Meeting the parents

This morning I headed up to campus to participate in our Faculty Open House, a one-hour event in which (presumably) all the faculty are corraled and nametagged into a central area into which visiting parents (with and without their enrolled offspring) are poured. It's a civilized kind of fracas: each department has a small table and identifying sign around which we cluster as parents wander around in search of Junior's professors. . . This year, nearly half the parents I spoke to had no real details of their kids' actual schedules--either the students had neglected to provide this basic information or had failed to show up at the appointed hour of ten AM--and as a result, we were forced to send the parents along the line, from one of us to the next to the next, until someone (hopefully) brightened with an "Oh yes! Your daughter/son is in my class!" It was sad.

The few parents I was *hoping* might turn up (and provide some clues, consciously or not, about why, for example, Junior just can't stop rocking back & forth and muttering softly in my class) (I made that one up but some of the behavior is just as disconcerting) did not, alas. But I quite enjoyed chatting with the nine or ten who sought me out (because I teach first-year composition, I tend to get the longer queue). The drive home reminded me that it's nice to be out of the house on a Saturday morning.

Randy, meanwhile, had offered to take the car to its 1:00 appointment for new tires, so I was able to get cracking on a fresh stack of essay drafts. It's nice to have the Saturn running again; I hope it lasts us another ten years.
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My folks finally had their power restored on Thursday, though it's still out at Dad's shop, and Mom says he's starting to get "sour" about it. They're in Cincinnati, where the remnants of Ike tore down quite a number of large trees.
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Number of very small mice captured and released since last week: three.

Number of blocks I walked the second mouse before releasing: two.

Number of times Randy reminded me that mice don't find their way back all that easily (they do, after all, need to be trained to navigate mazes: thankfully only one (he really could have rubbed that in for a while).
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I hear geese. Summer ends tomorrow. Our crabapple tree is loaded this year; we're planning to make jelly again. Last time, it turned out wonderfully.
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E-Z Borrow books on my reading table: Peter Covino, Cut Off the Ears of Winter; Sue Owen, My Doomsday Sampler; G.E. Patterson, Tug; Eric Gamalinda, Zero Gravity; Greg Orr, Concerning the Book...; Jon Pineda, Birthmark.

I'm trying not to go overboard; I can only keep each book for 4 weeks. Thank you, Penn State and Carnegie Mellon, for your poetry libraries.
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Back to work--

57.

57 essay drafts = one big honking bite out of my weekend. What, it's Sunday night already?

Blur

Today was pretty much the Hump Day of the Hump Week of the Hump Month: the semester is a downhill road from here. Students who haven't managed to overcome their propensity for oversleeping, spacing out in class or with homework, and the like are probably not going to pull out of their current patterns, and this is the week when I stop overextending myself and trying to haul them back onto the Happy Raft. Sink or swim, y'all. I have my own paddling to do.

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We're trying a different med for the headaches. We'll see how it goes.

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And now, let's play Name That Novel! I copied pages from several books, pulled more-or-less randomly from home, to use for our erasures a while back. A few days later, in one of my comp sections, something made me remember and refer to the following passage. Students swore I was misremembering the scene, and that it was from another of the author's novels, but when I came home and checked, there it was--and here it is:

". . . [X], frightened at the spreading thighs, alone in the house, and horrified at the screaming wretch his wife had become, went mad with apprehension. Using his hands, his strong fingers for forceps, he had pulled and twisted the baby. The midwife, arriving late, had found the baby's head pulled out of shape, its neck stretched, its body warped; and she had pushed the head back and molded the body with her hands. But [X] always remembered, and was ashamed."

First person to correctly identify the title and author wins, oh I don't know, a slightly dogeared copy of Allison Funk's chapbook From the Sketchbooks of Vanessa Bell. (A nice chapbook!)

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Two words: GO, BOSTON!

[photo: driver's side blur, 10/12/07]

I'm still here

I'm still here, just swamped with work. Toss me a bail bucket. Fly me to the moon. Let me play among the stars. Or in the trees, before their leaves leave; that sounds nice. I'm starting to envy the acrobatic squirrels.

[photo: Maples, 5/16/07]