lazy bones

holy man am i lazy tonight. i would personally like to blame sunday, grading papers this morning, and an afternoon matinee. after grading 3 more papers, i just made an executive decision that i can finish grading in the morning, and that i am officially done for the night.

jeff and i went to see the departed this afternoon. it's REALLY good, i quite enjoyed it. leonardo dicaprio does a great job. i usually don't care much for him, but he did this role really really well. if you like scorsese films i think you'll really like it. i also ate popcorn at the movie which i haven't done in ages. mmm.

other than seeing the movie, jeff and i really haven't done much of anything this weekend. friday night we went to the chair of the english department's house for dinner. he and his wife are pretty amusing, they swear at each other a lot (but in a loving way i think...). saturday i drove jeff to work for 10:30 and went to the last farmer's market of the season. i bought a bunch of apples and pears, some new potatoes, and some arugula. then i started feeling a little cruddy again (pesky cold lingering). on my way home i stopped at the annual craft fair in the colesium here. it was huge, but pretty terrible. definitely a 'craft' fair. if you wanted something w/ your name painted on it, you were in luck. i was feeling pretty run down there, and the smell of badly scented homemade candles was getting to me, so i came home and ended up taking a 2 hour nap. i still felt a bit run down afterwards, but not nearly as bad. i think i just needed a final nap to really get rid of this cold.

last night i picked up jeff from work at 6:30 and we decided to rent a movie. we decided to find a new video store (b/c it's $4.50 to rent from blockbuster here!). it was in this place called the adam's mall, a place we had no idea where it was. we found it, and it's smack dab in the middle of fraternity houses. this was during the 2nd half of the WSU/UCLA game and when we got out of the car we could hear cheering from all sorts of houses around us, as well as the bar that is in the mall (more like an old high school w/ 5 businesses in it). the sound of cheering all around us was pretty funny, such a huge huge football school here. and the adam's mall knows it's market! one bar, a video store, a party store, the pita pit (subway on pitas), and a branch of the pullman police department. too funny. anyhow, we rented the xmen, decided to order pizza from papa john's (which is right there as well) and then sat in the bar and drank a beer and watched the game w/ a bunch of rowdy WSU fans. wow, lots of hooting and hollering and minor drunkenness. it was fun for the 15 minutes we waited for our pizza, but that was probably enough. amusing though. so we got home, ate pizza, watched xmen3 (fun!) and went to sleep.

quite a rockin' weekend!

this falling back deal is nice, although at 5pm today it was DARK. grr. alright then, off to eat dinner, sleep, and begin week 11 of school. crazy.

week 10 almost done!

It's hard to believe that week 10 of school is just about over. Eeks! I've gotta say that prepping for 2 new courses has really sucked up a major chunk of time. I also got in over my head with grading, in that I assigned too many in-depth papers that I really wanted to give a lot of feedback to. But feedback takes time. Time time time. Oh well, lesson learned. If I wasn't worrying about getting some articles out I'd be fine, but it's that "publish or perish" worry that lingers over me. I'm looking forward to breaks where I can spend a few days in coffee shops just writing/reading and not grading papers. What am I saying, I'll totally be grading papers. HA! Ok, Christmas maybe will be free.

Speaking of which, it looks like we'll be getting home for Christmas, that is assuming airfares don't continue to go as crazy as they already are. Last week tickets were 500, now they're 700!!! We're looking into flying to MSP (200 cheaper) and then getting a ride from jokes who will be headed to the UP anyway. Then on the way back we could celebrate new years even in MSP which would be fun. But, this is all tentative and there is the possibility that jokes will actually get a job in the meantime which might screw things up. We'll see.

So last Saturday (day 1 of cold) I went mushroom hunting with my friend Jessica. I totally forgot my camera, so no pictures for you. She knows a woman in soil sciences who is a mushroom geek, so she took us hunting for chantrelles. We went to this national forest about 45 minutes from here. It was very beautiful and lush there, and super moist (so unlike Pullman!). There were a TON of mushrooms, but we didn't find any tasty ones (not chantrelles). There were also a lot of bird hunters around which was funny. We all were told to wear bright colors, so as not to be mistaken for birds. Anyhow, it was fun and now I know a new place to check out.

My cold is finally going away I think. This makes me happy. Jeff works Friday and Saturday again, so I'll be grading more papers this weekend. Exciting! Come November we're going to have to play more on weekends, maybe a day trip to Spokane or something. Ok, off to watch tv and go to sleep.

it's been awhile

haven't posted in awhile, it's been a pretty crazy week. it's midterms, and my students are fried, and i'm fried, and everyone needs a week off. but no, instead papers are due and papers need to be graded and blah blah blah. oh well, i'm just tired and mildly cranky. i also got a bit stressed out because next week i start teaching a 3 week section of this intro to english studies course. my 3 weeks are on professional writing and visual rhetoric. should be ok, patty gave me a lot of materials from the time she did it, but it's just one more prep for 3 weeks. we'll see how it goes. i'm just tired i think, need a vacation. looking forward to thanksgiving.

so jeff started his new job today. hard to tell on the 1st day, but he liked it as much as he could so far. spent time getting things set up, etc. he's working at the coop also, so he's a busy beaver. as of nov 1 his coop hours will be much less though, so that will help. for now what really stinks is he works saturdays. but this has been ok as i've hada lot of work to do, so i can work on saturdays.

so a few things showed up in the mail last week, i thought i'd share:

that thing on the left looks better close up:


hoorah! bound dissertation and diploma, both in the same week!

ok, on another note, some folks wanted to see pics of our place inside so here you go.

this is the living area and our new tv stand. not much on the walls yet, we're lazy.

i spun around from where i was standing and took this pic, our dining room i guess, but we only have 2 chairs right now


kitchen view 1

kitchen view 2


did anyone just see the bears come back and win that game? holy wah! ok then, gotta run.

pictures: tahdah

batch 1: dad, kelly, pullman


dad in my classroom



batch 2: kamiak butte--jeff loves nature




batch 3: jeff takes good pictures

yooper visit

holy wah, i'm beat. long weekend, but we had a really nice time. dad and kelly got here thursday around 3. they came over, checked out our place, then we took a tour of pullman and moscow. we ended up driving to uniontown (on a dirt road we'd never been on, through a wheatfield, the scenic path) for dinner. we ate at eleanor's pub for dinner, who promise "the best burgers on the palouse" and i think they're probably right. friday i had to be at work from 11-3, and jeff worked all day. we met dad and kelly for breakfast at the old european (bigger/brighter suomi) where we ate abelskivers, eggs, and meat products. dad and kelly spent the day bumming around, then i met them at the book store around 3 where we poked around and they looked for WSU gear. did a campus tour after that, and then met up w/ our regular friday cocktail crew at rico's bar. finally we ended up the red door restaurant in moscow where we ate a very very yummy dinner, and where we met jeff after he got off of work. saturday we did the farmer's market, looked at the grizzly bears, watched some football, grabbed lunch, and went to prairie home companion. it was really cool and wacky to have prairie home here in pullman. i hope some of you managed to catch it live. it was a really nice time, great musicians, and just a lot of silliness. worth the $$ definitely. we then came back here and watched more football (theme of weekend) and finally went to swilly's in pullman for dinner. had great food. crashed.

wait, some of you might be wondering why we didn't end up in coeur d'alene. well, we were planning to go saturday after prairie home, primarily because there were no hotel rooms available in pullman that night and we figured it'd be fun to poke around. but they ended up getting the hotel for saturday night (somebody cancelled) so we just stayed put which was probably much easier in the long run.

anyhow, this morning we met up at a bar called the office. yes, i was at a bar on a sunday morning at 10am. but it was fun. it's this bar that shows every single nfl game and serves breakfast. so we watched the pack, drank bloody marys, and ate food. dad and i stuck around to watch the pack screw up and lose, and kelly roamed pullman a bit and jeff went to the bike store. it was fun. our friends andy and keri told us about it, as they're huge colts fans and go there most sundays to watch the game.

dad and kelly left here around 2pm to head to spokane, they fly out at 7am monday. then jeff and i went to kamiak butte as it's open again now that fire season is over. it's a butte about 10 miles from here. you can drive about 1/2way up and hike the rest of the way. jeff and i took a 3 mile loop around the butte. it's really pretty, but the way up is a bit of a hike. whew. nice views. i'll post pics soon. we then went to a belated wedding party some folks in the dept were having (they got married in portland in july). now i'm home. and tired. and have to go to the chiropracter at 8am tomorrow. but jeff is making me dinner, so i'm happy. it's week 8 this week, hard to believe. holy wah indeed.

ps. go cougs, go blue.

he got the job!

So apparantly Jeff has some magical fairy dust around sprinkling every interview he goes to. He interviewed on Monday at 3, today at 3 (48 hours later) he got the job offer. We're both a little conflicted about it, but it's always nice to get an offer.

Pros: it pays well, it's only 20 hrs/week, after 4 months he can begin taking any class at the University for $5/class, it's doing more design than he's been able to do at his past job

Cons: working both the coop job and this one will mean a lot of working, will it lead him away from kitchen work? does he want to be led away from kitchen work? he'll have staff hours, not academic hours, so for eg he'll only get a few days off at thanksgiving and christmas and NO summer off.

He did say yes. He'll start in 2 weeks. And the way he figures it for now, he'll give it a whirl for the next 8 months and see how it treats him. Is the universe leading him down a path towards grad school?

Oh, and we also realized today that he's never *not* gotten a job he's interviewed for. What a turd.

In any case, he's happy for the most part, and a bit conflicted about where this is leading him in life.

Ok, I have to get back to doing a ton of work. I'm trying to plan for Friday and Monday classes today so that I can enjoy my time with Dad and Kelly and not be worrying about lesson plans. Pip pip.

workin' man

Not much new here, BUT jeff had his interview at WSU today. It's a part time job doing kind of what he did at MTU. It would be nice in that he could take classes for $5/pop which would be pretty cool. He felt like it went pretty well, as well as he thought it could. So now we just wait and see what happens.

He worked all weekend at the coop, which was probably ok because I had a ton of grading to do. I spent time at the coffee shop grading rhetoric papers, then I spent time on our back porch reading aristotle. Weeheew. Pretty dull weekend, but I got a lot done so that's good.

Dad and Kelly are on the Oregon coast right now and are headed this way Thursday. It's kind of hard to think what to do with them here, since there's really not much to do... but it should be fine. It'll be good to see them and show them where we live.

The Packers stink. I just watched them for the first time all season since we don't get their Sunday games here (they just played Monday night). Now I've gotta watch Heroes, which I can't tell if I think is awesome or just cheesy. We shall see.