On the back burner

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately.

Mostly about my future.

When I finished my M.A. year, I was burnt out. Personal and academic stress wore me out that summer. I earned my B.Ed. to please my parents and because I didn't know what else to do with myself. I taught high school after that because I needed a job and I didn't know what else to do with myself. I was then both burnt out and miserable. Somehow, through a series of coincidences and some incredible luck, I came to apply for the job that I have now. This is my fifth year at this job.

Over the years, I've had a lot of questions about my plans for school and when I would be going back to do my Ph.D. For a long time, I couldn't face the idea of returning to school, but eventually I began to soften as I realized that I miss my intellectual pursuits. When I got this job, I thought to myself, "This is the universe speaking. You are meant to go back to school." Some of my friends and colleagues put forth compelling arguments about the experience of graduate school. It all seems so exciting.

But I can't do it.

I love the idea of pursuing a PhD, but I can't commit to the reality of it.

A PhD gets me nothing but the glory of the intellectual pursuit. In my current job, where I am hired at the Instructor level, I don't need a PhD. If I got one, it would make no difference to my employment situation: no raise, no change in responsibilities. If I wanted to pursue a job with a higher status, I would have to give up what I have now--and what I have now is pretty good. I make more than most adjuncts do, with pension and benefits to boot, and I have a decent amount of job security. I've gotten used to making money, to paying back my student loans, to eating decent food, to owning a house. I also have other things to think about: the possibility of having children, for one; travelling, for another.

I would love to do it some day, for its own sake. In the meantime, I have a life to live.

Counting down the days

We went away for the weekend for the first time in more than a month, and we did it for fun for the first time in more than a year. It was very exciting to get out of the city. We visited old friends of Mat's, who are becoming my friends too. We ate Thai food (mmm summer rolls) and went shopping for crafts and books. Michaels, which is about the only big box craft store we have in Canada, does a line of $1.50 accessories that are colour and pattern co-ordinated, and the pre-holiday set this year was knitting themed. My favourite part? The best wrapping paper ever:

There are matching cards, notebooks, pencils, pencil cases, etc. I also have a roll of blue cabled paper, but I haven't broken into it yet.

We are in the final week of school, at long last. My students will hand in their final papers today, and I'll be grading well into infinity. There are about eight inches of snow outside, and I have yet to solve my winter boot dilemma. (I have a gorgeous pair of Hush Puppies, which are knee high and lined, but they also have a three inch block heel, which I feel is a bit dubious in times like these.)

I finished three hats in the car this weekend, but the hood on my mom's Rogue is continuing to kick my butt.

Strange Days Have Come

On Mondays, I only have one hour of class, and it's a class that I don't even teach in, and it's a class at 3:30 in the afternoon. At the beginning of the term, when I found out my schedule for the year, I was thrilled--how could I not be? Unfortunately, my peaceful, easy Mondays began to fill up quickly, and now most of my Mondays involve 7+ hours at the school or in meetings.

Today was no exception, and it was made all the more frustrating by the quality of the meetings. The first was derailed by an unfortunate discussion of the merits of social media (and a refusal on one party's part to acknowledge that not wanting to join Facebook is a legitimate position) that took up the first 50 minutes of the meeting. The second was with a former student, whom I normally quite like, who was exhibiting some decidedly snowflake-like behaviour. It was a very uncomfortable situation: I'm torn between my desire to help my former student and my desire to point out that she has been hoisted entirely by her own petard here, and that now is the time to quit making excuses, to quit complaining, and to start doing instead.

I'm twenty rows in to the hood on mum's sweater and it looks pretty cool.

New Patterns

Some days you have to take the good with the bad. Last week, I had a very sore throat and swollen lymphs nodes in my neck for most of the week, which seems to have transitioned into a full blown cold this week. As of last night, my voice is starting to fade. The good, I guess, is that my students are all involved in a peer editing exercise during class this week, which means that they work hard and I don't have to talk much, which is optimal for everyone involved.

I've been making good progress on the sweater - the back is now worked to the shoulders and bound off, and I'm plugging away on the front. The sleeves are what concern me most: I don't have a good track record with set in sleeves, but I figure that as long as I am patient and take my time, I can do this.

The best news from yesterday, though, is that the two patterns that I submitted to Three Irish Girls have been published and are available for sale on their website. Strangely enough, both patterns are mittens--I don't actually make that many mittens but apparently that's all I can write patterns for. The Breakfast at Jessica's mittens are done in a beautiful blue wool-silk blend, with picot edges and white bows reminiscent of a Tiffany box. The Glasgow Cathedral Mittens are modeled after the Millenium Window in Glasgow Cathedral. I had originally envisioned them in brilliant shades of blue, but the green-based handpaint in the sample is quite fetching.

Three Irish Girls released a whole new lookbook for Fall 2010, with 41 patterns and 33 new colourways. The lookbook can be seen here, if you're inclined to go looking for some yarny loveliness. My favourites are Carey, Eavan, and Mairin

The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Mostly. It has been a hell of a couple weeks around here. I might have to write this entry as a bullet point list for the sake of clarity. I'm hoping your regularly scheduled blogging will resume shortly. Anyhow, here is what I've been up to:

• Collective Bargaining - I sit on the bargaining committee for my union, and we have finally started negotiating a collective agreement with the university's administration. Things have gone quickly so far, but we still have the big stuff--compensation and workload--to get through. It will be very interesting to see how this goes--the Ontario government has asked for a two year wage freeze for all public servants/groups that receive transfer funds; it is likely that we will be offered 0-0 for the next two years.
• New school year. You'd think, since this is my fourth year in this job, I'd remember how hard that first week of classes is: a million names to remember, new schedule and locations to memorize, no more napping in the afternoons...but I didn't remember, and last week just knackered me. I'm so lucky to have Mat in my life--if I were left to my own devices, I would probably eat pizza for the entire first month of school because I am just exhausted when I get home from work right now.
• Test knitting. I'm almost done my second test knit. The first was a stranded pattern done in sport weight yarns, so it was a slow(er) project. I've only knit one other stranded project in my entire life, so don't ask me why I came up with a fairly involved stranded design...but I did. My second knit is in a worsted weight yarn, and I'm so happy that I saved it for last because it's working up like a dream. I'm going to mail them out tomorrow, and then I just have finish writing the patterns.
• Bachelorette party. This was a very good night. The theme was "Wear It Again" (as in, wear a dress that you've only worn once) with a side of "underwear" (everyone brought me a pair of gotchies and I had to guess who brought me which). There are lots of photos here, although I will warn you that there are pictures of a) crocheted thongs, b) phallic pastries, and c) firemen having hoses pinned on them.
• Various and sundry wedding planning. I finally have all the fascinator things, but haven't quite figured out what I'm doing. I do not have all the jewelry things, which is irritating. At times like this I feel like the persecution complex that I have in relation to Canada Post is actually quite justified.
• My cat hates me again.
• I AM GETTING MARRIED IN TEN DAYS FRAK

as we walk in fields of gold

As it is apparently a pretty cinematic week 'round these parts, we went to see Iron Man 2 last night. (I've also watched both A Streetcar Named Desire and Party Monster this week.) IM2 is pretty much exactly what you'd think it would be: it's nowhere near as bad as some early reviews implied that it was, but it certainly doesn't exceed the original. The only thing in it that really bothered me was a touch of lazy writing: to have two Russian characters and not ever really acknowledge what that means...I don't know. I suppose that a) one of the characters is technically American (in which case the naming of that character is unfortunate) and b) as Mat points out, the vast majority of the film's audience knows nothing about twentieth century Russian history. (Which is, I suppose, unfortunate, since so much of the Iron Man stuff is informed by the Cold War...)

I received my course evaluations for the Winter term in my mailbox at work yesterday, and they were the best set of evaluations that I've received yet. (We are evaluated by both a 5-point Likert scale scantron sheet as well as an anonymous written form.) I received a 4.40 out of a possible 5.00 for my Likert scores, and the most negative comment that I received in the written was that I was "just okay" in seminar. I also had a couple of people comment that I was "well-groomed" which is...hilarious? bizarre? irrelevant? untrue? I try not to think too much about my evaluations because they don't necessarily mean anything, but I have to confess, it's particularly gratifying to have such good evaluations for this term because my evaluations for the Fall term were actually the worst evaluations I've had in my three years here. It feels good to have made that kind of improvement, and to know that my students enjoyed this year as much as I did.

I've cast on a February Baby Sweater, and I have to say, it's a bit terrifying. EZ's pattern doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense to me, but I am trying my best to trust that it will turn out well. I guess that if it doesn't, at least it's a very small sweater, so ripping back won't be too painful. I'm using one of the yarns I picked up last weekend, a superwash DK dyed by Tanis Fiber Arts in a beautiful blue/purple mix, and it's knitting up beautifully.

What do you mean, it's only Wednesday?

It's been a busy week here in North Bay Rock City. The T-1 year countdown to the wedding is on as of last Friday, my special snowflakes handed in their first essay assignments to me, and it may (or may not) have snowed at some point in the last seven days. I did not personally witness any of this alleged snowing, so I am opting to believe that it didn't actually happen.

I did, however, break down and turn on the furnace a few days ago when I got home and the thermostat told me it was 14 degrees in the house. Brrr!

I also had an appointment with a dermatologist on Monday. My body is covered in moles--I easily have between 200-300 of them. (According to the US Cancer Institute, most people have between 10-40 moles.) I also fall into just about every category of risk for melanoma: fair skin and light hair, freckles, UV exposure and sunburns, having more than 50 moles, and having many dysplastic moles.

There's one mole on my arm that the doctor described as being "just wrong", so it's going to be biopsied in December, and in the meantime I am not to ever sunbathe again, ever, and to wear long sleeves and a hat when in the sun. I also get to check myself over every month to make sure that nothing's changed mole-wise.

Then today Mat was playing with the cat and asked, "Is it the cat's ear bleeding?" It wasn't, but there was a large red bump inside his ear, and another one where his eyebrow would be (if he was human. Do cats have eyebrows?) Thankfully, the vet was able to see us today, and my poor kitty has neurogenic dermatitis--basically, he's stressed out and it's manifesting itself in these sores on his skin. He was given a cortisone injection and is now on the road to recovery, so hopefully he'll be all better soon.

We also got him on a scale while we were there, and my wee beastie weighs a not-so-wee 16 lbs., 8 oz.

A sweater for Caitlin is on my needles currently. It's another February Lady, but I've done the yoke in Noro Yuzen (a wool/silk/mohair variegated) and the lace part in Berroco Inca Gold (a silk-merino cable spun). The Inca Gold is heavenly to knit with. The finished sweater will be unique, but hopefully in a way that suits Cait. (And hopefully it will be finished in time for her birthday next month.)

Words, Stories, Ideas

The first week back went decently well. My grammar teaching skills are not great, but things got better as the week went on. It will be an exhausting semester, and I'm going to have try to extra hard to keep myself healthy. I'm pretty sure that I will get either H1N1 (Knit One Purl One, as my mom keeps calling it) or the regular flu this year if I let myself get run down. This is one of the "perks" of working with a university-age population: once it hits, it will hit our population hard.

Tomorrow, I get to make a trip out to the alpaca farm with Caitlin. I am really excited about this because I am going to buy the yarn to make my wedding shawl. I don't have a pattern picked out yet (although I do have a few in mind, and I have purchased Knitted Lace of Estonia). I'm also excited to see the alpacas, of course.

In one of my classes this week, we talked about how English majors are interested primarily in three things: words, stories, and ideas. I think that knowing which of these is most important to you says a lot about the type of person you are (literature student or otherwise). The importance of each has changed for me over the years. Right now, I would say that story holds the most importance: I've been watching a lot of TV lately, and I feel that TV has really come into its own as a medium of storytelling in the last eight or nine years. Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, LOST are only a few examples of shows that demonstrate the possibilities of storytelling.

I also like stories and storytelling because they are a part of my knitting. I love knowing where my yarn comes from, and how it has made its way to me. Part of my affectio for Three Irish Girls (aside from Sharon's obvious talent--she did win 4 of the 8 Dye for Glory categories she entered) comes from her use of Celtic names for her colourways, and also the fact that my sisters and I are three Scottish girls. I love that knitting connects me to my family's stories, too: both of my grandmothers were knitters, as are my mother and one of my sisters. It also connects me to my historic site, to the history of Huronia and to my time as an interpreter there. I love the ways that patterns can form parts of stories, whether in their names or in their content.

This is why I want to buy the yarn for my wedding shawl from Misty Haven Alpacas. I'm not getting married in North Bay, but this city is a big piece of my life, of my story, and including a local yarn in my wedding day will be a nice tribute to that.

working for the weekend

I've been taping both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager on the PVR for the last several months, and the series of TNG went full circle last week. Unfortunately, somehow the PVR managed to tape only Part I of the finale. Colour me disappointed.

The clock is ticking on my return to work. We have a late start this year because of where our Labour Day falls, and things don't start in earnest until the 14th of September, so I have been avoiding accepting that my life will be very, very busy for the next few months. The course I usually teach has been split from a full year course to two half year courses, which dictates a much more frenetic pace to the semester. I also have approximately 165 students. It's going to be a lot of marking this year, that's for sure.

I'm helping an old roommate move in with his fiance today, and a friend from teacher's college is swinging by tonight. It is a cold, wet, and potentially miserable day here. If it weren't raining, I'd take my new February Lady out for its inaugral wearing. I made an Urchin beret yesterday out of a Fleece Artist kit I had kicking around in my stash. I held a strand of a thick and thin yarn with a mohair-wool-silk boucle, and it looks gorgeous. Exactly what I needed for my new grey wool coat. I have plans for another Urchin in a few weeks. I love patterns that knit up in a day.

Follow the directions

I like to make fun of my partner because he is an inveterate non-follower of directions. Any time he is required to do something that involves reading from a manual and progressing through steps, he's usually convinced he should "just know" instinctively how it will work. This can lead to a particularly awesome combination of hilarity/frustration.

My students also don't follow directions. After every single test and assignment, I will stand at the front of the class and say, "The most important thing you can do to ensure your success is to read the directions carefully, and make sure that you know what the question means." But they don't. And then they lose marks, and say, "But my answer is right." And I say, "Your answer may be factually correct, but it doesn't answer the question as it was posed."

All of this is a lead up to say that I should probably practice what I preach. Back in February, Starlite75 came up for a few days and we dyed some yarn together. One of the things that every single set of directions for yarn dyeing tells you is that you should tie your hank of yarn in several places. I assumed that the two ties in my Knit Picks Bare skein would be sufficient. That assumption was incorrect, and I spent the better part of 45 minutes this morning detangling the skein on my swift. It wasn't a huge deal (I am the kind of weirdo who like untangling knots) but it could've been avoided pretty easily.

The offending yarn is now a pretty little pink and white cake, and I'm off to get started on some socks for my mom for Mother's Day. Good times.

If I am good...

If I am good I will finish my large Ishbel today. If I am better I will work on Caitlin's sweater. It's a variation on a toddler sweater I made last year. Apparently grown women are much larger than two year olds. Who knew?

I am a packrat. While this has obvious implications for my home life, it also spills over into my professional life. In some ways teaching is well-suited for this kind of behaviour: the culture of entitlement forces me to hang on to things that should simply be binned or recycled, because if I get called up to prove that a student earned (or didn't earn) a certain grade, I need to have all of my documents in order. This year, I am throwing out everything from last year--I figure 12 months is plenty of time to hang on to things.

Once my office is clean (which should take a few more days), I am going to start on my craft room at home. It's sewing time, I think.

Starting Over, Passing Through

I didn't get to watch today's inauguration because I was busy running around trying to get a variety of things organized. One of my colleagues is out for two weeks, as per doctor's orders, so I am having to pick up one of her classes and a joint project we are working on. This isn't really a big deal, but when you combine it with essay proposals in both of my courses and the general high anxiety levels of my second year students...well, let's just say that it makes for a busy day.

A few good things did come out of all the busy times, though: I snagged a waffle iron and a hot air popcorn popper, and my new glasses were finally in! The types of people who "design" glasses frames (or lend their names to such) fascinate me. There's everything from Hilary Duff to Nintendo to Eddie Bauer to Cadillac. The pair I wound up with are Cosmopolitan (...I know) and I have to say that I think they are pretty sharp. This is my first new pair in about 3 and a half years, and it's marvellous to be able to SEE again.

Reading the status updates of my friends on Facebook today has been a tremendously uplifting experience.[1] It's hard not to catch that optimism, that hope. In one of those moments that is truly serendipitous, my first year students are reading Nella Larsen's Passing, a novella that will challenge them to consider and re-consider how they perceive race and gender. Right after the first lecture, one of my students asked me, "But how can it be that no one notices that these people are black?"

Which is, of course, a very loaded question to deal with in that few minutes while your class is filing out and the next class is filing in to the lecture hall.

My students attend a *very* white school. (In fact, every time I see the school's latest marketing campaign, I laugh a litttle, since it suggests a student body that's much more diverse in terms of both race and gender.) A lot of them will have never thought about race in anything more than an abstract way, much less realized the myriad of ways that race shapes discourse and interaction in our society. I'm hoping Obama's inauguration allows at least some of them to engage with the ideas that Larsen proposes in her novella.

1. The other thing that really struck me, upon reading through pages of Facebook status updates, is how many people viewed this as a historic moment. Which, duh, it obviously is, but it's interesting to see how people identify it as such in the moment: "...is watching history being made" etc. CNN has historic t-shirts, too. The half life of nostalgia is truly growing smaller each year...

oh, the weather outside is frightful...

I could not blog today without talking about the weather. It is cold here. In all fairness, cold does not begin to cover it. At present, it is -32 celcius here in North Bay. The television tells me that this can technically be referred to as a deep freeze. The only good thing I can think of right now is that at least when it's this cold, it doesn't snow.

Second term is now underway. I feel bad for my second year students, as I think they are vastly unprepared for the onslaught of work that's about to hit them in the next three weeks. I have to keep reminding myself that it is not my fault if they are unable to read the schedule of assignments off their syllabi.

I've decided to make it a point to mention Twilight in each of my classes this week. We're doing Great Expectations in first year, and Tennyson's "Tithonus" in second. What is the relevance, you might ask?

For Great Expectations, we're reading and comparing the two endings that Dickens wrote, and discussing which we think fits the tone and scope of the book better. (I am published ending FTW, by the way.) One of the questions I like to put to the students is to what extent an author needs to consider how his or her audience will react to a text. Harry Potter and Twilight are the obvious comparisons because of how personally invested their readers tend to become in the stories. It's actually prompted really good discussion from a (normally) fairly quiet class, so I'm quite happy about that.

For "Tithonus", we've been talking about what aspects of the Tithonus myth are relevant to us, and the idea of eternal youth/beauty to go along with immortality presents an interesting segue to Twilight and our larger obsession with vampire stories. The ideas of immortality and eternal youth are so closely intertwined for us that you almost wouldn't consider them separately. (And, of course, in Twilight, Bella is obsessed with being even slightly older than Edward.)

I finished my sweater, and it is huge. It actually looks more like a sweater dress. Stupid blocking. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. Perhaps once I get the sleeves on I'll feel more kindly to it. I've started a new Wisp in the KnitPicks Imagination sock yarn, which is an alpaca/wool/nylon bled. The colourway is called Looking Glass, and it's the most lovely shades of blue, green, and grey. It actually reminds me of beach glass.

I need another project, but just can't seem to figure out what I want to knit. It's making me antsy.

the most blunderful time of the year...

The countdown is on. One day left to this week; three days left next week, and minimal teaching all around. (Minimal teaching, of course, means maximal marking. Bah humbug to that.) I'm always ground down this time of year; I let my job be more stressful than it should be, and I am so effing ready for a break I can taste it. I went to bed at 11 p.m. last night, and woke up around 7:30 this morning. It's now 4 in the afternoon, and I am exhausted. There's nothing left in this tank. Just air.

(As an illustration of my point, I just paused from writing this scintillating rumination on my life to go pick up some stuff from the print room here. Apparently, you actually need to send documents to the printer before they will be printed off. Where the heck is my telepathic printer?)

Don't get me wrong. I like my job. But I'm ready for a break right now. I'm ready for comfy clothes and healthy food that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, and time spent with a cat who has no sense of entitlement except when it comes to the Boyfriend's computer chair. I don't want to read more essays that misinterpret both texts and questions. I don't want to be as tired and frustrated as I am right now.

I'm hoping the quick trip home this weekend will refresh me. If not, maybe I will just sleep for the whole month of December.

I open at the close

The first 'real' week of school has been quite a challenge. I've got seminars in two courses this year (the first year intro course AND the second year British literature survey) and the balancing act required therein has been difficult at best. Add in a little personal turmoil and you've got the makings of a week that I'm quite pleased is over.

I taught scansion in the first year courses and it went from being an unmitigated disaster on day one to being mostly okay by day five, which is excellent since it's something that I'm totally crap at. If you want obscure New Wave song lyrics from the 80s, I'm your girl. If you want to know anything about rhythm...well...*cough*. I get to teach it again in second year next week, so we'll hope that they are able to grasp it. Overall I've been really impressed with my second year courses thus far.

I received an email from an old internet friend that I'd fallen out of touch with several years ago. After adding each other to the key social networking places (as you do) we discovered that since we last spoke, we have continued to share interests. It's hard to explain why that makes me so happy, but it does: the friendship that I treasure most seem to be those that can hang infinitely in the balance, but always fall back into place in the most satisfying way that says: Here we are again.