• Riding the gondolas up to hike above Snowmass Village and Aspen
• Watching a bluegrass band perform at over 10,000 feet
• Fly fishing the Roaring Fork river and having a nice rainbow trout on the line before it twisted away from the net
• Introducing Grey to his first goats and cows at the Snowmass Rodeo
• Helping a couple and their dog after they slid off the road at Independence Pass and totaled their car*
• Eating on the deck of our rented home in Estes Park, looking out at Rocky Mountain NP
• Hiking up to Lake Haiyaha past Bear Lake, Nymph Lake, and Dream Lake at RMNP
• Seeing a moose alongside the trail at RMNP and a pair of elk with huge racks outside our home in Estes Park

Overall it was a wonderful trip and Grey is proving to be a very patient and resilient hiker. He loves the outdoors, although he’d prefer walking on his own two feet than riding in the backpack. Soon, little buddy, soon!

* – We drove from Aspen to Estes Park via Independence Pass and the weather got worse and worse as we climbed. It began raining hard at the top of the pass and the rain turned to hail and ice. My father-in-law was driving about 15 mph, slower around curves. A car passed us going about 25 or 30 and we commented on how it was way too fast for conditions. We were still talking about it when we rounded the next corner and saw tire tracks veer across the center line and disappear into the ravine.

While certainly not a highlight of the trip, it will be something we will all remember for the rest of our lives. Although I do try to drive responsibly in inclement weather, this accident served as a sickening reminder of how little it takes to lose control of the vehicle. It’s also nothing short of an engineering miracle that the couple not only survived the crash—they had to be going at least 30 mph and plummeted about 30 feet down the ravine, undoubtedly getting airborne in the process–but they walked away. They looked to be in their mid-70′s, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that they’ll live to tell about it.

Current Mood: Kinda sad to be home |

Speaking of Brother Todd he (foolishly) invited me to take part in a “Last Man Standing” competition, where players all kick in some currency and get to pick one team who is certain to win over the weekend in the Barclay’s Premier League. The catch is that you can only take each team once, and they have to win—a draw is as good as a loss.

Out of a field of 23 players from various countries, two players remain—me and Larry, one of Todd’s friends from high school who now lives in Wales. Unlikely draws and losses for Ars*nal, Man Citeh, and Spurs in the last few weeks thinned the field considerably, topped off by Liverpool’s draw yesterday with Birmingham to put me and Larry head-to-head. I stand to win (or lose) about $115 US, but we’re idle this weekend for the international break. Can’t you just feel the tension?!?!

Over the next two classes in my creative writing class my students will be reading short shorts by Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Ben Marcus. I am more than interested to hear what they have to say. A good number of them appear to appreciate complicated, confusing, and somewhat perplexing stories, but there is also a contingent that seem to feel if a story doesn’t have a pronounced linear plot that features rising action, climax, and denouement, then the story is deficient.

I teach intro to creative writing again in the spring semester and will be changing things around, but not a ton. Conversations about modernism versus postmodernism seemed to help adjust reader expectations somewhat, so that if a piece of creative nonfiction or a short story appears to be devoid of a fixed “meaning” that it doesn’t automatically mean the author sucks. I plan on building this more deliberately into the syllabus next semester since a surprising number of essays and stories in the course textbook definitely bear some hallmarks of postmodernism.

Have to stop here and start working, unfortunately. A lot of stuff on my mind that seems blog worthy, but it’ll have to wait.

Current Mood: Pretty Good |

Also, I found out that you get charged $15 for checking even one bag nowadays, which therefore encourages more travelers to bring their carry-on sized suitcases through security. I find it odd that no one cared about the gel-filled pouch we heat up in the microwave to warm baby bottles, because it seems like that could be filled with a variety of liquid substances that are banned from carry-ons… but what do I know? Anyway, I opted instead to bring my bag to the gate, where they had a mandatory policy to check it, which was fine because I wasn’t planning on bringing it with me in the plane to begin with. But of course they’re not set up for thirty people needing to check and retrieve their baggage at the gate, which in turn leads to bottle necks, and the oh-so-important doorknob salesmen who simply must call everyone in their cell phone’s contacts at the moment the plane touches down, and therefore become just as (if not more so) clueless and clumsy as the family of fifteen traveling on an airplane for the first time. Fun? Oh no. Not so much at all.

Overall, the trip has been lovely although school and teaching obligations have hamstrung me quite a bit. Normally I’m on full-time baby duty Thursdays and Fridays and get very little done anyway, but I would still say I’m running behind the curve on my own schoolwork this semester. So it goes.

The weather has been nice, about thirty degree warmer than Wisconsin and far sunnier, and the g’parents have been vital in making sure the baby Grey gets all the attention one could hope and dream for. Savannah’s a lovely little city made for strolling and, more to the point, strollering.

We return tomorrow to cold, rain, and work. Not looking forward to the grind, that’s for sure.

Current Mood: Pooped |

I’ve arranged it so I have student conferences for two days straight when I get back. We can cancel classes at our discretion as long as we meet with every student, either individually or in small groups, as part of conferences. My first semester teaching I kind of dreaded conferences because students tended to treat them as interrogations, but now I like them a lot more and find them quite useful. My first round of conferences was sort of a “How do you think you’re doing?” kind of meeting, which I didn’t find useful. Now I try to give the conferences more structure, as in “We’re going to talk about X,” and students tend to come more prepared. There are also a couple of students stuck in neutral that need some prodding, and this is a decent time to do that as well.

As far as my own studies, it’s very much catch as catch can at this stage. I’m fooling around with design work and, while I like it quite a bit, a find myself only producing semi-satisfactory results—which is probably because I’m not a designer. I finally broke down and bought Adobe CS4 Design Suite Premium, which sells to students for an insanely low $315. This will allow me to hack around in programs I have worked with a little bit (Dreamweaver, Illustrator), give me access to programs I’ve never used but want to learn more about (Flash, Fireworks and InDesign) and update my very old version of Photoshop. Like with most things, having the right tools helps tremendously and though I wasn’t keen on dropping $300, having these tools on-hand should allow me to gain some level of comfort with them that I never would achieve trying to use them in the campus computer lab.

I find this situation interesting in terms of some of the research that I’ve been doing regarding computers and pedagogy. Overwhelmingly, easy access to computers and specific software translates into being comfortable and proficient in teaching oneself new things; in other words, students who have computers in the home are likely to be more comfortable using them than students who only use computers in school settings. Upon reflection, this should seem fairly obvious. But what’s disturbing is how a) these skills make students much more competitive when looking for jobs, and b) students who have up-to-date hardware and software on their home computers tend to be white and upper-to-middle class, not to mention that fooling around on the computer is still predominantly a “guy” thing (though I think this is rapidly changing).

So once again, students who are already at a disadvantage from not having easy access to computing resources (and thus are less likely to feel comfortable self-teaching and experimenting on computers) are also likely to be working from a disadvantage in terms of socioeconomic standing, which in turn strongly correlates to race. Just something to mull over as I, a white guy, drop a good wad of cash on software that hopefully will help me get a job down the line…

Current Mood: Sure |

Unfortunately it looks like I’ll be working over the long weekend too. I have to read the essay I’ve assigned to my research class so I can come up with some decent questions for them to answer, and I’ve got to read the section of the poetry chapter we’re reading for my creative writing class for basically the same reason. This is why teaching two new classes is a little like taking two new classes. It’s too early to tell how these classes will be (students tend to be uptight for the first couple weeks) but no red flags yet. Some of the CW students seem really enthused, which is awesome, and it turns out that 6 of the 24 students in my research class had me for 101, so I already know a quarter of the class. Which means I can pick on them to get conversations started.

The classes I’m taking are still a little up in the air too. One is entitled Rhetoric, Writing, & Info Technology and the professor (who I had last semester) is still building the syllabus and assignments, largely around the interests of the group. While there’s a theory component to this course, a good deal of it is also “building stuff” to use the professor’s own language. I hope to learn more about CSS and PHP (there are still things with this site that I’m not thrilled about so I may do another overhaul in the future) but we’ll have to see what direction the course takes us.

For my independent study, it’s largely up to me. The course is about information design so I’m reading a book this week on design principles, and I plan to find some crummy ads and redesign them. I’ve got the whole semester’s reading planned out, but not what I’m going to produce for “assignments.”

So the motto for this semester overall: make it up as you go along.

Current Mood: Good |

I’m using my dad’s free Xbox Live account he got when he purchased the console, and I’d been helping him and Amy through the beginning missions of GTA 4. Now it’s turned into a fight, where all of us take turns slowly walking past the den doorway, seeing if the Xbox is free. Amy’s a seasoned GTA player having beat Vice City back on the PlayStation 2, but my pop is having… let’s call them “challenges” with some of the basics—primarily walking and driving, but let’s not get into aiming the gun or running from the cops.

I’ve done a little reading, getting about 50 pages deep into Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and another 50 pages into Magic Realism: The Remystification of Narrative. Compared to running over a complete stranger with a bus or nuking them with a rocket launcher, reading feels like work.

More importantly I’ve been figuring out my teaching plan for the upcoming semester. I’m planning on using Jeffrey Ford’s excellent short story “The Honeyed Knot” as part of the curriculum. Last semester, students read “What You Know” by Peter Ho Davies, which is also a semi-autobiographical work of fiction whose protagonist is a writing instructor, and both deal with the mysterious process of writing. I need to rewrite the lessons (students who failed 101 in the fall generally take it again in the spring and therefore need new materials) but I think students will find that Ford’s story holds up under multiple rereads, as that’s what this part of the assignment sequence is after.

We head back over the weekend. Not looking forward to resuming our regular programming.

Current Mood: Vacation! |

The highlights of the year were undoubtedly our trips to Spain (here) and Costa Rica (pictures forthcoming). We hadn’t planned for two international trips in one year, but our Costa Rica trip got pushed back a year due to tight finances and our Spain trip was celebrating Amy’s graduation from grad school, so it just kind of happened that way. No big trips for 2009 planned.

All in all, an absolutely lousy year for writing. My one and only sale happened in January and was for a reprint. I had a measly twenty-six submissions on the year—that’s twenty-six, my lowest output since 2004, the year I really started writing—and a lot of those were older stories that were circulating through my top markets. Compare that with the previous two years (51 subs and 39 subs, respectively) and it’s no wonder I haven’t sold anything recently.

On the brighter side, I did see my story “The Hodag” published in Black Static #7 and “Of Silver Bullets and Golden Teeth” in The Beast Within, an anthology by Graveside Press. I also received an Honorable Mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror for my story “Black Jack Davy,” and I was also mentioned in Ellen Datlow’s introduction to the book. So those things buoy me somewhat. But now that my coursework is winding down, I hope (hope, hope) to regain some time for writing.

My books read list was 54 this year, down from 64 in 2007. The highlight in this area was being introduced to the work of Louise Erdrich, as I read seven of her books in 2008. I also read seven books by Cormac McCarthy, but I still count Blood Meridian (which I reread) as being head and shoulders above the rest. Other high points include Wild Indians and Other Creatures by Adrian Louis, Fools Crow by James Welch, The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus, The Journalist by Harry Matthews, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, and Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

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2008 was an indifferent year for the teams I support. Tottenham won the League Cup but had an abysmal league season and, for the season currently underway, hover just above the drop zone. Also, Dish Network dropped GolTV, depriving me of watching the Spanish league and I find it much harder to keep focused on it now that I can’t see the action on a weekly basis. No doubt about it though, the highpoint of the soccer year was watching Spain slice apart the competition in Euro 2008. It’s so very rare that my absolute favorite teams accomplish anything, so it was a great joy to see Spain finally get their just rewards on the international stage.

Let’s not even talk about football. The Packers went from being a few plays away from the Super Bowl to being 6-10 under dolts Mike McCarthy and Ted Thompson. Letting Favre go was probably the right move, but they couldn’t have handled it much worse. The Badgers were truly awful this year and it’s remarkable they started the year so highly rated.

I took some very good classes in 2008 and I like to think I did some good work. Over this year I got a good grip on two major areas of study—Global postmodern fiction focusing on magical realism, the surreal, and the fantastic, and Native American lit—and plan on fleshing out the third (something to do with the aesthetics of texts and visual narratives) in 2009. Best of all, I got a teaching position and survived my first semester of English 101, which means (in theory) I have a lot of teaching options open in the next couple years.

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And of course, I can’t talk about 2008 without mentioning the passing of our kitty Heineken. It still tears me up to write about it and we miss him terribly. His death cast a pall over the entire year as it always seemed like something was missing as we transitioned from season to season, and the house still feels a little empty without him. Rabbits have taken up residence in his garden, and we need him now more than ever. We love you Heiner.

His sister Athena turns five in February and is just as goofy and crazy as ever. Nothing to report with her, except that she made a fantastic haul this Christmas, receiving an unprecedented number of toys. Good work Bean, you deserve it!

To whoever reads this space, thanks very much! Blog hits rose again in 2008 (probably because of the four-year archive I’ve built up) which is a nice thing. Hopefully the trend will continue in 2009. See you all on the other side!

Current Mood: Singing Auld Lang Syne |

I also can’t believe what I’ll call “the Chelski effect” that has bloated the price of transfers. £30 million for Adebayor? At that rate, £17 million for a player like Barry seems like a steal. That’s also in the neighborhood of Luca Modric, Spurs’ biggest signing to date, and I would take those two over one Adebayor any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

The rumor I like the most is David Villa to Liverpool to reunite with Fernando Torres, although that’s never going to happen. If by some chance it does, then suddenly I’m much bigger Liverpool fan.

I have to say Riders of the Purple Sage is pretty good, especially on audio. There’s ample opportunity to zone out for a minute or so only to come back and realize you haven’t missed anything plot-wise. And this is much more what I expected from a Western, what with the murderin’, and rustlin’, and stampedin’, and seekin’ of vengeance. It’s not the best book in the world, but it’s pretty entertaining.

But very few books can hold a candle to Blood Meridian, which I am rereading and have decided goes into my “All-Time Favorite” book list. I was switching off between this and The Orchard Keeper, which I haven’t read previously, but I’ve been reading way more of Blood Meridian because it’s just so undeniably awesome. Check out this sentence when the Americans filibustering in Mexico stumble across an Indian war party:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or bilblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bulls or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
Oh my god, said the sergeant.

Things don’t go well from here…

Current Mood: Good |

No more pictures after this, and believe me, I’m just as relieved as you are. Look and comment if it pleases you.

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