Weekend Update: Hello, friends/springtime edition

Greetings from the Monster Menagerie: new addition, Kachina ("Hillilli") doll, on the right.

It smells like spring out there! And with summer-time temperatures, to boot. This is the second day of a five-day streak of temperatures in the mid to high-eighties in Ben Lomond, and we have the house on heat lockdown. Early every morning, I'll open all the doors and windows to let in what's left of the cool night-time air, and then I'll close everything up and draw all of the blinds on the west-side of the house at around 9am to lock the cool temperatures in for as long as possible. This can usually get us through most of the afternoon, and then we'll open everything up and maybe even get the hurricane fan going once it starts cooling down outside again. 

The winter quarter ended with a bang. So much so that I embarked on a three-week mental Spring Break sometime in the final week of teaching. Once the vacation-fog cleared from my brain, since I'm not teaching this spring quarter, I've turned my attentions to everything that had been neglected due to my teaching load in the previous quarters -- namely, the house. 

Jason and I have been doing some gnarly spring cleaning around here. Organizing closets, bookshelves, climbing things up into the attic, scrubbing cabinets and baseboards, vacuuming cobwebs and dust tundras, etc. etc. It's amazing how easy it is to ignore the fact that you live in the Munster's family home (cobwebs on candlesticks -- no irony, no hyperbole, true!). But once I got the heavy-duty cleaning out of the way (12 buckets of soapy hot water to mop the entire house) I couldn't stop dusting and scrubbing and throwing things away (selling books and other stuffs at Logos and online). My parents came to visit last weekend and we extended the work outdoors -- repairing the irrigation system demolished by this winter's septic system repairs, planting and pruning in the front yard. It 's all looking GOOD. We even have the hammock back up, too.

This should also mean that there will be more activity on the blog as well (how many times have you heard that one before?). Since I'm not teaching right now, I'm actually quite hopeful that it will be the case since I'll need something to keep my brain energies exercising. It's amazing how much "healthy" brainpower* gets sucked into teaching and how much of a surplus you have once you aren't teaching anymore. I want to read books and watch foreign films for which I must read subtitles and write big thoughts. I want to start producing things other than letter grades and essay evaluations again.

Speaking of the blog itself, yesterday I was looking through its pageview statistics and saw that a good deal of traffic was coming in from the blog Barcelone Experimental. Look! They took some of my filtered images from my third Enriqueta Martí post! Reading through the article, I was finally able to find the link they put in for my blog. My French may be rusty (and it certainly is), but it looks like they're attributing my Enriqueta Martí posts to Elsa Plaza. That gives me a chuckle (see the Editor's Note and comments at the bottom of the post for why). I briefly considered writing the author (or better yet: leaving a comment) but then decided against it. It's flattering enough that my weird Sack Lady posts have become source material for others -- and, if we wait long enough, Elsa Plaza will take care of the misattribution eventually.  So, thanks, anonymous author of Barcelone Experimental!

* as opposed to "junky" brainpower -- that thing I use to watch shitty television and waste time on the internet. 

Springtime, also for postcards

Check it out -- it's the first postcard of the 2013 season!

Retro and futuristic and weird all at once. 

My former student Ali (adoptive son of Carlos and Claudia) is spending his final college quarter abroad in Berlin. He left close to a month ago promising postcards, which is a good thing especially considering that he is terrible about checking/reading/writing email. Here's the (first?) postcard. Keep them coming, Ali!

Turning the postcard over was especially exciting:

Woah. 

I love receiving lengthy epistles via postcard! It appears that Ali is having a fantastic time. Careful not to do too much public 9am drinking, sir. You're enrolled in classes, after all. Leave that Bacchanalia for the summer. 

Pink Freud

I took this snapshot of a flyer for my "Core Café" discussion salon for work last week. I hand out flyers at each week's faculty meeting, and by the time I walk into my classroom at 2 o'clock to teach my second class, a flyer's always tacked up on the grungy bulletin board in the back of the room. A circuitous way of getting things done, but one less thing I have to do myself (i'm so lazy) -- excellent! Thank you mystery instructor who teaches in my room at 12:30!

Freud in the American university classroom: so many penises.

An even bigger thank you to the super helicopterita who agreed to make the flyers for me in the first place. The first link in the chain of posting flyers for Core Café is, of course, the flyers' creator: Claudia! Did you know Clo Blanco is an internationally renowned art director, graphic artist, and painter? Did you know that she designed the NYC Condom "Get some!" campaign? Well she is and she did, and you should see her online portfolio on Behance.

The best part of the fact that I somehow suckered (badgered) Clo into making these flyers for me is that she designs a new one for each week's salon meeting and emails me each week's design on Sundays. It's a fancy surprise every Sunday evening, almost as much a surprise for me as is it for the rest of the faculty and students. Clo, everyone at Stevenson College loves the flyers. They want to mail you cookies as a thank you.

I'll post new photos each week, and then photograph the wall in my office where I put up each week's flyer at the end of the academic quarter -- a grand total of nine flyers! Marx and Nietzsche through Marjane Satrapi! It's quite the canon.

This week coming up is Virginia Woolf!

Welcome back, here I am

After what felt like the world's shortest winter break, spent mostly at my parents' house with my family, in semi-retirement,* here we are. And, in the blink of an eye, we're already finishing up week two of the new academic term. First Marx, now Nietzsche, next week Freud. Oh my god I'm in heaven.

Marx, Engels, Angela Lansbury, and me. Saturday nights don't get much better.

I have a new Sack Man post in the works (Sack Man and werewolf!), as well as a Serbian vampire and Venezuelan cannibal to investigate. With the way things have been going with my teaching load this academic year, we'll see how quickly I can churn them out. In the mean time, check out the Instagram, I'm posting images of the quotidien to it frequently.**

It's just about my bedtime. I've been getting up before dawn on teaching days to work and it is DELIGHTFUL. The world is quiet, and dark, and it's just me and the dog and maybe Murder She Wrote, too.

***

* Semi-retirement really isn't much of an exaggeration: up at 6am, working together, eating together, walking the dogs together, falling asleep at 9pm in front of the t.v., watching Rachel Maddow together. It's either semi-retirement or some kind of socialistic suburban co-op utopia.
** Jason tells me that, based on the sheer volume of photos of Roscoe on there, Instagram people must think that I'm an insane dog lady, which is fine, mainly because the only people following me are my friends who know that to be true already.