her to just go ahead and call it a novel and get rid of references to the "real" story) and I tested out a section of a dissertation chapter. The section in question deals with the Parisian cultural scene of the 1920s, a topic that has been covered in great detail by expatriate American memoirists, biographers, and scholars like Shari Benstock. The Czech experience in Paris, however, is not quite so intensively studied, so without attempting a history of the Czechoslovak expatriate community, I tried to show how Paris was presented in Czech periodicals and correspondence, and how this related to Toyen. Whether there is enough Toyen in the section is hard to say, but my audience seemed enthralled by the quotations about Montmartre and Montparnasse, so I suppose my committee cannot accuse it of being dull.

American Bridges

I'm not often moved to comment online about disasters, as there are far too many of them worldwide. This does not mean I am not just as interested and appalled as the next person.
The Twin Cities bridge collapse particularly captures attention in this household, however. On the personal level, we're acquainted with the bridge in question and are relieved that no calls have come about lost or missing relatives. On the larger scale, we're unhappy to hear that the Bay Bridge is in worse shape than the 35W (never mind that we drive it occasionally, it is much, much longer than the 35W and is full of cars all day long) and that thousands of bridges around the country are in similar condition.
Admittedly, I've known for years that American bridges were in bad shape, but one doesn't generally envision them just collapsing for no apparent reason. It's also unsettling to hear that one reason there have been so few deaths on the 35W was that it had no real superstructure to fall on anyone. A great many American bridges, the Bay Bridge included, are suspension bridges or have some other sort of hardware that could fall onto the surface.
At the same time, I must say that I am not impressed by efforts to make the 35W sound like a disaster on the level of Hurricane Katrina. While it's shocking, disruptive, and killed at least five people while injuring and distressing many more, there is really no comparison. I suspect that more than five people are killed in the Twin Cities in ordinary traffic accidents each day, although I hope I am wrong about that. (I was heartened to hear that biking and public transit are popular methods of getting to work there.)
One can only hope that 35W will actually spur bridge repair across the country, though I am skeptical that this will happen.

Domesticization?

Megan and I were recently discussing a phenomenon that she says she has observed lately among people in their mid and late twenties, namely an obsession with domesticity. She tells me that her peers have suddenly gotten all immersed in household life, so that not only are they into such potentially creative and useful pursuits as knitting and cooking, but that topics like tea towels and heirloom vegetables have (she says) ousted social responsibility and politics, which were previously of great importance to most of her friends.
I can't speak for them, as it is all news to me, but on the positive side, I think it is relatively normal for people of that age to take some interest in their immediate personal surroundings and conclude that it is no longer quite enough to have a towel, a change of underwear, and a Swiss Army knife. After all, many of them are cohabiting and some are even beginning to produce offspring. In those circumstances, a degree of interest in one's home life is desirable.
On the negative side, certain generations do seem to develop an excessive interest in domesticity, and I would be disappointed if Megan's generation proves to be one of these. The domestic arts have their place and their value, but they should not be the focal point of most people's lives, should they? (I'm open to discussion on that since I can't really speak for the world's population as a whole.)
Being close to moving into a new place, my own thoughts are somewhat more home-focused than usual. The thought of rejoining my furniture, towels, dishes, and so forth is rather appealing, while at the same time visions of decorating a new space seem much more interesting than going at another chapter of the dissertation. This prompts me to go flip through decorating books and magazines in the hope of finding exciting ways of doing something new with my belongings.
In that frame of mind, I happened across a tome called Home Comforts, by one Cheryl Mendelson. The thing is supposed to be the domestic equivalent of The Joy of Cooking, a volume I have never actually owned (I do have a Betty Crocker cookbook from 1950 and various other cookbooks). The author claims, somewhat unbelievably in my opinion, to take great pleasure in keeping the house running perfectly. (I am not calling her a liar, as she clearly finds the subject interesting, but I am skeptical. My mother is the perfect housekeeper, but I am certain she would rather be reading a good book most of the time, or at least gardening.)
Well, whatever the truth of the author's claim to actual pleasure in housekeeping, I am all in favor of having a good place to look up things like how to clean drapes and blinds or how to prevent clogged drains. And I would say that this book seems to offer a good deal of that, although this afternoon when I checked for tips on how to keep clothing from eternal bleeding (I have been hand-washing a certain silk top for about 5-6 years, maybe even 8-9 years, and it still leaves a copious amount of dye in the sink), I did not find anything on this perpetually important subject.
Actually, while few have ever regarded me as likely to win a housekeeping prize, I was intrigued to find how much in the book seemed like the kind of thing I have always done or know I ought to do if I ever get around to it. I rotate my canned goods, although if I were more careful I would mark them with the purchase dates. For that matter, I always have something edible on hand. It is not my custom to run out of staple foods without replenishing them. Nor do I wash colors with light fabrics, although I do have some towels that seem to be permanently green rather than brown due to the implacable desire of a green T-shirt to bleed despite having been repeatedly washed by hand. And, while the author regards the cleaning of mirrors to be a low priority, I do not like them to accumulate spots.
We all, however, have our own little peculiarities. I do not find dusting very interesting, and would rather be oiling the furniture than dusting it. If there is an easy way to put away coat and shoes the minute I come home, I will do these things, but if not, well, too bad... which causes me to wonder about the facilities in my new apartment, which I have not seen in person. The floor plan shows a closet inside the front door, which is good, but will the closet be easy to use? Will it have a convenient space for me to keep shoes away from inquiring lapines?
One can only wonder about these things. In the meantime, I suppose I should turn my attention to the dissertation.