again, many good intentions of posting have been long postponed (pun most certainly intended, why do you ask?) by excessive business and stress bordering on insanity. which almost caused me to burst out crying in my office. just the once. and i just ended up blushing a lot. so it's ok. this is a grouchy post; i'm actually doing a fair amount better than it's about to sound.

thought number 1: advanced degrees area sick form of academic hazing.
seriously, what i'm doing right now with my teaching is something that i'd need a certain amount more practice and my PhD to do at middlebury. like... i feel like if i did nothing but teach undergrad language courses for the next 3 or 4 years, i'd be plenty qualified to join the forces imparting the german language to the best, brightest, and wealthiest. right? especially in the humanities, this whole Research Contributing to the Knowledge of the Discipline is a bunch of bullshit. blowing hot air at one another at conferences is not what I want to go into academia for; i like writing papers because i like talking about books. academics should teach, and they should talk about books. and the only reason you have to have a PhD to get a professorship in the humanities, and the only reason you have to keep doing research and publishing and shit for fear of not getting tenured, is because the old fogies making the decisions about whether you get or keep a job had to do all these things themselves. overgrown frat boys, the lot of them. (boy, i'm a bad grad student...)

thought number 2: teaching, especially beginning language, is rather like parenting. i gave the first chapter test in my german class today, and graded it (in front of juno, ahem) when i got home, and even though i know my students worked hard and studied for this test, i take an inordinate amount of pride in their ability to produce simple sentences. one of them wrote a complex sentence (i'm from dublin, but i now live in columbus) on one of her homework assignments... i could have hugged her. it's possible that i'll want to kill all 23 of them in their sleep by the end of the quarter, but... at least for now, i almost always come out of teaching my class with such a HIGH of creativity and excitement and brainstorming. lesson planning is a bitch and i don't want to talk about it. and the communicative method, while useful and among the less-flawed language teaching methods to which i have borne witness, can suck my metaphorical dick. but the actual standing in front of a classroom and teaching produces euphoria. and absurd pride.

thought number 3: creepy asshole, a week later. i was going to not preserve this incident for posterity by posting it, but over a week later, it's still bothering me. hannah and i were walking home from classes last week and were holding hands - we were right by the kroger, almost home. and this guy slows down his car as he drives by (going the same direction we were, but we were on the other side of the street) and rolls down the window and starts talking to us. and i slow down and kind of lean in to try and listen to him, because i thought he was asking for directions or something. and he's waving a cell phone and a wad of cash out the window going "if you guys are over 21, i'm looking for a good time..." and i got SO VERY UPSET. rarrgh. i looked away, but he kept repeating himself, so i flipped him off. this was a bad idea. a couple weeks ago, a woman who was aggressive right back at a group of men being aggressive at her not too far from our neighborhood was shot. not killed, but still. i flipped him off, and he shouted at me and drove away. and then i was in a vile mood for the rest of the day.
seriously, that was entirely unnecessary and objectifying and undignified and disrespectful. i bet he's anti-gay marriage, too... guess people like that just don't want us to have an excuse to be monogamous. i guess i should get used to at least some amount of harassment as a young woman, as someone who likes to hold her fiancée's hand in public, whatever. but really, did the bastard think we'd see the stack of money and be like OH OK WE'LL GO HAVE SEX WITH YOU??? with a total stranger? i doubt he thought that - more likely, he knew he could make us uncomfortable by doing what he did. it was a power thing. and it worked, and that makes me even madder. i hate living in a city. i hate not living in vermont. halp.

thought number 4: best yiddish expression experienced so far. it translates as "noah with seven mistakes" - because the hebrew spelling of the name noah has only two letters, this is a way of saying YOUR IDEA IS THE WORST IDEA EVER because it's only two letters long and still it has 7 mistakes in it. my yiddish professor is, as advertised, the least linear human i have ever encountered. and he very much likes having a captive audience who must listen to his stories about drinking beer with the communist police in east Germany, funny t-shirts he's seen in Israel, and 1920s jewish cabaret for two hours wishing he would go back to the damn grammar lesson. but "noah with 7 mistakes"? a real gem.

fact. my xenians are getting here tomorrow. i cannot wait.
fact. my fiancée is still doing homework downstairs and i'm half asleep up here waiting for her to come watch grey's anatomy with me.
fact. i made chili and cornbread for dinner and now my guts are grumbly.

i've officially just lived through my first week of classes as a grad student. and i had a really good productivity mojo today, and i felt like a GERMANIST. that's right, bitches.

my classes:
~german 840 - teaching college german
this one has already been kicked like the proverbial dead horse, because it started out as the two-week seminar boot campy thing on how to teach foreign languages before the start of classes. the good part of it is that so far since the start of classes, we've done fairly practical stuff like practicing grading chapter tests. the bad part is that my professor's computer crashed recently, the upshot of which is that we still don't have a syllabus, so i have no idea what papers or projects or whatever i'll have for the class, though i've been assured that they will exist, whatever they are. the other bad part is that it meets 3 hours at a gap at the end of thursdays, which are my Very Long Days anyway (office hours, teaching, yiddish, methods, then teaching seminar), and i am generally very comatose by that point in time. anyway.
~german 702 - methods for literary analysis
eew. not to be confused with literary theory, which i have to take next quarter, either. it's not a bad class - the professor is really funny, and so far i've felt able to participate fairly intelligently. i'm also still not quite sure exactly what the topic of the class is; i've heard it described as "introduction to The Profession", being some sort of combination of literature survey without the actual literature, research methods and bibliographies, mini-forays into various fields of german studies, grad school to job market... yeah. it's a bit of a hodge-podge, but it's an acceptable hodge-podge.
~yiddish 670 - yiddish for speakers of german
yiddish is pretty great, i must say. being already familiar with the hebrew alphabet has its benefits, as in, i can already read pretty long chunks of text and make more or less sense of them. the vowel system in hebrew, which is what i'm used to, is really different from the notation in yiddish, which has thrown me for a bit of a loop, but i'm sure it'll get easier, the longer i'm exposed to yiddish. the professor is the least linear person i've ever interacted with... saying that he goes off on a lot of tangents doesn't even cover it, because saying that there are 'tangents' implies that there's a primary thread of linear thought, which there most emphatically isn't. the class is at lunchtime, which is fine - i bring food, i occasionally repeat sounds with my mouth full, no harm, no foul. well, not for me, anyway. the only complaint about the class is this over-bese-ish jewish woman in the class who knows hebrew but no german (um hi? yiddish for german speakers?), but reads the alphabet a lot faster than the rest of us, and feels the need to jump in and be a know-it-all every couple of seconds, even though she doesn't know german and misses most of what the professor says. also, she's in her 60's, balding, and wears what hair she has in pigtails. and grosses me out. /rant.
~german 742 - development of german poetry
for a class that i'm officially auditing, this one is the culprit of the greatest volume of homework. like... a good 200+ pages of theoretical reading per week, plus a good chunk of poems to analyze, plus oh-hey-i-know-you're-auditing-but-i-think-you-should-still-do-the-response-papers-too. also, lots of religious baroque poetry that i find not especially stimulating. blah. the professor is *way* intense - so much so that she wants to go by her first name among students, but behind her back, people refer to her as professor mergenthaler. yeah.

so the other thing is, i'm teaching german. which is really exciting and fun, but is a million work - i average 3 hours of planning and preparation for every hour i spend teaching. sometimes - like when i give a short quiz that i announced 3 days in advance, and then more than half the class fails it - i get really frustrated with my class. but most of the time they are my baby deutschies and i love them. and i get really excited when they do something right or ask me smart questions or send me emails with german youtube videos. or call me professor gordon. ego trip, much?
i want to post more about my teaching, but for now, movie and tea and cuddelz call, and i was born to answer that call :p

i taught my first class today! so that was exciting.

...i'm in grad school. it's pretty weird, actually. i haven't processed it well enough to post about it properly.

further updates as events warrant.

i should clarify from yesterday - the way that our workshop is structured is that we get to teach practice mini-lessons to new TAs from other departments, and then we get feedback on the structure of the lesson, how we practiced certain structures or designed certain activities, etc. so i've been teaching german lessons to speakers of spanish, russian, french, arabic, japanese, etc., and have been on the receiving end of their lessons. the only beginning language i'm doing this quarter is yiddish for speakers of german (yay!) - though japanese, chinese, and arabic have been really interesting, and i wish i had time to take them here (or had taken them at midd).

recent lack of posts attributed to wibbly exhausted brainz. fact.

two days left of TA orientation. on the one hand, two weeks feels longer than YOUR MOM with full days on campus and then work that follows you home. on the other hand, i still feel very overwhelmed thinking about all the material i need to cover, the expertise my students may expect of me, and the many strange or bad or unusual or confusing circumstances that may arise. i start teaching, as in my own classroom five days a week with 25 of my very own guinea pigs students to torture teach german, a week from today. this is very exciting and mildly terrifying.

also, the communicative method, which i swear each and every one of these professors would take into his or her conjugal bed, were it concrete and not a pedagogical theory, has aspects i like and aspects i dislike. planning down to the minutiae of communicative lessons is very frustrating. if nothing else, these practice micro-teaching lessons have given me empathy with how overloaded, childish, and paralyzed it can feel to be a student in a beginning language classroom.
on a related note, quality of instruction notwithstanding, the only good thing i can say about russian is that it instills in me a good healthy fear of being called on. seriously, hearing my name called by a russian teacher makes me want to puke in my shoes. i am RETARDED at russian. just in case i felt like getting cocky about being a good language student. i'm none too bad shakes at japanese or arabic, though, so that's good.

no major complaints about department-mates or boss. boss reminds me of my mother in her ubiquitous need to relate her own experience at every turn, rendering any given conversation about three times longer than it necessarily had to be. a berliner-turk, an italian, and two americans are given instructors' editions of deutsch na klar and told to go forth. sounds like a bad bar joke...

my next-door neighbor from home went to the university of michigan and is a huge fan, and by association is a big hater of osu, since the two are major football rivals. i could care less about the actual football, but the floods of red and grey-clad, not-especially-sober pedestrians flooding up and down high street by noon the day of an 8pm football game has been known to stir even my limited school spirit to produce a feeble I-O! while driving. (i got O-H!'ed at in the car on saturday. heeee.) anyway, said neighbor sent me a t-shirt that says GEH BLAU!! on it (go blue! in german - go blue is the michigan cheer, apparently. a color isn't a terribly tough mascot, but then, neither is a nut...)

...man, though. i really sucked at russian.

1. this being the fifth day of being home while hannah's at orientation, and thus of my spending way more time on the tubes than necessary, i have come to conclusion that that the president of the united states is only the *second* most powerful human being in the whole wide world, after the new york times restaurant critic. seriously, the man has the power to smite a business over an over-cooked steak or a drafty table. think about that. 's all i'm sayin'.

2. julie powell, writer of the julie/julia blog with which i am obsessed and nearly finished, compares the italian vs. french philosophies of cooking as follows: the italians take good ingredients and treat them with respect. raw cleaned anchovies on a plate with lemon juice and olive oil. tomatoes, salt, and fresh basil on good crusty bread. i would argue that most mediterranean cuisines (middle eastern, north african, greek) fall into this school of thought. the french, on the other hand, take generally very humble ingredients - cuts of meat tough with connective tissue, organ meat, root vegetables - and give them lots of cooking time, loving care, and butter, until they become delicious. having attempted cooking of both origins, i find this to be correct. and it makes me analyze other schools of thought with respect to cooking; many other cultures that produce food with which i am obsessed. guesses welcome.
A. take ingredients we've been holding onto for i-know-not-how-long, add chili peppers until you can't tell your meat was spoiled.
B. it is absolutely crucial that your dish contain all food groups, plus lots of salt. it should also, when possible, be cute.
C. everything is better if you fry it. better if it's big.
i think my personal food philosophy is this: there are no foods out there that cannot be improved either by garlic or by chocolate; some can even go either way.

3. my quiche last night was a thing of glory. homemade crust, grated swiss cheese (which is generally not my favorite cheese, but it's the only way to go with quiche), caramelized onions, broccoli, perfect fluffy custard. it was like... pretty. and tasty. and not that hard. and it gave me confidence that i could cook for... like... real people! company! i'm a real person that may, some day, have company! ...ahaha.

i'd just like to point out that ben and jerry's, in support of gay marriage becoming legal in vermont as of this month, changed the name of their ice cream flavor "chubby hubby" to "hubby hubby". this fills me with glee.

vacuuming happened today. so that was good. vacuuming the stairs is a bitch, because the hose on the vacuum isn't long enough to reach all the way up the stairs, so i have to do the top half of them in constant fear that the thing's going to come plummeting down on top of me. alas. also, i ran out of febreeze, but then i went and got another scent that is much less febreeze-smelling and leaves the sprayed object smelling clean, not sprayed. so that was good, too.

pursuant to our neighborhood being the kroghetto, out of curiosity this afternoon (not as a product of too much law and order: svu... why do you ask?), i looked up the sex offender registry for columbus, and there are two registered sex offenders living on our block - one registered for "improper sexual contact with a minor", and one for "rape charges". i'm not sure how i feel about this... because "improper sexual contact with a minor" could be a 19-year-old who was sleeping with his 17-year-old girlfriend, which is idiotic but not super scary, or it could be a child molester... and the rape charges could be ex-girlfriend revenge sort of charges, or real rape charges. i do not know. i just keep my door locked.

also, lots and lots of sirens over the course of today. more than usual. bleh.

having already purchased most of my books (and oh hey, i'm registered for twice as many credit hours as i'm supposed to be taking... that never happens...), and with hannah in school, it is unbelievable to me - unglaubable, if you will - that school doesn't start for another two and a half weeks. workshop will give me some structure and something to DO, which will be nice even if it's moderately stressful. now i just need to get my hands on my yiddish books, and all will be right with the world.

so Favorite Girl has started her orientation, leaving me a bachelor for the better part of any given day this week, and let me tell you, i'm in fine form.

first of all, the dreams of late have been *bizarre*. my high school german teacher, an impossibly realistic video game, pigeons, egyptian gods, hannah forgetting to wear shoes on her first day of school, alison's pet duck, sun-hee choi teaching macro economics at midd, and other such unlikely characters fill my non-waking hours.

and then there's the general lack of restraint. i just caved and went downstairs to fetch three malted milk balls. what i really want is a big bowl of cocoa puffs; the only thing holding me back is that we don't have any in the pantry, and i refuse to go to kroger to buy some, first of all because i find myself doubting that they'd have any, and second of all because yesterday for the first time i heard our neighborhood described as the "kro-ghetto", which is both too painful and too accurate in its depiction to even bear further contemplation.

there's also the extreme and increasing jumpiness and paranoia. despite today's being the last cool-ish day for a spell, according to the interwebs which are always right, i cannot bring myself to keep the front door open and the screen door locked, despite its being one of three screened portals to the outdoors in the whole house - the rest of the doors and windows either lack a screen or have storm windows over them that are stuck closed. because every bump, vroom, scratch, or other noise i hear from the little alley next to the house or from the street outside, day or night but especially when i'm alone in the house, sounds to me like some very burly neighborhood punk come to relieve us of our tv, laptops, and my virtue.

...fine form, as i said.

other than that, i've been very busy watching streaming movies on netflix, crocheting, developing my new-found love for goo gone and comet, getting the bureaucratic run-around from my department and from osu at large, cooking, house-cleaning obsessively, and accomplishing a number of other equally useful tasks. speaking of which, i think i'll watch some law and order svu now...

last night's party was fun. yes.

but first, a tale of woe about my sunday morning.
so i get up. i shower. i get dressed, i snuggle hannah for a little while, she hardly notices i'm there, yadda yadda yadda: regular morning routine. go downstairs, heat up water for tea, open all the blinds, realize it's sunny and nice and cool outside, open all the windows, putter around the kitchen, make tea. so i'm upstairs reading blogs and drinking tea and generally wasting time, because hannah starts her TA orientation tomorrow which means we're both going to be getting up early for the rest of forever and so i haven't the heart to bother her and wake her up so i can eat breakfast. and i'm like you know what, i think i'll get started on that laundry.
i'll start with the darks, because hannah's pajamas are light, and she'll want to put them in the wash when she gets up. i need to wash bath towels this week. bath towels are dark. go into the bathroom, balance laundry basket on sink (we have no bathroom counter) while fetching towels. basket falls; laundry goes everywhere. this should have been my first clue.
heading down our relatively steep stairs, i stumble and nearly am killed. basket falls; laundry goes everywhere. i reassemble laundry, head into the dining room to fetch the (dark-colored) placemats that also need to be washed. going up and down the little bit of stairs into the kitchen, i trip. basket falls; laundry goes everywhere. this is, for those of you humanities majors out there, my third time dropping the laundry basket in about as many minutes. my thoughts turn to religion: perhaps if i were in church on sundays and not doing laundry (work! blasphemy!) on the lord's day, i would have better luck not dropping shit all over the place?
anyway, i get into the kitchen, set the washer to running so i can dilute the detergent, open the detergent: cap in my left hand, held over the washer, bottle in my right hand, out over thin air. i DROP THE GOD-FORSAKEN BOTTLE. and that's not all. i CATCH the god-forsaken bottle before it hits the floor, for i am ninja. also somewhere in here, i fling the cap across the room, but it does not yet have detergent in it. no harm, no foul; i will retrieve it later. in the process of catching the detergent, though, i get a big blop of the (ahem, bright BLUE) stuff all over my (muscular) arm and my (white) t-shirt and my glasses and hair. eugh. i clumsily rinse the detergent from my skin in the running water in the washer, turn to load the fucker so i can go wash my face and hair. elbow knocks basket. BASKET FALLS; LAUNDRY GOES EVERYWHERE. for the fourth time. i swear copiously. i load the washer and close the lid.
my t-shirt goes into the basket with the lights, i turn on the shower. our shower generally takes about 20 minutes to heat up, but i'm covered in blue gunk here, so i hop in. it is cold, and the washer is running, so the water pressure isn't quite what it ought to be. actually, the water pressure upstairs in our apartment is never really what it ought to be, the upshot of which is that it generally takes me about twice as long as it ought to to rinse the conditioner out of my hair in the morning, during which time i usually get a fragment of a really annoying song stuck in my head. anyway, the water pressure was even less helpful than usual, so it took way longer than it needed to to wash the blue gunk out of my hair, which i might add *still* smells like blue gunk, and then i get out of the shower and OH HEY our towels are down in the mother-fucking laundry. woe is me. i use the spare bath robe that is hanging in the bathroom to sort of dry off. and put on a different t-shirt. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.

so anyway, the party last night! i am happy to report that none of the social awkwardness that you all have come to know and love as a personality trait of both myself and my fiancée has gone anywhere or developed into any sort of maturity since our move to columbus. i made oatmeal raisin cookies and aztec brownies for the pot-luck. we trucked on over there, deliberately half an hour after start time so that we wouldn't stand there by ourselves the whole time because there were like a million cars parked on our block by that time.
the food was varied and delicious and occasionally mysterious. the live music was good. our hosts were gracious. faced with an open bar and asked what i wanted, i had no idea, and was given a rum and coke, which wasn't bad. it had lime in it, and i like lime. hannah had a gin and tonic, which tasted like christmas tree and shoes, respectively. for the most part, we stood there and were too shy to introduce ourselves to other people, largely because most of the people there were 40 or older.
side note to this: i have officially experienced a major paradigm shift. this summer at nmh, whenever i would say something about being a grad student, the middle schoolers would all be like wow, you're so OLD. last night at the party, we introduce ourselves to some lady by the dessert table, and we're grad students, and oh-her-goodness, we are so YOUNG! alas.
also, at one point i caught a glimpse of our landlord, who was one of the hosts of the open bar shindig, shmoozing on the porch in dark t-shirt. i turn around, and there's... our landlord in a white polo and glasses, drinking wine with some lady. double take. yup, there he is in his dark t-shirt. i nudge hannah: she agrees. bruce and bruce.
...what else? we were awkward. our brownies and cookies were a hit. at one point we saw this 40-something guy palm about four cookies by the dessert table, and then stealthily drop them into the pocket of his cargo shorts, which was pretty hilarious. it was nice and cool and breezy out, which was a good thing, because the night before it poured fucking rain, which would've been rather poor conditions for a garden party. oh, and there were candles like phallic symbols on the birthday cake.

i'm a little incoherent right now, and i think i want to go eat breakfast. ...that is all.

sometimes, it's hard to be so all-fired excited about being in columbus. i could've been living in some hipster neighborhood of austin, making about thrice what i'm making here, or in some crazy ethnic neighborhood of seattle. instead, i live in columbus, ohio, near the kroger and not one, not two, but *three* adult novelty stores. and there's this truck on my street that has an alarm that goes off about twice an hour, any time a vehicle larger than a compact car drives by it. i like our apartment. i like our neighbors. we live walking distance from the short north, north market, campus, even downtown. and jeni's. god. we have air conditioning. really, we've got it good. and yet, i identify my living situation to columbus-ites who ask where i live as "by the kroger". i fuckin' *hate* the kroger.

seriously, you do not understand how bad this kroger is. like, how do you not have popsicles in a grocery store? how do you have 3 separate aisles for sports drinks and soft drinks, but not carry the tomato products necessary for the preparation of spaghetti sauce? also, you have to go in through the door on the left, and out through the door on the right. what do they think they are, english? to quote firefly/buffy: grr. aargh.

to further rant about the current Wedding Crisis (i'm waiting for my photos to upload and my fiancée to finish showering and then painting her nails, ok?): when we signed our contract with the waybury inn, they asked us if we wanted to pay an extra deposit to reserve all of their rooms for our guests, who would then pay for their own rooms, and we would only be penalized if any of the rooms when un-rented. we decided that no, we would just make reservations at our leisure, and let our guests do the same.
so my mom goes to reserve rooms for my immediate family and hannah and me, and gets this rather terse email back from the owner, saying that there's another wedding at the inn on the saturday (ours is on the sunday), and that couple opted to block out all the rooms. as in, we can't stay there. as in, there isn't anywhere for us to get ready for the wedding on the property that morning. and she wasn't apologetic or helpful on the phone. and... RARRRR. i know this isn't the end of the world. but i'm wondering if this whole getting the leftovers from the saturday wedding is going to be the treatment we'll get for the next year. in which case, i want to get the hell out and have my wedding somewhere else, you know?
...end of rant. i need to deal with it, not dwell on it; i know that. but for chrissakes, my pictures are still uploading, and i've got to bitch about something, because it's past my bedtime and i'm grouchy.

on the bright side: tomorrow we're meeting everybody's favorite cap'n robertson in toledo, where it will be (rainy, lame, but!) much cooler than is predicted for columbus. cool midd friend + less heat! + change of scenery. +++++ cap'n robertson! and then services friday, and getting sloshed with our middle-aged neighbors on saturday. hannah is hopeful that girly drinks (smirnoff ice *cough*) will be served. plus my german dictionary ought to be coming soon from amazon, and my scrapbook photos, and stuff.

right: pictures, as long-promised.
( under the cut! )

anyway, that's about all for me - getting up early for drive tomorrow, crashing now.

also, andy, i swear to god i'll call you soon. i haven't forgotten.

fairly uneventful day - though, praise the lord, it stayed cool-ish. and my debit card finally came, and now i'm a real person with money again. to celebrate, i bought myself a german dictionary (the real kind, words with definitions, not translations) on amazon and ordered prints of photos to decorate the apartment. woooooo!
(also of note, i officially hit 1000 messages in my gmail inbox. uh, yay?)

and we brought some of our amazing but insanely rich brown sugar browned butter cookies to one of our neighbors who we'd both met only briefly, but who seemed nice... ended up getting invited in for a nice long chat, and a chance to scratch her rather shy but very sweet puppy's ears. (her name is lily, and she's about a year old, looks like a jack russell terrier, but is a little bigger and MUCH mellower.) i lurves me this puppy. oh my goodness. anyway, our neighbor is really nice too - has lived here for like ever (at least 30 years), knows all the neighbors and the town really well, and was way stoked about the cookies. :)

also, in an email from my mom: "I'm not a bad man; just a bad wizard.." aw. she's cute, in a turning into my rather senile grandmother sort of way. <3

first truly pleasant day (weather-wise, that is) since our arrival in columbus! i got up this morning and did my daily reality check (comprised of opening the back door and spending 30 seconds out on the porch to see what the weather is, rather than guessing from the comfort of the air-conditioned apartment) to find that it was actually cooler outside than in! and has remained cool and pleasant and only a tiny bit muggy all day! i just might cry, it's so nice, though the sun has disappeared behind clouds by now.

anyway. early-ish morning so that hannah and i could walk the... oh, maybe a mile and a half or so down to north market (not to be confused with short north, as i had been for the past couple of weeks) for a new farmers' market scene (hello, SPROUTS!!) and, as it turns out, something that looks like a combination between a farmers' market and a whole foods that is indoors and always exists, even when it's too cold for markets and/or not growing season. it's a lot of prepared hot foods, meats, cheeses, produce, chocolates and other pretties, etc, all set up inside... reminded me a lot of the borough marketplace in london (*sighs longingly*). and was generally filled with bustle, hustle, and assorted commotion and wonderful smells. i am *such* a fan.

also, we were treated like adults not once, but twice! first, the guy running the wine stall talked portuguese green wine with hannah, who made an impulse buy of some of the same, and we were not carded, which was odd... maybe because we seemed to know enough wine to be credibly not underage. or maybe it was hannah's glasses. anyway, the second was that i was hanging onto the handle of my (Middlebury Co-op!) bag with my left hand, and one of the vendors noticed my ring and congratulated me on getting married soon. yay!

also, there's a jeni's in north market, and they have a flavor there that i hadn't encountered yet. ...seriously. celery ice cream. seriously. it wasn't as bad/weird as the sweet corn kind from our last visit... just kind of sweet and a tiny bit celery-y. and green. hannah didn't like it. i was skeptical at first, but could be convinced. just for a sample, mind you - not like $3.75 kind of convinced. but... celery ice cream??

also, because i can't not talk about food, best lunch EVAR today, mainly comprised of wraps with homemade hummus and some of the sprouts we got at the farmers' market this morning. om nom nom.

and now, we await with bated breath the arrival of the washington clan en route to bloomington. dinner will be had. (i vacuumed today, because i'm obsessive like that, and because i continue to find dog hair in the carpet, and because i like the way the apartment smells after i vacuum.)

german village and the book loft? pretty much overrated. still, it was a nice day for a walk in a new part of town, and i got to wear my OMIGOSH ORANGE LOUD ISRAELI SKIRT, and my girlfriend she holds my fin when we cross the street.

also, further smoothie success.

first shabbat services at temple israel - despite guitar in occasionally stubborn major keys (???) and... jazz piano?... i knew like 3/4 of the melodies, and the rabbette was young and gave a good sermon, and i was generally pretty comfortable, even though i insisted on bolting early on in oneg because 1) i was hungry and 2) primarily, i didn't know anyone and hadn't the balls to start going up and introducing myself. still... yay, services. yay, guitar. yay, feeling comfortable.

date night at the ethiopian restaurant on high street. which was different, but way awesome. and satisfied my caveman urges by allowing me to eat meat with my bare hands (and a sourdough crepe thing). perhaps next time i will go for the raw beef... MUAHAHA.

and then we got an invitation to a potluck dinner party (we show up bearing food, apparently, drinks are provided, party scheduled from 7-12:30) thrown by some of our middle-aged neighbors. not gonna lie, mega excited.

and now i am over-fed (late dinner does bad bad things to my internal clock) and looking forward to abs workout and then tea and fruitbat with my lovely lovely.

yesterday was a nearly-perfect day. not even that exciting, but after spending all of sunday feeling kinda down in the dumps, it felt AMAZING.

got up. had tea. (after 6 weeks at nmh where my eating and drinking schedule of anything but water was determined by dining hall hours, i'm relishing being able to have a big cup of tea whenever it damned well pleases me.) browsed around the internets. crocheted. realized i'm nearly done with american gods, debated whether i want to download jane eyre, a little princess, alice in wonderland, les misérables, or pudd'nhead wilson to listen to next. woke up fiancée, had lovely seasonal breakfast.

post office run: check. kroger run: check. our kroger seems to not carry popsicles. this is odd and unsettling and, in the midst of this heat wave, rather upsetting. run home. on the way out the door for bank business (checks with both our names on them!!), i get a call from a high school friend to say haha i'm in ohio and you're in ohio isn't that funny. turns out, she was just outside columbus (driving cross-country to baltimore to start grad school at johns hopkins) and was able to stop in for a cup of tea at a tea salon (...yes. a tea salon. i know it sounds snooty, but it was amazing.) that hannah and i had been wanting to try. yay visiting and catching up!

came home, rocked out the banana chocolate chip cookies with the fiancée, made the single most satisfying supper of my life (again, thank you mark bittman for the light, easy, and incredibly delicious salad #85). then our first netflix movie, vier minuten, which was... good. intense, but good in a german-lesbian-prison-music-troubled-past-beating-the-crap-out-of-people sort of way. and there were cuddles and banana chocolate chip cookies (don't think we'll be giving away so many from this batch... mmm...) and TEA and it was nice.

accomplished:
synagogue preliminarily found
volunteer orientation for kosherchick scheduled at local humane society
new debit card ordered for me, so that i might actually be able to access my bank account...
graduate classes in my department for this year sorted through and *squee*d over

to do today:
target run! always a blast.
old navy and sundry other shopping for good teaching clothes
homemade pizza dough for calzones
department lecture thingy

i remembered! or rather, it occurred to me on our walk after dinner (WHYYYY is it so hot out???), and hannah reminded me just now. so! the post-worthy small finding:
insomnia cookies.
on high street, across the street from one of the giganto dorms on the osu campus: a hole-in-the-wall type of business, closed for the summer, that promises to resume its late-night delivery of warm cookies about a week before the beginning of term.
catering to a specific crowd much?

to do in the next... what, 3 weeks? yes.
~find a synagogue that has some good guitar-age going on and that doesn't charge exorbitant prices for high holy days tickets. potentially also find some community service or other to do through said synagogue.
~maybe join a church choir? or something?
~coerce whoever needs to give me the paperwork to give me the paperwork so i can get my student id card and go to the damn pool. there's nothing worse than it being too hot to exercise when you know there's a perfectly good and likely empty pool within walking distance. so close... and yet so far.
~bake banana chocolate chip cookies. and maybe cupcakes of one variety or another. produce food that doesn't leave the apartment smelling like garlic and onions. not that there's anything wrong with that...
~free admission to the columbus museum of art this month! hopefully it's... like... art, and not... art (insert snooty gay overly contemporary voice and body language here), but either way, no harm, no foul.

i also, as in the past, fucking love blackberries.

...there's something that i keep meaning to post about. here or on 3GT or something. i see it or think about it, and i'm like DAMN, i need to post about __________... and then sure enough, i get in front of my computer and it's gone.

the salad that hannah posted about was, indeed, delicious. the minimalist's salad #95 - couscous with red onion, chunked up oranges, raisins, almonds, olive oil, orange juice, salt, pepper, seasonings - served over baby spinach. delicious, nutritious, and filling. which is a good thing, because with the amount we have left over, i will be eating it for lunch for about the next week. one way to get me to eat my spinach, i suppose.

didn't sleep well last night. it's been hot and i can't bring myself to run the AC over night. that plus stuffiness from the Cold That Wouldn't Die didn't help. probably, reading later will turn into nap.

ground cherries at the farmers' market today by the quart - i am charmed by their little leafy casings, and they are sweet and delicious, but i find myself unwilling to process (er... de-leaf-ify) and package and freeze a fruit that i'm fairly certain would be inconsequential in any smoothie.

also, the bananas at the supermarket were all very green. plans to bake banana chocolate chip cookies today have been foiled and put off til at least mid-week. alas.

i had been contemplating officially abandoning the blog for good, with how little i've been posting in the last... what, year? and with how little i seem to have to say. i figure, though, that now that i'm living (for the first time since germany, really) not in the immediate vicinity of most of my readership, that this is the time that the silly inane details of my life once again bear recording and sharing. so the blog lives on. (this will be long. i apologize.)

summer session was... hard to describe. the individual days (wake up, remind two girls to take their medicine, rouse a chronic over-sleeper, remind another to call her mother in china, walk another to the clinic for her medicine, breakfast, office drudgery and general bitch work, french class, lunch, stretching so i don't die of teaching dance, dance class, break, dance class - that's a grand total of 300 sit-ups daily, thank you very much - dinner, duty or sundry class planning and paper grading, sleep, repeat.) felt very, very long and exhausting, but the summer went by very quickly. resulting in my having many facebook friends around the age of 13 who TyPe ThEyR sTaTuSeS lEiK oMg LeIk ThIs and post lots of "which twilight character are you" sorts of quizzes. they're cute, though. and i taught some of them french, and some of them very little. (one of my students got a 98 on her final exam; i wanted to frame it and keep it, but i gave it back to her.)

hannah and i are more or less settled in our apartment in columbus: furniture has been set up, boxes unpacked, multiple embarassingly large trips to target made, boxes broken down, the carpet duly febreezed and vacuumed in a somewhat successful attempt to remove the old motel smell left behind by professional carpet shampooing. we've bought, cut into little chunks, and packaged into little baggies enough seasonal fruit (and some not-so-seasonal... coughmangoescough) to make smoothies through the long, packed semester. i have baked; i have realized that even after giving away a dozen oatmeal raisin cookies to our neighbor the handyman and a dozen to our landlord, a batch of cookies stretches the limit of what we can consume in a week. i shall bake again tomorrow. we've braved various neighborhoods of columbus, with varying levels of dependence on our gps. we've set ourselves up with new drivers' licenses, bank accounts, credit cards, netflix accounts, ohio license plates (the old vt ones are up on my bulletin board), and other such things befitting of people who have their first truly permanent address in the last... what, four years?

smoothie experiment reveals that we do not, in fact, have a blender. we have a Blender. seriously, herr tuckermann, this thing is going to be key to your whole dismemberment of bodies plan. it's like a gazillion watts. probably suited to purposes more industrial, more heavy-duty, and likely more criminal than the liquefaction of frozen fruit and yogurt. alas.

we bought an idiot-proof assemble-it-yourself no-tools-required bookshelf to hold the overflow of books that don't fit in my piece of shit desk. (i love my desk, by the way: it is wide and roomy, allows me to hang a bulletin board and a dry erase board within easy reach, holds most of my crap, and means i don't have to compute from the floor or the sofa. it is, nevertheless, a piece of shit.) much sweating and cussing ensued. no tools necessary, i suppose, if you don't mind using your teeth in place of a hammer. hammer strongly recommended. bookshelf is together... considering the number of german books i have in comparison to the number of english literature books on their respective shelves, i might well have considered a career as an english major. ah, well. as school has not yet started, the whole setup remains gloriously uncluttered, and makes me very happy.

i've done lots of things that you have to do if you're a Real Person, such as paying utility bills, applying for credit cards, dealing with landlords, making sure doors are locked and air conditioner is off before going to bed, washing wool sweaters, writing reminders to myself of payments to be made and contacts to be undertaken for the wedding i'm supposedly still planning (out of sight, out of mind?), etc., etc. the thing that makes me feel most like a Real Person, though, is the hinged double picture frame on my desk with a picture of each of my sisters. it sort of faces the plastic dinosaurs on the shelves on the other side of my desk; we don't talk about this fact.

jeni's ice cream remains incredible, if suitably pricy for a place as trendy/ local/ organic/ hairy armpit as it is. flavors tried:
~lime cardamom froyo (tried in... what, may? june? sometime.): spicy, flavorful, palate cleansing, generally amazing.
~sweet corn black raspberry: taste tested but didn't buy. you can definitely taste the sweet corn, it was definitely weird. could get used to it; might not bother.
~thai chili: coconut and chunky peanut butter ice cream, plus more cayenne pepper than i was anticipating. a little peanut-buttery, but damned good.
~black coffee: rather than doing the normal coffee ice cream thing (brewing coffee past the point of sludge into concentrate, then diluting with cream and freezing), these guys apparently steep coffee directly into the cream. that shit'll make hair grow on your chest. delicious, though.
~goat cheese and roasted cherry: still incredibly decadent and the best thing in life. still my favorite.
~salted caramel: definitively salty, and a dark, burnt-sugar caramel, rather than the cloyingly sweet flavor i'd expected. definitely a fan.

beyond that, been putting in a certain amount of time crocheting a throw blanket (gasp! gossip!) while listening to american gods. which is amazing. and a book of some good length even when reading - i'm a fairly fast reader - positively endless when listening. no bad thing; just sayin'.

i'll cut my babbling short for now - dinner to make and a cold to get over (more tea!!!), and a walk after dinner once it (hopefully) stops being hotter'n the blazes of hell outside. if you stuck with this entry this long, excellent for you :)

pictures, for comparison purposes, from our current top-two choices for wedding venues in vt; further pros and cons to follow.

( mom and hannah! go! )

a few quick updates from some of my last real down time for the next five weeks...

staff week:
-lots and lots of long-winded meetings. the director of the program is a math teacher during the regular year; he both dresses and drones like one. nice, but awkward. and meetings that run a full hour longer than you're expecting. yegh.
-ran out of yarn, still have the urge to work on my blanket and listen to the new audiobooks i got from naomi (peter pan and american gods).
-stayed relatively cool and rainy. hopefully this holds out awhile longer... the one day it went up to 85, my room was an oven.
-my dorm director has a fireman fiancé, a playful and sweet black lab called sadie, a little grey kitty called sneakers whom i've only seen from a distance, and is babysitting her mom's 20 lb. maine coon cat named finnigan, who is GIGANTIC and super fluffy and orange. HUGE. seriously.
-the other interns are really nice, and i was good about being social, eating meals with all different people, etc., etc. just when i was starting to feel comfortable around everyone and like i knew who people were, 200 students showed up to confound me all over again...
-somewhere between my still needing to drag my french abilities out of a closet and dust them off, and the fact that the teacher i'm working with is from senegal and has quite a heavy accent both in english and french, i struggled quite a bit in working with him this past week. the good news is, i know more french than the (5) kids in my class... monday, i get to teach them the alphabet. rock on.

kiddos so far:
-i can take a good stab at the names of all the girls in my dorm (about 25), all of whom are between the ages of 12 and 14. ...actually, that's a lie. the littlest one is 11 and will turn 12 next week. they are all pretty tiny and adorable.
-i have seven advisees, most of whom are quite sweet and still little girls and eager to please. just one is giving me a little trouble so far; my current strategy is to nice her out of it. no use making enemies the first weekend of camp.
-katie is the troublesome one, part of a big group of seminole native americans from florida that send up a bunch of kids every summer. i can tell right now she's acting up just to push her boundaries and see what she can get away with. more on her and her friends later...
-kelsie is sweet and bonded with one of the day students right away. she's a gymnast and will be in my dance class. her brother goes here during the regular school year, so she's already pretty comfortable with the environment. her mom's way overbearing, but she's a good kid.
-michelle is from taiwan, and her english is the best of my ESL students. she's quiet, but has taken up a leadership role simply by default of translating a little for the other chinese-speaking girls in the dorm.
-maggie goes to an international school in japan, but that doesn't stop her from being a typical american 'tween. she's the cute bouncy type and the leader of a newly-formed gaggle, who have been in her room listening to music from high school musical and messing around online all morning. and giggling. did i mention the giggling?
-angel is from taiwan too... she's shy about her english and hasn't opened up much. she's quite the outlandish dresser.
-ellian is from china, and speaks almost no english. she's really sweet, though, and we've had a few conversations, they just take a little bit longer than you'd expect. she plays the piano, and likes to watch american tv shows "to practice her english" :)
-tylinda is probably my favorite so far (eep, need to try not to play favorites), also one of the oldest in my group, going into 9th grade next year. she has corkscrew-curly hair that sproings back when you tug on a curl. eeeeeee. she's a little bit attention-seeking, which took the form of her coming over to my room for help with lots of little things (putting batteries in her electric toothbrush) every 10 minutes last night. she's a little chatterbox, and already has a little gaggle of friends.
-i'm really surprised that over 3/4 of the middle school girls showed up with laptops, most of which are their own. i expected cell phones, but this surprised me.
-i'm not quite sure how to deal with this group of seminole girls. from what i know of them, all of their families are pretty low-income, and their tribe is paying for their tuition and expenses for the summer. they're also all pretty low-achieving in school, and have so far refused to go get their textbooks. one of them has even refused to register for classes for monday... thank goodness she's not my advisee, as i would have no patience to deal with her nicely. anyway, they're all acting up in little dumb ways and putting on the too cool for school act, which i think bothers their roommates, and it sure as hell bothers me. all of them have relatively new (and expensive) laptops, cell phones, ipods, and designer clothes, and they seem to take the opportunity they have by being here totally for granted, far more than any of the wealthier kids. i don't know if this is me being racist or classist, or just being inexperienced in the realities of the teaching world, but i'm not especially inclined to be sympathetic towards them if they're more interested in scribbling with crayons on their laptops than in getting ready for classes to start tomorrow...

so i'm now back on the east coast (sort of...) to teach french at northfield mt. hermon school for the next four weeks, with this coming week being staff week before the teaching starts. i'm all moved into my dorm room, killin' a little time before the crazy meetings start tomorrow. since graduation, hannah and i have put close to 5,000 miles on our lovely little car, penelope, who has taken the strain admirably (and apparently got just over 30mpg on one tank of gas on hannah's way back to pennsylvania today!). it's been a bit of a strain on us, too... lots of nights in motels (that is, before we figured out the joys of booking ahead on orbitz and paying less than a regular price at a motel 6, except at a 3-star hotel instead), lots of hours on the road, lots of fast food. i miss my lovely fiancée already, but there's something to be said for my staying more or less in one place for 5 straight weeks, with one weekend off to visit vermont - wedding venues and date night and middkids, oh my!

anyway, my main purpose for this post was to post pictures of various ventures on our denver trip, so here they are...

( PICTURES!!! )