Yes We Span campaign

Yay! My American expat friends in Hungary made Yahoo News.

I'm reading and thinking about families and domestic space in ancient cities. I started with Ancient Sippar (c.1750-1595 B.C.) in Babylonia, and now I'm reading about families in the height of ancient Rome (200 B.C.-A.D. 200). . . There's a reason I'm not an archaeologist, but I have to admit that some of this stuff is fascinating. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill's article on Domus and Insulae in Rome sent me to Google when I read the line that the Antiche Stanze exhibition was of an extensive area of housing that emerged in the late 1940s when the new metro station was being installed in front of Termini (Wallace-Hadrill 2003:10), and that it had been demolished and all that is left is the photographs and private notebooks of an archaeologist. And sure enough, there's an online Powerpoint presentation with a few photographs. . .I love the interwebs.

Fall pleasures

I think I'll be able to harvest my sweet potato plant pretty soon! I'm not sure what really to expect, since it's the first year I've grown sweet potatoes. But I love them, and I'm pretty excited.

The drive home from Ann Arbor is prettier every day. Despite the gray. I don't know if I'll ever quite get used to the breathtaking beauty of the autumn in the East, having grown up on the West coast. Or, for that matter, to the delicious smell of the air in the fall. It's . . .pregnant.

I just harvested all my remaining basil leaves from the plants in the garden and made a whole huge thing of pesto, a slight variation on this recipe. My house smells completely amazing.

I also have huge pots with my pineapple sage and lemon verbena, and also a little pot of cinnamon basil that I've just rescued from the garden in anticipation of our first freeze of the year.

I did some internet research on winterizing the herb garden and hope that I've prepared adequately with layers of cloth over many -- though not all -- of the plants. I'll see tomorrow how everything looks. Perhaps I should have clipped all the parsley too, but I'm hoping that a couple layers of cloth will be sufficient for the night.

I have discovered a couple quite nice low-sulfite wines they sell at Trader Joes now for under $6. Which is pretty awesome for someone with a sulfite sensitivity, because up until recently, the only drinkable bottles were $11-13, which meant that I didn't drink much wine. But tonight I brought a bottle over to my friend A.'s house after teaching and taking care of a few quick items of business at the university, and we visited for a bit, drank some wine, and ate some cheese before I came back to my cottage. We might make it a Friday routine. :)

Good news to report, I've been very productive in my work recently, and I'm finally getting back to being on top of things. After a very difficult year, that's a huge relief. Now I just need to get a handle on my dissertation project and get some grants written convincingly enough to get support for my research abroad . . . no small feat. (fingers crossed)

Fall has settled in here in Michigan, and it's stunningly beautiful. The air is crisp and fresh, and when the sun is shining it's glorious to be alive, with the leaves turning and the foliage thinning just enough to give an even more spectacular view of the river when you drive Huron River Drive. I transplanted most of the zinnias in my garden so I now have a charming and cheerful pathway lined with pink blooms and a profusion of mint that leads to my cottage. I ate the most tart, crisp, delicious local apple this morning while I took a break from gardening.

Somehow I don't even mind I have almost 30 papers to grade. It's nice that they're about literature . . . it's a welcome change to be thinking about Pushkin and Lermentov for a semester.

Bipartisan Approach to Hotness

Hah!!!

"The Other Hawaii"

Interesting stuff about Hawaiian independence movement.