One, two, three, four

My altered schedule this week has affected my workout routine in ways I didn't expect. Because I didn't need to be home before dinnertime to help out with the kids, I stayed at work on Monday until past quitting time. By the time I got to the gym, the dressing room was filled with coworkers of mine getting ready for their exercise class. "You should come!" they enthused. So I did.

The class was Zumba. Now, if you're a woman of college age or beyond, you probably know that Zumba is an aerobic dance kinda thing influenced by Latin styles. Or so I gather from having been to all three of the classes offered this week.

It's not that I'm any good at dancing, especially dancing that requires galloping and relatively rapid footwork and lots of hippy swirling and sashaying. It's that it was really hard. After the first class, I was a little sore in the thighs. After the second, I ached every time I got out of a chair. And by the time I showed up at the third two days later, my feet felt like they needed a session with a reflexologist.

My last exercise class was at least five years ago; I don't recall having been to one since Cady Gray was born. And it was probably step. I'm sure you readers on the progressive coasts are wondering why we're still doing Zumba here in flyover country, but for me, this was like going from rotary to the iPhone in one giant half-decade step.

I didn't look good trying to swivel my hips to salsa-tinged R&B. It was sobering watching the co-eds around me demonstrating their effortless rhythm. But I had a lot of fun. If I recover fast enough, I'll take advantage of one more week of late afternoon free time and try to learn a few more steps.

Manufacturing

I sat in a Starbucks for several hours this afternoon, sipping drinks alternately hot and cold, working on the syllabus for my new fall class. While I read about eighteenth century embroidery, a young man next to me was making several phone calls -- not too loudly at all, but he was fairly close by.

As the hours passed, I occasionally heard him making reference to orders, artwork, "shells," "cards," and other manufacturing-type terms. When we finally struck up a conversation (prompted by a third party who asked to sit down at the empty seat across from me), I asked what business he was in. Advertising, he said. He handles promotional materials for his firm's clients.

So he makes things. Material things. And I was reading about the making of things, from an earlier age. In my book, the material things were being made by hand, and reflected something of the maker's values, or ideals, or sense of self, or way in which she wanted to be perceived by others, or receipt of cultural tropes. These items were one of a kind, but nevertheless part of a tradition.

We frequently engage in handwringing in America about not making anything anymore. It occurred to me that usually I sit in Starbucks and overhear people making websites or planning revivals. Here was a guy whose business was making things. Well, putting corporate logos on mass-produced things of little value made in third-world countries, to be more exact. But because of his labor, material things were coming into existence. Whose values, ideals, sense of self, desired image, or cultural norms were reflected by those things, I wondered? As I knit my scarf, I thought about the way material things come into being. And I thought that it would be worthwhile if the students in my class this fall reflect on the differences between my Starbucks neighbor and me -- and the similarities.

Home alone

Because of the kids' summer camp in Little Rock, I have had no reason to get home as early as I usually do. There's no chance for quality time with the kids or husband, and there's no dinner waiting on the table.

So for a few hours in the late afternoon, I'm a singleton again. Nobody's expecting me anywhere.

I've stayed somewhat later than usual at work for the last two days. And when I got to the gym an hour after my normal time, some staff folks convinced me to go to a Zumba exercise class with them. Ordinarily that would not work for me, since the class lasts until 5:45 -- past our family dinnertime. But with no family dinnertime for the next couple of weeks, why not? It was a nice break in my routine yesterday -- so nice that I went back today on my own.

When I get home, I revert to my college and grad school days. There's no point in making elaborate food. I slice some bread, make a sandwich, or drizzle honey and butter on it; I chop up an apple, I peel a banana. It's bachelorette food. And there's something satisfyingly spontaneous about it, even though I'm aware that it would get old really fast.

I like the meals Noel makes for us. I like spending an hour with my children before we eat together. But I don't mind something different -- for a couple of weeks, at least.

Get your game on

It's All-Star time in major league baseball. At this halfway point in the season, the contenders have been distinguished from the bottom-dwellers. You know whether your team has a decent shot of competing for a title, needs to step it up to get off the bubble, or will be unloading stars before the trading deadline.

This is the time of year when I look to my right, where Noel occupies the other recliner, and check his mood. In the last few years it's been darkling. The Braves hovered somewhere south of .500 ball, and even though they made a couple of runs, it was hard at the All-Star break to imagine them as pennant winners.

In 2010, it's different. The Braves are on top of their division and boast the best hitter in the league. Now I'm looking over at Noel and trying to remind him to enjoy the moment. Anything could happen in the second half. So we should resolve to be happy that our team is successful now, and not to be too disappointed if that doesn't translate into postseason play.

That's always been my philosophy as a sports fan, although I can rarely follow through: Keep expectations low and be pleasantly surprised if anything good happens. The All-Star game (which features five Braves on the NL squad) is such a pleasant surprise, and the standings at the break are another. It's too painful to get your hopes up that it will last. So the moment will have to be enough.

Experimental

Earlier this year, Archer's GT teacher sent home information about a two-week summer program administered by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for talented youngsters. When I looked into it, I saw that Cady Gray could also apply. They were thrilled that they were accepted, as were we.

The monkey wrench in our planning is that the program is in Little Rock, a 40-minute drive from our house, and at an odd time -- 12:30-5:30 pm. One of us (Noel most days, though I'm hoping to relieve him a few times) has to drive them down at midday, and then find a library or bookstore or coffeeshop in which to while away the hours until it's time to pick them up.

It also means that our family mealtimes are disrupted. Noel is the cook, and most days he'll be on his way to pick them up at the time when he's normally serving us dinner. We might switch the big meal to lunch a few days; I'll pack lunchboxes so the kids can eat on the drive home. And there might be fast food sometimes.

Right now I'm waiting for my family to come home, and I'm hearing that there might be a few kinks for the program staff to iron out in the pickup procedure. Noel tweeted at 6:10 pm, 40 minutes after pickup time, that he had been stuck in a line of cars for 45 minutes and still hadn't gotten to the point where the kids could be retrieved. That makes me anxious for Archer. Things going over schedule, having to wait, minutes and hours dragging on without knowing when the next thing will happen -- these are recipes for weeping and meltdowns. I hope that the process gets fixed so he (as well as the rest of us) doesn't have to endure that day after day.

And I hope the program itself is worth the trouble it takes for us to commute with the kids and disrupt the routines that give comfort and structure to our days. Everything up to this point has made us confident that it is. I'm looking forward to the kids being home and hearing about it. It would be a shame if their enthusiasm about the classes and the experience was dampened by a traffic jam on the first day.

America the beautiful

We live in a great country. A country where people can spout any nonsense they want, and where -- thank God -- other people can stand up and call it nonsense.

A country where it's not a crime to be a white supremacist -- where you can even run for public office on a platform of the eradication of races other than white. And where I can call that morally repugnant and Satanic.

A country where a man can give a speech claiming that a cabal of Democrats engineered the promotion of slavery in the nineteenth century, and that this means that black people are fools for not voting straight Republican tickets today. Where a newspaper columnist can swallow the speech whole and proffer its content as suspiciously suppressed truth in print. (Even though the judgment of those who give him column inches and order the type set is thereby rendered suspect.) And where a history professor can author a column in that same newspaper politely shining the light of day on the speech's distortions and falsehoods, and calling the columnist to account for endorsing it without question. (Links unfortunately lead behind a paywall; check the July 6 and July 10 opinion pages of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette if you want the full story.)

As a wise man once said, I will defend to the death the right of these people to believe whatever hateful, self-serving nonsense they prefer -- even to shout it from the rooftops through any mass media they can harness to their cause. And I'll exercise vigorously my right to broadcast why they're horribly, harmfully wrong, and encourage everyone I know to do likewise.

A new obsession

A few weeks ago, we checked out a library book on backgammon for Archer. A few nights ago, he suddenly appeared in the living room after bedtime with a piece of cut-out paper in his hand -- a doubling cube he had drawn and wanted me to tape together. The boy clearly wanted to play backgammon. And so today, while Noel and Cady Gray went to Despicable Me, I took Archer to Target and bought him a backgammon set.

There's no shortage of games to which Archer could happily devote a lifetime of immersing himself in strategy. And there's nothing he'd rather do. Every time we go to the library, every time we pack books into a backpack for him to take to church or on a trip, he asks automatically, "Did you get a chess book?" With the same single-mindedness, he endlessly turns the pages of books on card games, dominoes, marbles, and pinball.

Games are a structured, rule-governed environment in which Archer can interact with anyone -- his peers, adults, family members. He is drawn to them as if by an irresistible force of gravity. I'd be surprised if his love for games didn't last a lifetime. I just hope he's able to achieve both the socialization and the mastery that he craves.

Just a number

All of a sudden this week, the world seems determined to tell me I'm old. We started watching the hilarious (and dreadfully profane) Louis on HBO, and Louis C.K. was talking about how he's in irreversible decline in his early 40's. An Olay Regenerist commercial on the Weather Channel a few mornings ago urged me to "defy" my age, and the beautiful spokesmodel asserted, "I'm 42."

What are these people talking about? I'm 44, about to turn 45. Yes, the gray hairs have started appearing, and I can look forward to a distinguished coif in a short while. The view in the mirror is going to be really different in a few years, and I'm not sure if I'm reconciled to that after a couple of decades of minimal change.

But old is exactly what I don't feel. Or feel like I look. Listen, I don't want to brag, but nearsighted campus visitors have recently mistaken me for a current student. Who are these people on the TV telling me that I should be buying wrinkle cream and anticipating physical deterioration, if not experiencing it already?

There's no doubt I'm blessed with good genes; my parents don't look their age, and never did. I've been moisturizing with sunscreen for years, I've never been a tanner, and even though I've never been a fitness nut, I've tried to stay in reasonable shape. Nevertheless, the number 45 doesn't fill me with dread any more than 40 did. Nor does 50 sound so bad (although somewhat sobering). I just can't accept the judgment of these cultural voices telling me that I've entered old age, when I feel firmly in the driver's seat of middle age for years to come.

A spark of life

Today's entry about my first ever crochet project is at Toxophily.

After I wrote the reflection on trying to learn crochet yesterday, I made a little tawashi flower from my extensive collection of dishcloth scraps. And I confess, I've been itching to make another all day. New obsession? Thrill of accomplishment? At the very least, another tool in my tackle box.

First steps

This fall, I want my students to reflect on the process of learning a new craft. So it seems only fair that I reflect on my first experience with crochet today.

My agreement with myself was that I would start the process of learning to crochet in July. I had thought that I'd be farther along with the class syllabus by then ... but no matter. A deal's a deal.

As I wrote last night, I have no childhood or familial experience with crochet, and having only learned to knit a few years ago, crochet seemed utterly peculiar and counterintuitive to me. I felt like I had to prepare myself for today's embarkation with some study. Last night I read through my entire textbook -- Teach Yourself Visually Crocheting. And for some reason, I thought I actually understood the process better than I ever have before. Perhaps my fumbling experiments in the craft prepared me for the explanations I saw in the book; perhaps watching videos (even though the crocheters in them always seemed to move awfully fast and know a bewildering variety of stitches by heart) had put the right templates in my head; or perhaps the book is just that good. In any case, I felt upon closing it that I could pick a yarn and hook and try a sampler of stitches the next day.

This morning I wound a ball of cotton, took it with me to my Wednesday coffeeshop retreat, and, studying the book's directions intently, made my first chain. Much like I've always thought it was discouraging to teach knitters to cast on first thing -- it's a process you don't use all that often, it's not knitting, and it delays getting to what you actually want to learn -- I found starting with the foundation chain alarmingly dispiriting. It wasn't chaining that made me anxious; it was trying to see the parts of the chain clearly, and counting the links. Nevertheless, I forged on with my treble crochets. When I got to the end, I tried a turning chain. Onward through single crochets, double crochets, and half-double crochets. After I got back to the treble crochet row, I stopped and looked at what I'd done.

It looked like crochet. The movements were becoming more natural. I had started to believe I could remember which stitches had yarn-overs where. But my sampler was too narrow. I unzipped it, rolled the yarn back up, and started again with a longer foundation chain.

This time I felt better about my understanding of the chain. And the crocheting went quickly. But when I stopped at about the same point, I found that I had lost two stitches somewhere along the way. I looked carefully to try to understand where. It looked like I had missed a stitch in the middle of a row at one point, and maybe mistakenly started with the second stitch at another point ... or maybe missed crocheting into the turning chain at the end of a row, it was hard to tell.

I ripped it out again. I have nothing to show for my hour of crocheting -- no swatch, no scarf in process. But something changed today nevertheless. The stitches made sense. The hand movements started to come naturally. There's still some trick or some taking-care that I am missing -- something akin to the knowledge, so rarely imparted to the new knitter, that if you turn your work and the yarn is at the back, you're going to add an extra stitch because that first stitch is pulled over and is going to look like two on the left needle. But you're not a failure as a knitter because your first piece grows every row, unintentionally. You are just in need of that next step of awareness or information that will keep your stitches at the right number.

And so, faster than I had thought possible, I am a crocheter. The world of crochet seems open before me. I am confident that I can figure out what I need to figure out, YouTube and Ravelry what still doesn't make sense. Launching into learning a new skill -- or teaching it to yourself -- is always a bit dicey right at the beginning. What if you don't get it? Does that mean that your learning and growing days are over? So it's a relief to find that I'm still able to pick up something new. I am still a student. I am still learning.

Perpetual student

As preparation for the course on the handcrafting movement that I'm teaching this fall, I've asked all the students to learn a new craft. Those who don't know how to knit are teaching themselves basic knitting. Those who know how to knit but don't know crochet are teaching themselves basic crochet. And those who answered my questionnaire with the information that they know both crafts already, I'm asking to up their game on the craft at which they consider themselves less proficient.

I didn't exempt myself from the requirement. And so I'm teaching myself crochet this summer.

My experience with crochet is almost non-existent. I never picked up a hook as a kid, while my grandmother did teach me enough knitting for me to work on the traditional trapezoidal swatch while onstage in a kindergarten play. I did some sloppy work around the neckline and armholes of a top for Cady Gray a while back. And lately I made a couple of chain loops for washcloths, feeling my way through it with more instinct than technique.

I know a lot of people who consider crochet easier than knitting. I don't get that. First off, in knitting there are two stitches -- knit and purl. There seem to be dozens of ways to put various numbers of loops on the crochet hook and draw them through, confusingly named single, double, half-double, treble, etc. In knitting, the stitches are all there on the needle waiting for you to knit them. You know what your next move will be -- it's the next live loop on the left needle. No ambiguity. In crochet, though, there are no stitches waiting. You create the next stitch into whatever space you choose. The loop on your hook is the remnant of the stitch just made, not the road map to the next one. It's a vertiginous experience. There's no clarity about where to go.

I've been watching and reading carefully about crochet, and some things are starting to make more sense to me -- or at least, I can see the outlines of the sense they might someday make. But there's no substitute for grabbing a hook and some yarn, and making some mistakes. I'm hoping that if I work steadily this month on mastering some basics and wrapping my head around the process, I'll be able to work my way through a simple pattern -- like a granny square -- before class starts in the fall. The prospect of having enough crochet skills to make something has made me greedy; I'm marking lots of crochet favorites on Ravelry and dreaming about the things I might make. For now, though, the first steps still await me.

What I missed most

We were only gone on vacation for five days. When we got back, it felt like we'd been gone longer -- we had packed a lot of relaxation into those days (and the last one was very long, what with seven total hours of driving and a birthday party in the middle of it). But waking up the next morning, it felt like we'd never left.

Here's what I missed most about home life during our trip:

• TiVo. We had to watch some TV during the trip -- I was writing up So You Think You Can Dance for the TV Club -- and it made me strangely anxious not being able to pause or fast-forward. Or have anything on tap to watch during idle moments.
• Knitting choices. I took two projects with me: a long-suffering pair of socks (finally restarted, on the home stretch) and a new lace scarf. What I didn't have was a choice of large gauge project, like my worsted-weight brioche stitch scarf or my hoodie vest. And I didn't have my yarn to inspire me with dreams of projects to come.
• Wii. Our kids were fantastic on the trip, enjoying the simple pleasures of comic books, card and board games, swimming, sports, and wandering around outdoors inventing amusements. But I missed Archer's enthusiastic explanations of the intricacies of pinball machines in his Gottlieb Hall of Fame game (the current favorite), and Cady Gray's excitement over a new species in Endless Ocean.
• Internet. It's hard to overestimate how much internet access means to me. It's connections with friends and colleagues, planning on Ravelry for what to knit next, doing research, having information at my fingertips, writing every day.

I like my connected lifestyle, with its choices and conveniences. Even though I couldn't have asked for a more comfortable or restful vacation, some of the little things I love about home are even better given the chance to experience life without them.

Holiday

Today's the Fourth, but tomorrow's the Monday after the Fourth. Which means that I don't have to go to work.

But I haven't had to go to work in a week, because we've been on vacation. So how best to use a day when nobody's expecting me anywhere?

I'd feel bad taking a day -- or half a day, at least -- to hang out at the coffeeshop. But tomorrow's kind of a special case. First, everybody needs a vacation from vacation, as you well know. For me that means some concentrated time with my own work, which is not necessarily the work I do at the office.

Second, that work involves deadlines. Tomorrow I have two of them, and I need time not only for the research I'd normally dive into during a coffeeshop day, but also for writing those two pieces. And third, if I bail on the home front, Noel's not left supervising two kids and trying to get his workload covered at the same time, because Archer's going to a day camp on my university's campus next week.

So all things considered, it's the perfect day for me to put my nose to the grindstone. And that's my version of a perfect holiday.

At last

After a very long day of celebration and travel, we're back home and thrilled to have access to wi-fi and TiVo again. I'll have plenty of pictures of our wonderful trip in the days to come, but for now, here's an image that would have gone well with yesterday's blog if I had had access to Flickr at the time:

How to up your rating

From the point of view of our children, the two big attractions of our vacation were our morning whiffle-ball games and our afternoon swims. The villas here at the state park are nestled at the treeline in a semi-circle around the crown of a hill, which is completely covered by a large grassy field. Every morning we took our plastic ball and bat and our rubber bases out to the middle of that field and played three innings of baseball. The teams were ever-shifting, but Archer as the leader dubbed them the Archer Geniuses and the Noel Papers (later renamed the Noel Reds by Cady Gray). After the three-inning mini-games were up, Cady Gray knit one row for each inning on her latest project, and Archer recorded the box scores.

Every afternoon we made our way to the park's inn and conference center for a swim in its outdoor pool. Nothing special -- a small and shallow pool with water not much cooler than the (quite warm) air temperature -- but the kids loved it. They invented games and commandeered us to participate; they played along with our efforts to help them progress with their swimming and water-safety comfort level; and they chattered absolutely non-stop about the fun they were having. From day one to day three, they became bolder in the water, venturing on their tiptoes into water that lapped above their chins, and ceasing to cling to us desperately as they practice their strokes. We spent an hour there each afternoon, and naturally the kids would have stayed much longer if we'd allowed it.

This morning I asked Archer and Cady Gray to rate the vacation from 1 to 5 (a common Archer scale). Cady Gray gave it a "5 plus," but Archer, always cautious about keeping his options open, scored it a 4. I asked him how the trip could rise to a 5 rating by the end of the day, and he suggested another swim. Not a problem, big man.

Local yarn

We don't have a yarn shop in our town anymore. The beautiful shop that used to occupy a prime downtown location closed up a couple of years ago because of health issues in the proprietor's family. So a key element to some people's knitting addiction has been missing from Cady Gray's inauguration into the craft. There's no yarn store for her to visit, where she can fondle various fibers and be inspired by color.

Today my enabling mother-in-law took us to a lovely little shop in Dickson, just outside the park boundaries. Yarn Frenzy was everything you want a yarn store to be -- packed with yarns from all over the world, in all sorts of weights, colors, and fibers. As Cady Gray and I made our way slowly around the floor-to-ceiling shelves, I could see her sense of the possible firing on all cylinders. She strained for a high shelf, and I asked her what color of Berroco Pure Pima she was reaching for. "That red," she said decisively. And I thought: There's a girl who wants to take the burst of energy her eyes have perceived and turn it into something that has a texture, a feel, a weight, a tangibility.

She gravitated to a jacquard-patterned wool for a pair of funky wristers. I picked up two balls of long-repeat fingering-weight yarn in the deep shades of green I see in the woods, grasses, and lakes of Montgomery Bell State Park at summer's height, for a scarf to remember. And I realize with a jolt what she's been missing. It's a craft for all the senses, and it's a real shame not to immerse yourself physically in all its possibilities.

Familiar ways

There are a lot of ingredients to a good marriage. One that is frequently overlooked (except in wedding movies) is in-law compatibility. I was raised in a family that didn't take kindly to roughing it. I've never spent a night in a tent. And if I had married into a family of rugged outdoorspeople, shared vacations would be considerably more difficult than they are.

Instead, fortuitously, Noel's family likes a little good life with their nature. Their idea of relaxation is an afternoon with a complicated board game or a jigsaw puzzle rather than outdoor exertion. Not that they are averse to a stroll through the woods or a campfire; just that it's not their raison d'etre.

So vacations like the one I'm on now are low-stress for me. I don't have to gear myself up for unfamiliar adventures. "Familiar" is, in fact, the key word in my ability to relax and enjoy myself. Doing what I did with my family: playing games, reading books, going to the pool, locating and utilizing all available park amenities. I enjoy challenges and doing new things -- but if doing them is being pressed upon me rather than emerging from my choice and sense of adventure, it's stressful. This week is not about any more stress than "when's dinner." And key to that sense of calm is a family atmosphere that wraps me in the familiar.

Relaxation, Southern style

Live in a family for a while, and I guess they get to know your tastes. The vacation that Noel's mom has designed for me this week could hardly be further up my alley. A beautiful and capacious villa, home-cooked meals twice a day, plenty of games and puzzles, the occasional light stroll and dip in the pool, and a local yarn store just up the road.

Seriously, I think I could get used to this. The brand-spankin' new green villas at Montgomery Bell State Park are flat-out gorgeous. Built less than a year ago, they are tucked into the side of a hill and have eco-friendly energy-saving features designed in collaboration with the Tennessee Valley Authority. But that doesn't make them spartan, not by a long shot -- the kids have their own room with two queen beds and their own bathroom on the other side of the great room (with full kitchen and dining area) from the master bedroom and bath.

The kids are looking forward to getting in the pool tomorrow, and although it's cooler up here in the hills, it's still the kind of weather that makes you crave chlorine in your hair. I hope that the grandparents will go golfing sometime in the next couple of days, because Archer would love tagging along and keeping score. And there's a whole park to explore besides, with some expeditions outside its boundaries for yarn or wifi or the like.

I think I'm set for the next few days, folks. My posting may be late because I'll have to make special trips to town to get an internet connection. But I'm still writing. And I'm on vacation.

Touch

I got the first professional massage of my life today. It was a wonderful experience, and my massage therapist (recommended by my friend Carey) made me feel very comfortable and relaxed.

Naturally, a first massage comes with all kinds of questions about what it will be like to be in that position. Will there be any awkwardness from being touched and handled in ways that do not ordinarily come up, let us say, in the ordinary course of business relationships?

It surprised me that I was most unprepared for a touch that might be considered one of the simplest. When the therapist grasped my hand gently to move my arm around, it was unexpectedly intimate in a way that the rest of the hour was not.

Holding hands is such an ordinary intimacy that it's easy to forget just how real and connected it makes you feel to another person -- and them to you. I love to reach for my children's hands, and I always feel like a small miracle has occurred when they wordlessly and simply accept the invitation by lifting their hands to mine. I have a habit of stretching my right arm back between the front seats while driving and grasping each of the kids' hands in turn. And I'm sure we all remember how thrilling it was to hold hands with a boyfriend or girlfriend in that first blush of puppy love, and how comforting to reach for a spouse's hand while walking or sitting together.

It's not the strange touches that jolt us with their power, but the familiar ones. How interesting to learn that today while on the massage table, having my hand held by someone I'd only just met.

Toy stories

Noel and I went to see Toy Story 3 tonight -- second time for him, first for me. It's no spoiler to say that the ending has to do with our memories of the toys that were important to us as kids. Some folks on the blogs and Twitter have been describing their best toy ever.

I have a hard time with that question. When I was a kid, at least as I remember it, toys took a back seat to books. I curled up with books much more often than I played with toys. And my most indelible memories of playing with toys are playing with my older brother's stuff. Much like my little girl just bounces into her brother's room and joins in with whatever he's doing, whenever she's allowed, I wanted to glom onto Dwayne's playtime.

So my favorite toy ever was a Hot Wheels car. Rocket Bye Baby was the model name; it was a futuristic, low-slung affair with curvy lines, a bubble-topped passenger compartment, and a huge jet nacelle on top. In my eyes, Rocket was the king of the Hot Wheels village, always leading the pack and saving the day.

Maybe my parents remember the toys I played with better than I do. Or maybe you remember your best toy ever with more clarity and fondness. I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

In their shoes

We had a brief and pleasant visit with a couple of acquaintances from the great state of Texas today. Eric and Diana joined us for lunch and then took the five-cent tour of Conway before going on with their Arkansas vacation.

It's always a strange experience to welcome folks to the town where you live, when that town is utterly unfamiliar to them. Our little college burg is unknown outside of the state, by and large, so people visiting have no basis for any particular expectation.

We are well aware of the limitations of our town, but we also like living here and rarely get frustrated with what we don't have. It's when we're showing it to friends from out of town that we wonder if our impression is accurate. Does Conway seem impossibly minor -- or quaintly so? Is there more here than you would think, or less?

Right now we're aware of a certain degree of privation since we're down to six movie screens for a population of 75,000 -- and for a week, after the fire marshall closed those down, we were at zero. Yet we also hear of new restaurants and businesses opening constantly, and the city continues to expand its parks and recreation facilities. On the other hand, the town's Fourth of July fireworks have just been cancelled due to a budget snafu in which a couple million dollars in operating funds evaporated overnight (they were committed to a project but had been mistakenly included in the balance of available funds).

So do we live in a charming village or a one-horse town? And who is the best judge -- the resident or the traveler?

A lifetime's worth

Yesterday I showed you my yarn stash, one that will certainly last me decades at the fastest foreseeable rate of consumption. Today I'm thinking about the book stash that I've had all my life and continue to accumulate. These days it's more on my Kindle than in physical form, thank goodness, but I still love finding a book I want to read and adding it to my queue.

I've always loved libraries more than any other social institution. My parents could park me there all day when I was a kid; in college I spent countless hours exploring their riches. I used to keep lists of books I wanted to read, first on sheets of paper (writing as small as possible, with columns for call number and title), then on Hypercard stacks and e-mailed search results. I thumbed through every reader's guide and best books list I could, in book, newspaper, or magazine form, to add to my list.

I've never stopped doing that, although at least 95% of the books on those various lists remain unread, and although long weeks and months go by when I read nothing except what I must for my work. It's still a joy to find the books and file them away, anticipating the joys of immersing myself in them someday, secure in the knowledge that I'll never be at a loss when I have the urge to read for my own pleasure. Just today I came across an enticing list of novels about domestic life in the midst of some other research I was doing, and I couldn't resist dropping everything for ten minutes to look up the authors on Wikipedia, Amazon, Project Gutenberg, and my local libraries' catalogs to see how many of the books in the list were easily accessible to me.

There will be a sight more books left over at the end of my life than yarn, I hope. But the whole point of such a stash is that it is an opportunity, not an obligation. Knowing that running out of one's chief pleasures isn't a problem -- well, it lends all of life an air of abundance.

Catching clouds in a bucket

I have a lot of yarn. A reasonable person might say -- too much yarn. Above you see a large Rubbermaid tub completely filled with sock yarn. Just on the top layer there you can see some Knit Picks Imagination, Dream in Color Smooshy, Berroco Ultra Alpaca Fine, Wool in the Woods Cherub, and Claudia Handpaint.



And that's not all my sock yarn. This 15x15 inch fabric cube is about 2/3 full of sock yarn. I call it the laceweight drawer to hide the fact that my sock yarn has spilled over its allotted space.



Since last summer, my yarn has been hidden away in plastic and paper bags. I implemented a project-stashing system, where I packaged yarn with patterns, numbered them, and vowed to knit them in random order.



Here's what's become of that system. It's not so much that it failed me, although the packaging was taking up far too much room and making it seem like I had more yarn than I did. (Bags were stuffed onto shelves and new unbagged yarn was taking over the guest room.) It's that I couldn't see my yarn. It was invisible under layers of opaque plastic and meaningless numbers. When I wanted to be inspired by the beautiful yarns that I've acquired, I had to call on my stash photographs and my memory. The glorious colors and textures, though, were sealed away. If I wanted to see and touch, I had to consult my code system, locate the item in one of the various storage areas where bags were stuffed, and rip open a grocery sack.



So over the course of two or three Sundays, while Noel took the kids to the playground and gave me a few hours alone, I dismantled that system. The yarn is free from its bags. Some of it is still linked to planned projects, but online (thanks to Ravelry's genius attach-stash-to-queued pattern feature) instead of in physical packaging.



Now the yarn is visible, touchable, stackable, craveable. It's the yarn store in my house.



Fiber fiends talk sheepishly about SABLE: Stash Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy. I don't think I'm there yet. But I have a lot of yarn. A lot of beautiful yarn that I can't wait to knit. And reorganize whenever I need a megadose of pure merino right into the vein.

All together now

What a day for a sports fan! We barely had time to register the US national teams' stoppage-time goal, miraculously lifting them out of the Group C doldrums into the round of 16, before it was time to switch over to Wimbledon where two relative unknowns were slogging out a 118-game fifth set that by itself was longer than the previous longest tennis match in the championship.

I love moments that bring the nation together in breathless anticipation of an unscripted result And today's examples are stellar. Anything could have happened -- and that made what did happen supremely unbelievable. More than anything, we simply marveled at the unpredictability of it all, so striking in the moment and so difficult to recover in hindsight.

It's instructive to compare those moments with the other cultural event recently that brought millions of Americans to their TV sets at the same time: the Lost finale. Whether you thought it was a hit or a miss, the conversation afterwards is about what should have happened. Control of the outcome by the little gods of Lost is presumed. What makes sporting moments like today's matches so mind-boggling is that they can only be about what happened. Praise or blame, even if apportioned liberally to players and coaches, can't be absolute, because a sports event is so supremely contingent. I've argued theologically that only in the presence of the contingent is a true response of faith and wonder elicited from human beings. The awe of these moments and the gratitude of those privileged to witness them speaks to that point.

Glory days

For the last couple of years, I've spent my summer writing about a sitcom that was never a big hit (and hung on for a couple of years at the bottom of its network, ratings-wise). Episode by episode, season by season, I have been working my way through NewsRadio, a NBC comedy that aired from 1995-1999. If you weren't a television aficionado, a Saturday Night Live fan, or a Kids In The Hall follower at that time, you might have no memory of it.

But for my money (and I'm not the only one), it's one of the pinnacles of the half-hour situation comedy genre. Now, granted, that's a genre I think is well worth paying attention to -- a format in which great art is genuinely possible. Not everyone would agree. Particularly in the twenty-first century, when laugh tracks seem to be on their way out among the cognoscenti.

Week after week I find it immeasurably gratifying that a loyal cadre of readers gathers to comment on my write-ups and offer their own observations about the quality of the episodes discussed. It's one of the defining primordial Internet experiences, one that we might find ourselves forgetting as we move farther way from the birth of the web: Strike out alone, and find a community. All of us were watching back in the nineties, or someone helped us out with tapes between then and now, or we've caught up on DVD or online in recent years. And we all find this semi-obscure show worth talking about and thinking about.

The season I'm writing about this summer is Season 4, the consensus best season of what we would contend is one of the best shows the network system has ever somehow fortuitously allowed on the air. If you remember the show dimly or fondly, tune in to the coverage. If you've never been initiated into the club, find yourself a box set or Hulu. We're having an amazing time celebrating TV comedy that approaches perfection more often than any of us have a right to expect. And we'd love to have you join us.

Presenting solutions

And now for the final chapter in the saga of my students and their research into parking and transportation at my university. You may recall from the four previous installments how we chose the project of researching and proposing changes to UCA's parking, shuttle, and pedestrian culture, where we went to find answers, what guided our communication efforts.

Today one prong of that strategy came to fruition, as three students from the class joined me in presenting hard copies of the fifty-page report to the university president and the vice president for finance and administration. A PDF went to a slightly wider distribution list, with an invitation to share it wherever it might be useful.

And the other prong is underway as well, with the hope that it will spring more fully back to life in the fall when students return to campus. UCA G.O.Y.A. is the name the students chose to brand their campaign. We knew we needed a logo, a name, a consistent identifier that would tie all the elements of the project together. But our brainstorming session to come up with a name sputtered for most of a class period. Everything we thought of seemed too limiting, confining the message to parking lots or cars, when we had recommendations on everything from shuttles to bikes to green space.

As we batted names back and forth, Jesse muttered, "Get off your asphalt." He meant it as a joke. But I gasped and the room went silent. That was it! We were saying that paving over more land wasn't the solution to UCA's parking and transportation problems. And it had an acronym -- not one that meant anything, necessarily, but one that you could pronounce: GOYA. Our most talented graphic designer got to work making a logo, our Facebook team started a fan page where all the links and info could be collected, and the brand was born.

Today UCA G.O.Y.A. became a movement that the administration took notice of. Its name, logo, and the names of its founding participants are on the report that we gave to the president and vice president. The story isn't over, but the task of organizing in such a way as to communicate and advocate is complete. You can learn more at facebook.com/UCAgoya, where the Executive Summary of our report is posted along with a few of the images and maps. We'd love to have you join us.

Patriarch

Some people would consider my life a success. I have a wonderful marriage, two gorgeous and brilliant children, minimal debt, an advanced degree, and a prestigious job. And it probably looks like I did it all myself. What you can't see is that I owe it all to my dad.

My dad is a laid-back character. It's not in his nature to push people. His high expectations are quiet. His motivational method is invisible. Yet he and my mother raised three children with three masters degrees and two doctorates between them, all occupying high positions in the field of education. He built a business he inherited into a major cog in the food chain in our community. I remember him joking about being one of the "community leaders" at his local Kiwanis Club; "gotta go hang out with the CL's," he would say. But of course he was a leader. He was never the loudest voice, but everybody listened to him.

Nothing has been more influential in my life than the words my dad repeatedly said to me: "You can do whatever you want to do." I'm sure there were times when he and my mom wondered if that assertion was misleading, as I went for a Ph.D. in a field with no clear job market. But more than anything else, my life has been shaped by the fact that I never thought to doubt my dad. I knew that my opportunities were limitless, and I simply acted on that knowledge. I didn't give a moment's thought to pursuing a career on the basis of job security or ease of entry or renumeration. I did what I wanted. And that has made all the difference.

Even when I was trying my parents' love and patience most severely, even when we disagreed about almost everything, Dad was always there. "We can always talk," he would say, and he didn't mean it as a prescription -- it was a description. No matter what, we could have a meeting of the minds. Our difference remain, but they're matters of approach, perspective, and philosophy. They're trivial compared to the common interest in thinking, talking, reading, learning, and finding the good in life every day. And Dad always treated them that way.

There are a lot of remarkable dads who deserve tributes on this Father's Day, including the one sitting next to me in the living room, the father of my amazing children, who deserves so much credit for their optimism and accomplishments. But I hope they will all forgive me if I put them second to the man who raised me and believed in me. Dad, it's not just Father's Day obligation when I say you're the best. It's just the truth.

KIPping

KIP = Knit In Public. It's an initiative to show our communities that knitting and crafting are going on all around them, that there are plenty of us that do it, that we are all ages, genders, races and social classes. Knitting in public is a way to dispel the myths and stereotypes about knitters and display our strength.



Cady Gray and I headed down to Little Rock for the city's World Wide Knit In Public Day meet-up. It was our first time in the Main Library, right near the River Market on the busiest of the downtown district streets, and we found a score of knitters gathered around tables.



There were Ravelers a-plenty, as well as knitters who have never joined up. There were grandmothers, mothers, and daughters; men and women; complicated Fair-Isle cardigans and simple garter-stitch squares.



As we suspected, Cady Gray was the youngest knitter there. Our new friends exclaimed over her work and examined her book, causing her to fairly bust with pride. A newspaper photographer was there snapping pictures, and he wrote down Cady Gray's name and age; maybe we'll see her in the paper tomorrow.



She chose a Happy Meal to complete our adventure. An inspiring day, a productive day. Just what my hard-working little girl loves.

Classic style

There are a number of ways to define the transition from childhood -- extended longer and longer as time goes on -- to adulthood. Maybe it's when you can legally drink at 21; maybe when you graduate from high school or college; maybe when you're paying your own rent or mortgage. I had the idea years ago that the moment when you started craving sleep in the morning instead of getting up as early as you could get away with marked an important step away from childhood.

We could, however, define it in a way that would put true adulthood decades away from legal majority for most people. Adulthood is when you start realizing that the classics foisted upon you in school are classics for a reason -- namely, that they're actually amazing.

In high school I read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. A few years ago I decided that I ought to give David Copperfield a try, seeing as it tops lists of the greatest novels in English. And I discovered, much to my shock, that I adored it. That I adore Dickens, and would happily spend the rest of my days reading through the entire Dickens catalog. Nothing would have shocked that 16-year-old slogging through Great Expectations more.

Thanks to the A.V. Club's Wrapped Up In Books monthly feature, I just finished Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. "You know what's a really good book?" I told Noel after turning the last page on my Kindle. "A Scanner Darkly." It shouldn't be surprising that books widely acclaimed, books that have taken their place in canons of one kind or another, are actually wonderful to read -- affecting, surprising, deeply emotional, beautifully written. But there's the child in me that hates to be told and is tired of hearing the unanimous voice of her culture.

It's liberating to be an adult and to strike out into the heart of artistic halls of fame, able to fathom the radical notion that quality might be present and that I might be able to appreciate it. This is a marker of adulthood that I didn't pass until just a few years ago -- most probably later than I should have, if I weren't so stubborn or blind. At least I have years of classics ahead of me to explore, like the well-trodden paths I never bothered with because so many had been there before me.

Ready to start

It takes a lot to get me into gear. I can live with stuff that's broken or suboptimal or ugly for quite a long time. But when the switch clicks and I decide I can't live with it anymore, I like to act decisively.

That has now happened for my front yard, or what my neighbors probably call "the Sahara desert" behind my back. It's devolved from mostly moss when we bought it, to mostly bare dirt now. The railroad ties that form the retaining walls that keep the yard from completely washing away into the street are falling apart. I've long known we needed to get a landscaper in to built new retaining walls, plant ground cover, lay some sod (I'd rather not have much lawn). But I didn't know where that stood on my priority list of things I need to hire someone to do. Walking back toward the house with the kids after a stroll around the neighborhood this evening, I realized that the time was now. I can't live with this horrendous hellscape anymore.

So I'm going to call a local landscaping firm. What I'd like is for them to rebuild all the retaining walls, plant a hardy, shade-loving ground cover on the front slope, remake the azalea beds around our large shade trees, and put down a minimum of turf that would have to be mowed or watered. I'd be open to turf alternatives.

What should I think about or know before I make this call? Any recommendations for landscapers in the area? Can I do this without ending up paying a fortune for an underground irrigation system?

Cupid, draw back your bow

Today's post about creation on a tight schedule is at Toxophily.

We've had a great week with my mom and dad here. The kids have taken this opportunity seriously. Archer organized an "Uno marathon" -- four sessions of ten games each, adding some of the optional special rules in various sessions. Cady Gray has lobbied for tickles and hugs at every opportunity. It's a two-day drive for them to get here, two more days to get back. So we really appreciate it when they make that effort. Thanks, Granny Lou and Papa!

Summer stock

On NPR this afternoon, while driving home from a day in Maumelle, I heard a piece about summer jobs. I didn't have as many experiences in summer work as some people; other than time spent answering phones, typing, and organizing invoices in my dad's business, and one terrific summer making sample books in my uncle's carpet factory, I spent my summers doing everything but working for a living.

These days my job continues throughout the summer -- like most adults, but unlike most of my fellow faculty members. The professoriate is a nine-months-a-year occupation. In fact, my university offers a scheme whereby one quarter of your salary is withheld during the year and then paid to you during your summer off so you don't have to go without a paycheck.

In four decades, I've never had a summer that proceeded without significant change from the seasons before and after. I've either been a student or a teacher all that time, and that means that summers constituted their own separate reality on the academic calendar. It's like the summer job experience that most people leave behind after their college years became my default; I do one thing for nine months, then something different from three, year after year.

What's your summer job memory? And do you still feel like you have a summer job -- or would you like to?

Cards on the table

My parents arrived this afternoon for a few days with the grandchildren. Right now they're participating in a grand Uno tournament enthusiastically narrated by Archer. Granny Lou just won her first game with Cady Gray's help, and Archer has battled back from two games down to tie Papa 4-4.

The clear rules and bounded structure of games appeal strongly to Archer's autistic mind. He is able to adjudicate any question about procedure with authority. And the "storyline" of the game seems to delight him. Motivations and emotional responses which might remain murky or inexplicable in real life become transparent in a game: good fortune and bad are well defined, and the appropriate emotions for each are plain.

And so my sometimes retiring, sometimes robotic boy becomes wildly animated while playing games. He grins, dances, shouts, sinks to the ground, and loudly rehearses the twists and turns of the game's and match's course to whoever will listen. It's a story with a plot that makes perfect sense and an appealingly granular -- often even numerical -- dramatic arc.

Someone along the line -- I think it was Noel -- started a little tradition of snapping the last remaining card in his hand after announcing "Uno." Now Archer does it with delight, and Cady Gray reaches over to flip Granny Lou's card for her when appropriate. There's something extravagant about the gesture: an expression of delight, a challenge to the other players, and nothing strictly necessary or prescribed in the rules. As these little extras accumulate, they sketch out more detail in this stripped-down game world. With enough time and tradition, the game might become as complex as parts of life. And perhaps Archer will have the tools it takes to navigate in such circumstances.

Aftermath

Arkansas is a battleground state in the mid-term elections this year. Our primaries were hotly contested, especially on the Democratic side. And that meant a landscape littered with election signs.

Now that the election and runoffs are over, I still see plenty of election signs on roadsides and medians. Homeowners who placed them in their yards have whisked them away, although some for the winning candidates remain in anticipation of the November general election. But every day I pass lonely signs, sometimes in reduced clusters, touting candidates who lost their bids.

Occasionally we hear about localities with regulations about cleaning up signs after elections. I couldn't find any evidence of such laws in Arkansas. But the impression left by orphaned signs of losing candidates left littering the roadsides is that the campaign staff and volunteers gave no thought to the consequences of their publicity blitz except their hope that it would pay off. Every sign that's still there is a testament to the dilution of responsibility and the narrowness inherent in short-term thinking.

Maybe on the weekend after an election, civic-minded folks regardless of party or campaign affiliation should get together and drive around town collecting the signs that no longer serve any purpose. Get enough people with enough pickup-truck beds and trunks, and you could make a dent. Take 'em to the recycling collection center, and return the wire frames to party headquarters, make them available to school and church groups that do sign-based publicity, or sell them back to sign companies.

Mark your calendar for the morning of November 6 -- what do you say? Who's in?

Does she want to give me kicks and be my steady chick

Today's post about yarn that won't run dry is at Toxophily.

Tonight my co-workers and two decades of program alumni said goodbye to a woman who's been a huge part of all our lives. When it's my turn to go, I hope I inspire a tenth of the tributes and affection. Glenda, you are one of a kind, and we can never tell you enough how irreplaceable you really are.

Love is just what you make it

Today's post about guinea pig knitting is at Toxophily.

And so ends one of the toughest weeks of the summer for me: swim lesson week. I'm relieved to find that my kids still love the water, and have that much more familiarity with it. They're not swimmers yet, but I know that they'll get there in their own time. Every experience reduces my anxiety and makes me a little more confident that putting them around water isn't a tragedy waiting to happen. Most importantly, they pushed their limits a bit, and still had fun. As long as their feelings about swimming are positive, I'm comfortable that proficiency will come eventually.

Interlibrary loan

I love interlibrary loan. I use it profligately, requesting articles and books in great piles when I'm doing research. The problem with that strategy is that the books tend to arrive all at once, and be due within a short time period a few weeks later.

But to tell you the truth, I kind of like that, too. Having to get the books read and the notes taken creates a kind of urgency. I have to organize the sources to get through them in the order in which they're due. I have to make time to work my way through them -- and that means setting aside time.

My time is Friday morning. I go to the coffee shop and spend three hours, if I can get there early enough, doing nothing but reading and notetaking. It's wonderfully extravagant to have that much time for books and ideas. But the luxury, the largesse of hours to dedicate to this task, is dependent on the urgency of deadlines. If I had the books indefinitely, would I ever get around to reading them? Isn't it the short-term loan of these items, the fact that their possibilities will only be available to be gleaned until a specified date, that makes them such a source of pleasure?

Like all indulgences, I feel guilty about this one. Yet as I spent the day with eighteen-year-olds entering the university, I realized how weird that must seem to non-academics. Feeling guilty about a half-day devoted to research? Maybe I'm through the looking glass. But you take your pleasures where you can find them, and I'll bet some of my colleagues will agree: nothing beats an empty calendar, a stack of books, and a citation organization system.

Game club

Archer would play games with us all day and all night if we'd let him. He's chess-obsessed -- give him a chess book and he'll read for hours -- but Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, or a book of marble, domino, or card games are almost as absorbing. In fact, not infrequently he draws his own game boards and cuts out money and cards, and a major subject of conversation is game rules and strategy.

I asked him last week if he'd like me to contact any of the kids in his school's chess club to see if they wanted to meet for matches, and one of the children he mentioned is the daughter of one of my university colleagues. We got them together today for an hour of chess -- two matches. In the first, Archer finally checkmated her when she had only a king left and he had a king and rook. In the second, they played to stalemate in about twenty minutes.

Last week I ran into a former student in a coffee shop, passing through town with her partner on her way back to her job in another town. She has worked with Archer before, and asked about him; the conversation turned to his love of games, and I mentioned Settlers. Turns out the two of them play quite a bit and have all the expansion packs. I enlisted them to come play with Archer when they're back in town for an extended session. There's only so much he can get out of playing a two-person game with me; what's more, I have no idea what I'm doing.

I would love to find Archer a regular game group to play with. Not for the first time, I've thought that we ought to introduce him to Magic-type collectible card games, which he might be able to play with other kids at the bookstore or the library. A game provides a structure to the social occasion of playing with his peers. Today while playing chess, he had intermittent conversations with his opponent about the rules, about whether the game has reached its end, about setting up the board. Archer is rarely focused enough on a common task to have an interaction with another kid; he tends to ignore their conversational proffers and wander off on his own or to the company of adults. I'm impressed that he sat across from a nine-year-old for a full hour today; words might not have been plentiful, but the two were completely engaged with each other and the chess board. I was not part of the equation.

I'd like to see Archer in more situations like that with kids his own age. His speech therapist told us this year that he won't make an effort to play with his classmates during recess unless he sees her watching -- then he approaches other kids eagerly in order to get gold stars from the observer. But nobody had to bribe him with a gold star to play chess for an hour with Miriam. With a structure in which he's already intrinsically interested, with scorekeeping and points and strategy and the reduction of the environment's unwritten rules to clear, written, and unambiguous ones, he can really be a part of a group of his peers. If I could find the group and the venue, I'd have him there every time the doors were open.

In every moment there's a reason to carry on

Today's post about a favorite fancy dessert and the dishcloth that brings it to mind is at Toxophily.

The busiest day of the summer is coming up this week -- far too early in the summer, if you ask me. On Thursday I'll have the kids at work in the morning to give Noel a much-needed break. After I pass them back, there's lunch with the provost, incoming students and their parents. Then in the afternoon I have a webconference for which I have to prepare a major report tomorrow. Late afternoon starts a sequence of several meetings with incoming students at our summer orientation which includes dinner and doesn't end until early evening. Then I come home after the kids are already in bed and have a TV show to write about before I get to hit the sack. After that day, everything slows down considerably. One big obligation per day is enough for the summer, even for someone like me who's trying to having the most productive summer since graduate school.

Caught in the flow

My folks are coming to visit at the end of the week, a prospect that always lights a fire under our simmering urge to make our home more livable. (Yes, Mom and Dad, it does get worse than what you see!) Noel has ambitions to organize our extensive collection of games and to pass books the kids have outgrown on to new owners.

He's calling this "de-hoardifying" the house, the idea being to make our home less like one of the places profiled on A&E's Hoarders. Not that we qualify for the show. We have teetering stacks of DVDs covering every available flat surface, yes, but we don't have psychological issues that prevent us from getting rid of them. Instead we have logistical and physical issues getting rid of them. You see, they just keep coming. A dozen a day, most days. I counted once while Noel was out of town; 60 DVDs or sets of DVDs arrived in one week. If you're not actively pushing them back out the door at the same rate, they quickly become an organizational nightmare.

And how do you push them out the door? We're not going to send them to the landfill. They're actually worth something to someone, if you can make the effort it takes to find that someone (a reseller or an end consumer). Again, though, at 250 flowing in a month, just making that effort to redirect them back out again is costly in terms of time and energy.

Every few months Noel makes a big dent in the DVDs, CDs and comics (notice how I didn't even mention the last two) by hauling them to a store or sending them to a reseller. But we haven't been down to level zero -- that is, only having in the house the media we actually want to keep -- in many years. If we ever manage to get back there, I might not recognize the place.

Now I hold my head up high

Today's post about radioactive dishcloths is at Toxophily.

This is the week we look summer in the face and see whether we can meet its challenge. The kids are both at home. Their dad is home, as usual, although he swears he's arranged a lighter work week. I'm at work, as usual, although I'll take the kids with me a couple of mornings to give them a change of scenery. After this there aren't too many more weeks where one or the other of them aren't in camp of some kind. If we can establish a summer pattern this week that doesn't drive any of us crazy, we'll be set until August.

The limits of obsession

When I get on a roll, real life annoys me. I'd like to do whatever I am currently obsessed with doing with from morning until night. Moderation is not for me. If it's something I enjoy, I'm not interested in taking breaks. Right now there are three things I'd like to just keep doing until they are done. I'm working on a storage and decorating plan for our extensive collection of games; I've got loads of yarn I'd like to knit up; and I'm at the beginning of a couple of fascinating research projects.

But that way of working isn't compatible with family life. Kids won't let you take over their spaces for days to decorate. Parenting can't be put on hold for marathon knitting or research.

The summer comes with longish stretches of time during which my obsessive nature can express itself. I can take hours or days and just do one thing, because there are fewer tasks to get crammed into each day. No classes, fewer meetings, periods of time when people are on vacation and the office is empty. And I can start to think that I have a right to that organization of time and that one-thing-at-a-time, all-the-time lifestyle.

Home brings me back to reality. It's not worth thinking about huge redecorating projects until somebody could be persuaded to take the kids for two weeks. I can't pull all-nighters in the library or crank out a sweater in a weekend. So the things I want so much to do have to get done in bits and pieces. And to be frank, that's a good thing. Because the problem with that obsessive tendency is that it can be an excuse not to do anything at all on the grounds that you can't do everything you'd like. Better by far to tackle a minor reorganization of a room than a wholesale retrofit, since my visions for the latter are probably unrealistically grandiose Better to fit my knitting and my research around the other tasks for which I'm responsible, lest I fail to live up to what I imagine limitless time at those occupations would produce.

Onward and upward

Today was the last day of school for Archer and Cady Gray. I picked them up from school with a little ache in my heart for the realization that they will never be third graders or kindergarteners again.

Archer brought home his writing folder chock-full of writing exercises I haven't read before. Here's a final draft of one from January 12, 2010.

Me, my mom, etc. had a blast having triple Christmas together! We were having triple Christmas Friday, December 25 through Thursday, December 31. We gone to 3 places!

At my house we did "rounds" (dividing out the presents and opening them one at a time). But some of those gifts weren't wrapped! So we got those presents for free.

It took us 6 hours to drive all the way to Nashville, TN. We did the same thing in Grandma Libby and Grandpa Alex's house as we did in my house, but the rounds were a lot longer. We woke up at 5:30 the day after that. We woke up so early that we had breakfast at the airport!

When we finally at St. Simons Island on 4343 11th Street, we rushed up the porch steps and into the house. We got there by first going I-25 N to Exit 29, then right on Ocean Road, then right on 11th Street. We opened the presents for free at Granny Lou and Papa's lodge, and heart a stored and devoured a chocolate pretzel topping with icing and an M&M there. Then, me, Drew, and Sawyer played a little New Super Mario Bros. Wii together back at 4343.

On the second day, we played again and beat the first world. It was a hard time for me at world 2-2. I kept losing all my lives over and over. I ended up with 10 continues!

On day 3, it was a hard time at world 1-4. I kept hitting fish and losing lives. And Sawyer deleted our checkpoint! He forgot to quicksave our progress! Now we have to start over from the beginning! What a day!

Unimaginable

I adore my children. Maybe I'm more of a worrier than most -- in fact, I'm pretty sure I am. In any case, my particular species of adoration leads me to think about what would happen if I lost them. The idea terrifies me, but I can't look away. For some reason I think that considering the possibility will help me deal with my fear. As if I could convince myself that such an event could be rendered ordinary by thinking about how it happens to other people, and what would occur if it happened to me.

At lunchtime today I read the first few chapters of a novel in which the main character is a mother whose little girl -- about Cady Gray's age -- has died in an accident. I couldn't stop myself from getting emotional at the descriptions of her difficulty getting through each day as everything in her life reminded her of her daughter. My overwhelming feeling was that I wouldn't be able to cope at all. I don't know how anyone does.

And then I wonder whether that means I adore my children too much. Not that I have any choice in the matter. But my inability to keep my emotions in check at any depiction of children in peril, or grieving parents, makes it difficult for me to keep perspective. I imagine all this is normal, yet isn't it also normal to integrate death into life?

Waiting for the words

I've never subscribed to the notion of a muse. My approach to my work has been, well, workmanlike; it's not always easy, but when I need to produce, I grind it out. When I was writing my dissertation, I treated it like a job. By the time the day was done, I needed to have five pages done. And as a result, I produced the dissertation in about six months.

But it's clear to me that I need time for thinking built into my day if I'm going to make progress on my research, or on constructing a syllabus, or on a review, or nearly any other creative endeavor on my plate. My thinking time on most days consists of my walk to and from the office, about 10-15 minutes at a leisurely stroll, longer if I stop to get a beverage.

During the two mornings a week I'm spending off campus for intensive work, I've found myself more consciously taking time for thought. As I lift my eyes from book or computer, stare out the window, and try to formulate or follow an idea, I feel more like I'm waiting for inspiration than usual. In fact, I sometimes feel like a parody of an academic, surrounded by books, scratching my chin, gazing absent-mindedly into space.

It's not so much waiting, though, as processing. In no more than a few moments, I'm able to see clearly what the next step is, and decide whether it follows on the course I'm currently plotting, or need to make a note of the insight to be pursued later. Does that mean I'm more like a bricklayer than an artist?

Crowdsourcing inspiration

One of my favorite features of the twenty-first century world of social networking is how visible inspiration has become. It used to be up to art and technology historians to identify who was an influence on whom. But as we assemble our plans and creative impulses in tiny pieces scattered across the internet, our browser histories themselves become a record of our sources. In addition, it's become customary -- indeed, expected -- for those keeping online project notebooks to note and link to the items and ideas that inspired them.

Inspiration is always a delicate matter in academia. We are socialized simultaneously in the art and ethics of referencing our sources, and in the value of originality. Paying homage to our inspirations, in that environment, can come to feel like a chore and a cheat. We overwhelm our readers with references to convince them of the thoroughness of our research. At the same time, we struggle to assert that we are neverthless doing something new, unique, and valuable -- something worthy, we hope, of being cited as inspiration or authority by another.

Perhaps there's something to the two terms I just juxtaposed. Academia -- well, the humanities, at any rate -- operates according to structures that bestow and honor authority. The fear of the limitless eclectic synthesis ethic of the Internet is based in the horror of lost authority. Yet everywhere I look in my social networks, I see people citing each other -- spreading the word about what others have done, adding their own spin, and putting what they do out there to inspire in its turn. The arts have long understood that there is a distinction between inspiration and authority. Even though originality is far more highly prized in those circles, it stands in tension not with the repetition of truths implied by the notion of authority, but with the participation in a communal process of choosing styles and elements of meaning.

As usual, I see a lot to be optimistic about in the emerging folkways of social networking. My hope is that these environments are socializing their participants into an expectation of generosity and appreciation. It seems unlikely that the need for critical engagement will go unfulfilled by other corners of the 'net -- or even in some activities in the same communities I'm discussing. I seek only to praise the existence and growing normativity of counterbalancing forces.

Busy relaxing

Like a preview of summer comes Memorial Day. Its salient feature: the need to find something for the kids to do.

I dreamed up three special activities for their school holiday -- one for each kid, and one for the whole family. This morning right after breakfast, Archer and I went running at Tucker Creek Trail. Then after I got back and changed clothes, Cady Gray and I went to Starbucks for a knitters' retreat. And after lunch, we all went down to North Little Rock for a minor league baseball game.

I've never been one to make big plans on holidays that are supposed to be about relaxing. All the organization feels too much like work. But even thought we had to make the half-hour drive to Little Rock and back for the ball game -- driving is not my favorite way to unwind -- everything else was exactly what a holiday should be. I spent quality time with each of my children, doing something we share a love for. And we all got out into the summer sun with our fellow Arkansans, cheered on some ballplayers, ate some funnel cake and frozen lemonade, and wore ourselves out.

I'm ready to get back to work tomorrow, though. To be honest, I've been looking forward to this week's two half-day prep and research retreats since the weekend started. The summer is here, and it's time to take the wheel.

Let your arms enfold us

If you recognize the lyric in the title to this post, you've probably spent some time playing the venerable Wii game Endless Ocean. It was one of the first games we go (on the recommendation of friends and acquaintances) when we purchased our Wii. For awhile it languished as we knocked ourselves out on Mario games, but in the last month or two it's been on heavy rotation after Cady Gray decided she would begin playing. And her enthusiasm for the game has infected Archer, too, who has become almost as interested as she in collecting new species and filling in the blank spots on the map of Manoa Lai Sea.

I'm fascinated by this development, because all of Archer's gaming obsessions to date have been centered around scoring. There's no scoring in Endless Ocean -- only exploration. The game moves slowly, only advancing in terms of a plot when you decide to take its increasingly gentle hints about where to dive. But Cady Gray's delight in identifying seadwellers and unlocking new areas is infectious. Archer now exhibits the same reaction, exclaiming "I got the Parade Float Sea Slug!" with as much excitement as he reports a new high score in pinball or his current monetary total in Monopoly.

A sequel to Endless Ocean, Blue World, was released recently. I hadn't been giving it much thought because the AV Club review was negative (of course, they didn't like the first one either), and at that time the game was languishing in our cabinet. But now I'm thinking that it might encourage Archer's openness to less structured narratives. Do you know of other games that might offer similar experiences?

A few stolen moments is all that we share

Today's post celebrating inhibitionless knitting is at Toxophily.

Noel and I went out for dinner and a brief shopping excursion tonight, the first time we've been out without the kids in a couple of weeks. And it was about time; I had a whole dramatic arc of work news saved up to tell him. It may seem strange, but at least on my end, we don't usually engage in long conversations about my job or research except when we're out on date night. I tend to get really animated and long-winded, for one thing, and I have to go way back in time and way deep into philosophical detail. When there are kids requesting your full attention and tending to interrupt any conversation of more than a few sentences, it just doesn't make sense to even get into it.

But I pay a price for saving it all up; explaining it to someone out of academia and out of administration really helps to get it straight in my own head and figure out whether my take on it makes sense. I don't know what other couples do on their date nights, but that's a big reason I look forward to ours.

Last day

Ever since I got here -- and for more than a decade before that -- our administrative assistant Glenda has been the repository of all expertise, all wisdom, and all knowledge in our department. Today was her last day at work. And it's truly the end of an era.

Despite the numerous tributes and events throughout this spring celebrating her time with us, I doubt any of us have really processed what it will mean to be without her. I know I haven't. As I said goodbye this afternoon in her suddenly bare office, devoid of the photographs, postcards, and knickknacks that hundreds of students have given her over the years, none of it seemed quite real. I know I'll be back at work on Tuesday, and in the weeks and months to come, thinking every so often, "Oh, Glenda would know" or "I need to ask Glenda about ..." before remembering.

As hard as it will be on us, it will be harder on Glenda. And these moments always make me think of my own retirement someday. What will my emotions be? What will I regret, what will I look forward to? Will I step aside with grace, with resentment, with fear, with relief? With each retirement I witness, I try to learn lessons about how to do it right. But it's hard to imagine that those memories will be stronger than whatever the psychological or social forces that will buffet me at the time. Retirement is a strange phenomenon of our age. There's probably no way to handle it perfectly. We can only hope not to erase the goodwill of decades by our demeanor as we exit.

I know I'm not a hopeless case

Today's post about awakening from a long winter's nap is at Toxophily.

Archer woke up in some kind of good mood today. After breakfast, as Noel was about to tell the kids to go get dressed, he suddenly leaped into Noel's arms and gave him a huge hug and cuddle. "Just delaying," he grinned, and when Noel asked for clarification, he added, "Delaying your instructions."

This evening he came out of his room holding a pile of marbles in one hand. "I have twenty-three marbles in this hand," he announced. "Is that some kind of record?" I asked. "I read that a world record by an adult was eighteen marbles," he remarked. "Did you break it?" I marveled. He beamed. "Look at my hand," he said quietly.

Work-o-meter

Some days you come home all proud and ready to reward yourself for getting so much done. Some days you work hard all day but don't have a feeling of accomplishment at the end. And the difference between those two kinds of days has little to do with how productive you actually are.

This morning I took my Wednesday half-day retreat to the local coffee shop to prepare my new class for the fall semester. I toiled over course objectives that could be linked to assignments and to the course topics outline, then read for the course for almost an hour. When I left, I felt like I had made some real progress, although the number of words I put down in my draft syllabus would strike some as minimal.

Then this afternoon I set about my second table-clearing project for the week: combining all my students' work on parking and transportation at the university into a single report. I created a cover page, standardized all the formatting, numbered the appendices, and labored for three solid hours on transforming a bunch of research papers and some other text and pictures into a cohesive, professional report.

By the end of the day, I was ready to produce a table of contents, the last piece. I decided to print a copy to make it easier for me to flip through and pull out the titles of the various appendices and figures. Some sections had color charts, maps, and illustrations, and so I sent a few pieces to the color printer.

And that's where my highly productive day turned frustrating. Our color printer is a decade old, and so finicky it's hardly worth sending a print job. Seven pages in, she decided to run paper through the duplexer for no discernible reason, and that was it. I couldn't find all the paper jams, I couldn't cancel the job, and I couldn't get it to print anymore.

So I came home feeling like I'd been spinning my wheels all day -- when it was really only the last step that had gone wrong. But because that last step was so frustrating, it slopped back over on everything else I had accomplished ... because all that other stuff was largely in my perception. I didn't produce a finished syllabus or essay, and I didn't get a hardcopy of my report. It's easy to believe I didn't really do anything worth mentioning. Maybe I need a meter that will measure my productivity in objective, standard units so I don't have to rely on my highly variable perception.

Closure

Sometime last week, I came to the realization that it was time to close out this past semester. I've been itching to get started on exciting new projects -- crafting a new syllabus, making headway on research -- and have had little enthusiasm for all the cleanup that needs to be done to put old projects to bed.

But it suddenly hit me: This is the last week of May. May is the beginning of the summer schedule for me, but it's also got one foot in the spring semester. We don't finish our official academic year's work until May 15. The last two weeks of the month could be thought of as a plunge into a new season. But they could also be a short respite before summer begins in earnest.

With that realization, I acquired an unexpected appetite for unfinished business. I picked up a knitting work-in-progress that had been dormant since late 2009. And I committed to bringing two large projects to completion at work -- editing a collection of essays I'd been putting off for months; and organizing my students' work on the parking project into a report that can be delivered to the administration. When June arrives next week, I'll have both of those tasks done and will be ready to enjoy the novelty of looking forward.

And it's over

Some of you don't watch Lost. So some of you are scratching your heads over all the hoopla. But in this household, and in thousands of others nationwide, it's the end of an era.

Noel stayed up until 3 am writing a five-thousand-word post about the final episode. A placeholder set of notes he put up shortly after the episode ended had a thousand comments by the time he got his full essay up.

This morning he's been quoted all over the internet and on social networks. Huffington Post, Us Magazine, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine, and any number of television-specific and Lost-specific sites, plus countless Twitter feeds -- all have mentioned and responded to his coverage.

Frankly, one thing we'll miss -- or at least I'll miss; I shouldn't speak for Noel -- is the sense of being at the center of the cultural conversation. The Lost blog led us to have some good conversations about television writing in general, and about the emerging conventions that surround them in the instant-reaction environment of the web. I hope Noel -- and the TV Club -- have gained some readers. And I'm sure that the thinking, reading, and writing we've done in this high-profile area will inform and improve our work to come.

This is the end

Tonight is the finale of Lost, and far be it from me to chart a course different from the Internet at large by writing about anything else.

While I've followed the show with interest and often passion over the years, it's had the most impact on our family because Noel has been writing about it since Season 4. His Lost blog on the A.V. Club's TV Club site has gathered a large and passionate community; every post generates hundreds of comments within an hour of being posted. Having such a devoted and opinionated audience takes its toll on him. He labors for hours -- sometimes days -- on each post, prewriting with non-episode-specific points he wants to make, taking notes during the show, then staying up until the wee hours to finish essays that can sometimes run to thousands of words.

Writing about the show has given Noel lots of opportunities, too; he's been on podcasts and gotten invitations to speak, especially as the series draws to a close. I'm in awe of what he's managed to do, keeping several years' worth of mythology in his head and making minute connections in the ever-more-complex story and structure of the show. I don't watch television that way; my readers on the How I Met Your Mother blog are often annoyed with me for not picking up on the relatively miniscule cast of recurring characters and jokes for that show. I could never do what Noel does, especially with such grace and insight.

Although there will be a hole in our lives when Lost ends after tonight, we'll be glad, too. There's a lot of pressure on Noel because of the prominence of this blog, and he certainly spends time and effort that's disproportionate to his compensation on this one task, maintaining quality and nurturing the community of his readers. What will take its place? Fringe has some of that potential, but it's not nearly the phenomenon that Lost has been. Few of us TV writers have had the dubious blessing of writing about an instant cult favorite, with all the scrutiny and responsibility that entails. And none of us knows where the finger of fate will point next.

At this point, we're determined to see the show through and evaluate its overall impact not based on moment-by-moment reactions, but on what it might mean as a long-form serialized drama, one of the most successful of its kind both critically and commercially. History will be the ultimate judge, but our goal as TV writers is to create a space where reflection can happen in the ephemeral timeframe of the broadcast schedule. Read Noel's years of coverage, and I think you'll see some of the best of that kind of writing anywhere.

This kind of blank adventure happens all the time

Today's post about a scarf for the next phase of life is at Toxophily.

I spent the afternoon playing Settlers of Catan with Archer. The game is second in his affections only to chess; he spends hours playing it either in its full-fledged board game version or on Noel's iPod, and that's accompanied by more hours reciting the rules to us. A friend responded to my Twitter updating mentioning the game by calling it a "gateway drug." And that sounds fine to me. If Archer's going to get hooked on anything, it might as well be the infinite variations and branching decision paths of strategy games. Does anybody have suggestions for a next step down this road?

Listening too long to one song

Today's post about gifts for the fashion-forward is at Toxophily.

I spent the morning off campus working through a long-term research project. It was a long-overdue chance to reconnect with something that many of us academics love -- reading books, making notes, building a conceptual framework around a topic, constructing an argument. When you spend your time in administration trying to build policies and procedures, you can forget about the other things you enjoy building.

It felt slightly silly to be at the coffee shop doing my research, because the only other person who was scheduled to be in the office today was a secretary. Surely I could have been just as productive in the empty office. But it turns out that letters we sent at the beginning of the week alerting our students to various levels of problems with their GPAs were received today, and the floodgates of calls and questions opened up. In the afternoon the phone barely stopped ringing. And the wisdom of my off-campus research retreat was revealed.