We riffed on the salmon-grill-cedar-plank recipe in Thursday's Strib tonight. The marinade was:
1/4 C soy sauce
1/4 C maple syrup
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 inch ginger root, minced
Juice of one (really dessicated) lime
I thought it was ok, nothing special. I think I would use less maple syrup, and perhaps fill in the liquid requirement with some rice wine vinegar. It was a bit too sweet, and the syrup got the grill all sticky. I wanted to taste more lime and garlic.
Also I think I have my day count wrong. We have 17 more days in the TC starting tomorrow, and not including the 15th, when we will get up very early and hit the road. Math: what a concept.
About 40-50 boxes packed, and I think that is more than half.
I'm nowhere near as excited to move "back" as I was to move out here. There's just so much to do, and so much left unfinished (my dissertation draft will not be completed, even though I am still hoping to get a couple more chapters cranked out). I'm also trying to get copies of articles and books I need for the lit review, since my library access will be, let's say, minimalist.
Then 3 days of brutal driving, and then the cleaning and unpacking, and all the start-up stuff: buy a car; prep two courses; get acclimated to a new school. I want to get all involved in fixing up the yard and re-decorating, but there just will NOT be time.
Then a research/writing plan for fall.
Well, we pushed our move date back by a week in order to give B's foot more time to heal. It's looking good though, and hopefully that is not tempting the E.R. fates.
We've packed about 20 boxes, and we'll need more boxes, but things are in pretty good shape, in my opinion. I'd pack clothes, but I don't want to have to do piles of ironing at the other end. And I am afraid to pack any dissertation stuff in case I need it in the next three weeks. I suppose all the good china and glassware could be packed, though.
But nevermind about all that. Back to collecting and documenting materials I'll need for my dissertation after I'm 1500 miles away from the stupendous resources of the UMN library.
How is it possible that in three weeks we'll be packing up a truck?! (Well, ok, we'll be paying some other people to do that.)
Yesterday was a tough day - trying to finish up lecture notes and an in-class exercise in the midst of three other appointments with weird coordination. B doesn't drive yet, which makes things more complicated.
I had that tense feeling all day that the minutes were ticking down and NOTHING WAS GETTING DONE, but it all worked out in the end (as usual) with barely enough time to do ONE of the two in-class exercises I had prepared.
Today feels like a slacker day - only two appointments and no teaching. Must prep for tomorrow. But I'm sick - a cold came on last night (I sneezed continuously for about 10 minutes, which was weird) and I have that drippy sore throat thing and the slightly runny nose. Gack.
More, anon.
At 7:30 pm tonight I found myself staring wistfully out the window of B's hospital room. Even being in the parking ramp it overlooked would have been preferable to 6 hours in the hermetically sealed environs of the hospital all afternoon on a perfect summer day.
B is fine: a "do-over" of his foot surgery from 5 weeks ago (his big toe rejected the titanium or whatever screws and the second toe decided on a different alignment than what the surgeon was looking for) went fine. Then his mouth disconnected from his brain and he announced "I think I'm having a heart attack" when coming out of anesthesia. A dream, maybe, or some slight actual weirdness in his pulse - but it sent the staff into full hyper medical mode. So as punishment (and insurance against future lawsuits) they kept his sorry ass there overnight.
Meanwhile I am cat-sitting a pure white, deaf cat who is the most affectionate creature on this planet. I hope that he will sleep tonight (as opposed to kneading his (unclawed) feet into my chest all night).
On the good side, I outlined lecture notes for Monday and started in on Wednesday. So I can get back to dissertation tomorrow.
Oh, yeah, another rant. I watched a documentary on Levittown produced by Hofstra in 1994. Really terrrible: annoying, cloying music snips; repetitious; a bunch of acontextualized reminiscences you wouldn't care about unless you knew the speakers. Some great, rare footage of construction, though. I wanted to know so much more about the geography - why that particular area? What were the economics of building and the economies of scale? How has the town matured and changed? What have been the challenges of living there?
(Kind of a poignant note in one interview - a woman who has lived there 40 years and still hates it and hates the suburbs.)
Then I watched "Suburbs: Arcadia for Everyone," thinking it was an ironic title (Pride of Place series, RAM Stern narrating, 1986) but alas, no. Turns out that the example of 20 or so new single-family manufactured housing units dropped into the South Bronx shows that the suburbs are for everyone, even poor blacks. (They come with bars already on the windows; I am not making this up.)
There was some good footage of historical suburbs but Stern isn't a very gifted narrator and the overall premise was flawed. Not that I am bashing the suburbs (he does a little of that with the strip) so much as questioning the premise that everyone should live that way.
I had a rant all queued up and then I forgot what it was. Brassieres that never fit? Neighbors who set off M-80s? The person who always parks in front of the fire hydrant out front? Oh, yeah, the mold thing in the basement.
A few weeks ago, the other tenant's HW heater sprung a leak. I found it when I was trying to figure out why we had no water pressure even though we were the only ones home. By the time we turned off the gas and the cold water feed, the basement was fairly wet. And naturally, because of summer humidity, it hasn't entirely dried out. Moreover, the basement has started to develop that moldy smell - a smell I haven't smelled since my mother-in-law sold her house.
See, their house was at the lowest elevation in their block, on clay soils, and routinely took on serious water in spring thaws. The highest I ever saw it was about 10-12" but they all remembered it being higher. What once had been a finished basement was unused, but I am sure that lurking behind all that knotty pine panelling was quite a furry sight. Every single item in the house smelled of the dank (the whole first floor, too; it was totally pervasive) and I had to wash every single item of clothing when we came back from there, worn or unworn, because of the smell.
Oddly, none of them ever seemed to notice.
Now, here the same thing: even if I whisk the clothes into the dryer the moment the washer stops spinning, and then extricate them the moment it's done, they still have a hint of the dank. I've thought of line drying but I just don't have the motivation. I suppose if we were going to be here more than - hmm, 33 days - I'd be looking for solutions. But I am ready to turn in my keys and walk away.
While I've been preparing the lectures for urban geography this summer, I've come across so many ethnographies that I'd like to read some day - partly just for sheer enjoyment, partly to enhance my understanding of urban processes.
G. Sjoberg (1960), The Preindustrial City (challenges the Chicago School generalizations about urban life)
J. Feagin's case study of Houston (ditto the challenges)
Orum's study of Austin, possibly Urban Aff Q 1991.
H Gans, Books on Levittown and Boston's North End
Lynds, books on Muncie IND
W. Warner's book on my hometown (I read it when I was a teenager; I'd get much different things out of it now)
"The dependence on Chicago as a basis for generalizing about urban life is challenged by and today the generalizations of the Chicago School have come under attack from other perspectives: for example in Feagin's (1988) case study of Houston" (Feagin, Orum and Sjoberg 1991:44).
Updated 7/12/07
I was all excited to read Feagin's book Free Enterprise City: Houston in Political-Economic Perspective, especially chapter 2 "theories of urban development," which I thought would help me fit all my chaotic reading into a neatly organized package. Alas, it doesn't really do that.
Sjoberg's book is great, although it's more of a review of then-existing literature on pre-industrial cities. He takes some good jabs at his fellow sociologists - good fun. I am about halfway through. His purpose is to show the commonalities between pre-industrial cities, and show how they are different from industrial cities, using the comparative approach that he says has fallen out of favor in sociology. He rejects the Chicago School (especially Wirth) for failing to appreciate the importance of social organization in urban life (for them it's all anomie and disorder). He rejects the urban ecologists for thinking of technology as something "outside" human ecology rather than a product of human minds. He rejects the focus on cultural and social differences (between cities; idiographic?) of Firey, Kolb and Max Weber. He recognizes the importance of looking at power as a differentiating factor, but his main focus is technology as the main independent variable: "technology both requires and makes possible certain social forms. This viewpoint does not commit us to technological determinism, however, for recognized is the impact upon social structures of other variables - the city, cultural values, and social power - all of which can affect the patterning of technology itself" (7). [there's a certain Yoda-like structure to some of the sentences...]