asteroid B612

I love living in New Orleans, really I do. Especially when the air conditioner is working.

Life seems a little apocalyptic feeling right now what with being pregnant, teaching, finishing coursework, x, y, and z.
I hate spring. This is perhaps the first year I admit it, but it's true. We all love the days when the warm sunshine first greets us from the winter doldrums. But if you think about it, those warm rays are unsettling! (In NOLA, we've gotten past that stage, I think, into our first phase of summer.) Spring is tiring. It makes me moody. I was so grumpy in class yesterday; I just got really peeved at the 14th c composer whose piece we were transcribing into modern notation.
But I won't drag you down into my bad mood. Actually, a good night's sleep and a quiet morning to pray keeps me going, brightens me up.

After grading their last tests, I've come up with a new strategy to communicate with my class: Powerpoint. yea, yea. Last Tues. I tried it for the first time, and I noticed a significant difference in their attention and interest level immediately. What can I say? we're the visual generation. It's more than doubled my prep time, but I think once I get the hang of how to create these things, I'll get quicker. So far, I'm enjoying it. I'm a visual learner, too. I think it'll also help with my lecture organization. I always teach from a careful outline, but I think I'm not very skilled yet at speaking my outline. So this will be good for me and for them.

Round 2 of the Jellybean Challenge has been completed, and this time I am defeated.

After playing on Sunday afternoon, we were pretty jellybean-ed out. As I was putting the bag up, one green bean escaped. I looked at it and was like "i'm not eating another jellybean." Chris wouldn't eat it either. But it's not like we would throw away a jellybean!

Later that night, I found the jellybean sitting jauntily on my pillow. But I was going to stand firm. I'm not eating the jellybean. So I put it on Chris's computer keyboard and proceeded with my evening. I made my egg salad sandwich, stuck it in the fridge, got the rest of my stuff ready to go for Monday morning.

Mid-afternoon yesterday, I went to retrieve my egg-salad sandwich, and to dismay, I discovered that I whole side of it was bright green! Chris had stuck the jellybean in my sandwich and all the green sugary coating had melted off into my sandwich leaving an anemic wad of jelly between two pieces of bread. It didn't totally ruin my sandwich, but there were a few questionable bites. I threw the jellybean (or what was left of it) away after that. Round two is over, and he wins.

(I don't know why I'm so into Jellybean Challenge these past couple of days.)

In a purely giddy moment, we invented a new game in honor of today: The Jellybean Challenge. And I would just like to say that I'm the undisputed victor. It amounts to being able to tell what color of jellybean you're eating with your eyes shut. I was even able to tell the color when TWO jellybeans were in my mouth (though it was a little harder when Chris squished them together before popping them into my mouth). Lest you think this is a purely trivial game, try it (okay it is trivial, but it's harder than it sounds).

I've been perusing books on different medieval topics lately. I picked this one up today: The Black Death by Joseph Byrne (Greenwood Press, 2004). This is part of a series entitled Greenwood Guides to Historic Events of the Medieval World. The best way to describe it is a textbook on the Black Death. It seeks to give an overview of the causes and effects of the Black Death, how it affected medieval society in its various facets, psychologically, economically, artistically, etc. It has helpful sections including a chronology of the spread of the plague, a section of primary documents in translation, an annotated bibliography, a section of brief biographies of key individuals, etc. If I had to teach a course on the Black Death, this would be a wonderful resource, because it offers a brief, yet fairly comprehensive, introduction to the Black Death to the beginner. However, it's not really what I was looking for in a monograph--a book with a single thesis and supporting arguments. I'm glad it crossed my way anyway, though. (p.s. History teachers, this is a good book for high school, too, written at a comprehensible level and includes a glossary.)

One thing I've noticed about this book, and other more recent publications is the high percentage of it devoted to the Middle East. Western interest in Middle Eastern history has increased a lot in the past couple of decades, no doubt, also spiked by 9/11. I even took a course in the history of the Middle East as an undergraduate history major. What was once a peripheral subfield at Columbia and other institutions who can afford to staff subfields has filtered into the literature. I'm definitely glad, as it offers an important and very relevant facet to scholarship.

The Black Death incorporates increased scholarship in the medieval MidEast (middle ages middle east?) in some more blatent ways and other more subtle ones. The most obvious is chapter 7 entitled "Individual and Civic Responses in Cairo and Florence," wherein Byrne describes the entrance and effects each in these two cities, highlighting each city's particular culture and politics and how they were each affected, and finishing with a comparison of the response to the plague by each city. Knowing virtually nothing about medieval Cairo, I had everything to learn, and found it to be an interesting, informative chapter. (...though in keeping with the book's nature, as a whole, not too deep.)

Byrne also brings MidEast history in to his narrative in other, less straightforward ways. For instance, when mentioning the response by the world of medieval medicine, he also includes what the MidEastern doctors thought, as well as the Europeans. At the back of the book is a section of short biographies of key individuals of this era; many MidEasterners are included.

It's right that all this information should be included, as the Eastern world and the European world had significant exchange during this time. And I'm glad that as more Westerners learn this history, it is incorporated into more generalist, less specialist books as The Black Death.

I have a great husband. Every once in awhile, he does things that are just so telling of his personality that it cracks me up a bit. I love that I know him well enough to notice these things, and that the more I get to know him, the more things I'll notice.

For instance, we got a couple Bradley books in the mail the other day (Dr. Bradley's book and the other one with pictures). My gift is sorting, his is processing--he gets overwhelmed by the flow of data, I get impatient with thinking too hard on it. We should open a library. I've sorted through all the kinds of childbirth, methods of natural childbirth, options, options, options, checking up with him periodically summarizing my findings. Now that, for the most part, the leg-work of sorting is over, it's time to process, so I stuck the Bradley book in front of him, as he says encouragingly, "I'm on board, honey!"

Then he starts reading the book. I can see the tortured expression creep up on his face as pages and more pages are turned. At first I worried that he was getting overwhelmed with the whole birthing thing, so later in the car, I started to ask some probing questions to figure out what he was thinking. As I sorted through all the little things he was saying about this or that, I realized the reason for his tortured expression and concluded thus to him, "You're the type of person that when somebody says they've found the Way to do it, your response to not get on board." It's so true!! It's actually somewhat true, for me, too, though not exhibited quite as strongly as him sometimes. We're both afraid of looking like we've subscribed to the party line. Ha! How puerile. (To our credit, though, it's always good to be suspicious of people who say their way is the only, right way, because there's only One who can say that. So part of our motivation for this attitude is healthy skepticism and intellectual honesty.)

Anyway. He most assuredly is "on board" and has proved it by giving me a backrub every night since we got the book. Why didn't we get it sooner!? And we're proceeding in our preparations all the while trying to maintain an aura of nonchalance and nonsubscription.

The other great thing that has manifested his personality this week is his devotion to excellence in his technological pursuits. He's taking a couple of education classes towards his masters/certification this sem, and one of the assignments is to make a video of people talking about diversity. Pretty straightforward, huh? How would you do it? I would get a video camera, tape people talking for 45 min, and turn it in. How does he do it? He takes a lot of footage, downloads it into his open source video-editing software (which he installed just for this purpose) edits it, inserts title, credits, and inter-titles, and burns it onto a DVD. It looks pretty good. It's taken him days to do it. I asked him why he was going to all this bother. Well, he has been wanting to learn video-editing for some time now. It is a good opportunity. I hope the prof is completely blown away by how cool this is!

Another nice thing about him is that he shares thing. He shared a cold with me this week, only I can't take all the Sudafed stuff that made him feel better. Thanks a lot! *sniffle, sneeze*

One of my favorite children's authors is Arnold Lobel, author of the famous Frog and Toad books. In Frog and Toad All Year, Frog comes to Toad's house one wintry morning with the exciting prospect of going sledding. Lying in his warm, cozy bed, Toad's unenthusiastic response is, "Blah." When I was a kid I thought that was hilarious. And "Blah", just the way Toad would say it, is often a fall-back gutteral response. I feel "Blah" this morning.

I had a bad dream last night. One of those crazy, larger-than-life pregnancy dreams. Every once in awhile they are so vivid that I have to force myself to wake up so that I can work throught the fact that it was just a dream, so that when I go back to sleep it won't bother me anymore. The last time I had a dream so vivid it was a high action dream. These bad guys had taken this weather balloon (?) from this boarding school and were going to blow up the world with it. Somehow, I had boarded the balloon with them, and was going to stop them; I woke up wondering how we were going to breathe when we got to outer space.

Last night I dreamt that I had lost Ellis. We had had a baby, and so had another couple, who were also at our house. But we ended up sharing one baby, and I was kind of sad, because it was rather awkward sharing a baby, and then they were going to take her with them when they left. I was walking across campus in the rain to return a library book, and all of a sudden it dawned on me, if there are two couples, there should be two babies, so where was Ellis!? I woke up as I was crying in my dream and asking Chris, "Where is Ellis?" It was weird.

I stayed up for an hour in the middle of the night, because I was afraid that I went back to sleep, the dream would start again. I was also getting congested. Go figure, it's my turn to get what's been going around. Chris's congestion was bothering his ear, so we ended both getting up for awhile. We both feel "blah" this morning. I'm so glad that I don't have to go anywhere.

Yesterday, we let ourselves relax a bit, and our bodies have responded by crashing. I need another week of break. We did have a nice time yesterday, though. We ran errands together. Why does that seem fun? It is. We sat on the couch and read together (the birthin' books arrived in the mail!). And we went to our favorite Mexican restaurant on Magazine Street together. It is just nice to be together.

It is starting to get very warm. I want to go swimming. It's lovely.

In the reading category: I haven't read 10-15 books like I hoped. I knew I wasn't being reasonable. But I've read a couple of excellent, interesting books on the origins and meaning of courtly love/courtliness that are extremely helpful when considering literature (and songs!) of the later Middle Ages.

We're really enjoying our break. Even though I may not be fulfilling all my lofty ambitions of production, I am getting good work and reading done, and I'm enjoying it. So that's good enough for me.

The weather forecast has threatened rain all week, but each day leaves the threat unfulfilled in a bath of warm sunshine. On Monday, I thought to myself that it would surely be the only sunny day, so I quick got a bunch of stuff planted on the porch. Yesterday morning dark clouds loomed, so I thought that I should hurry and get my errands done before it rained. But they soon dissipated into nothing.

While I was they were still looming, I wanted to get one stop out of the way definitely before the downpour: the pretty tiny, most of the time not worth it Farmer's Market. I was rewarded for my efforts this time, though. I got a whole tray of strawberries for a fraction of the price they are in the grocery store. Woohoo! So we're totally piggin' out on strawberries at our house. We've had strawberries and waffles for breakfast these two mornings. (Don't get all impressed, now. Frozen waffles were on sale.) And I have designs for a strawberry pie later today. And strawberries on ice cream. And a strawberry 'bout every time I walk into the kitchen. Yum-my!

So in case you're wondering why my belly is getting so big. You can blame the strawberries. Just kidding. There's a baby in there. Here we are at 24 weeks. I haven't taken so many since the last one. Mostly because...well, I'm the photographer in our family. Let's just leave it at that. And I'm not as skilled some people in taking her own belly pics. The last time we tried to take a pic, I ended up so grumpy looking that it kind of didn't seem worth it. Now, though, I'm kind of laughing about it! ha!! Chris wouldn't get off the couch to take the picture, so my 21 week picture is me at funny up angle very grumpy. We're actually sort of shopping for a new camera. We're not sure we really can afford it, but if we can eventually, we have some ideas about what we want to get. Maybe Chris will get more into picture taking then.

This week Chris and I are on Spring Break. Since our breaks are tied to the religious calendar (Easter), I'm off at both universities I'm affiliated with. Blessings!!! We have fairly staggered into our break. It couldn't have come soon enough. Last week, I was home Wednesday and Chris on Thursday, for exhaustion/sickness.

I have a long list of things I want to get done over the break. Hopefully, I manage a fraction of them. They're mostly reading/papers/grading oriented. Drudgery. But I'll be glad to have some of them behind me. I usually skim books. In grad school there's no time to actually read a whole book. I hope to get through about 10-15 books this week in my skim method. But I'm reading one book carefully to get me started off on the right foot for my dissertation. I'm so glad that even though I'm griping and hating all the other stuff I have to do that I get totally excited and into the books that I read for my own work. It's kind of reassuring.

Sometimes I feel like I'm hating everything all the time, and I start to wonder if I should still be pursuing musicology. But I have to think long-term. I'll be glad when I'm 50 that I finished my PhD when was 30. Hey, I'll just be glad when I will have finished it. It's hard to think about life after that right now when there are so many more immediate pressing questions. But I know I'll be glad to write the diss. There's a lot of unfinished skills and information that I want to learn and to get out of my grad school experience, that I know writing the diss will help me acquire. It will be my finishing. I just need to persevere and get through some of the not-so-fun parts of coursework at the moment.

So anyway. That's one thing my brain is mulling around this week. I'm also thinking about the birthing stuff. I had hoped Barnes & Noble would have a shelf of birthing books, so that I could peruse, but nope. If they reduced the books on choosing a kid's name by half and supplemented that with birthin' books, they would have a start to a good collection. They had a couple I flipped through...more inspiring than actually containing helpful information. Got a couple of good ones on their way from Amazon thanks to my Mom2 aka Doula.

Last Saturday I went to a kid's clothing sale with my friend. I got a few more things for Elvis. I now have about 2-3 outfits for every growth stage up to 24 months. And I found the cutest little infant sandals for less than a dollar, so I was pretty excited.

So books and birthing are on my plate. And to make the week pretty, I bought a few annuals at Home Depot. We need some color around here, and by the time we move, it'll be too hot for them to live much longer anyway. They make life so much more pleasant. I'm going to plant them up this afternoon. I also bought a strawberry pot, and one of my friends is going to give me a couple of offshoots from her patch. Yay!

Also on the plate this week is a tune-up for my car. I need new brake pads and the air conditioner needs a little work before it gets too hot. Every once in a while Ol' Faithful needs a little massage.

Chris and I are definitely glad we have a week home together. These past couple of months have been the busiest ever in our life here; just non-stop. So it'll be nice to have a few moments to actually see eachother. Maybe we'll go canoeing one afternoon in the bayou.

Maybe I'll get time to blog a bit more, too. We'll see...

We also received a nice card and toy from the Curly-Headed Girls. The picture is of Chris and me and the new baby. I just love it!
(I'm also having fun with my new scanner and image-editing software that Chris acquired for me.)

Quick! One week left!! Get your "Lent Special" from the local Wing Zone!