Mmmm. Well, for the record, walnut molasses hermits go very well with beer.
Especially after grading over 25 undergraduate papers, most of which are on exactly the same topic.
Proven Winners Plants Postulations
13 years ago
Saturday, March 8, 2008
This is a lonely town, ours is a lonely life . . .
Crampy, moody, and intensely craving molasses. I am trying my hand at a variation on hermit cookies, which I'll post on the Kitchen Empress if it turns out good. (Edit: it's here!) My version of the old-fashioned spiced raisin bar includes walnuts, turbinado sugar, and molasses. Even though I shouldn't be eating the raw egg, I couldn't help but taste the batter, which tastes really good.
The sun peeked out for a few minutes this afternoon, and the sunset is another one of those lovely ones where the frozen surface of the lake turns a cool purplish shade of pale grey, and the horizon gets dappled with a gentle peachy yellow behind the bare treetops. It's beautiful, but I still am hoping for the spring soon.
I spent the day grading undergraduate papers for Anthro 101, trying to work my way through the stack of 75. Characteristically slowly. I need to get a move on, though, because I have to do some writing tomorrow.
I took a little break to talk to Ali, who just bought a blue Prius, and to watch the last episode of Felicity again, while eating a little lunch of roasted broccoli, sauteed grape tomatoes, and quesadillas.
The sun peeked out for a few minutes this afternoon, and the sunset is another one of those lovely ones where the frozen surface of the lake turns a cool purplish shade of pale grey, and the horizon gets dappled with a gentle peachy yellow behind the bare treetops. It's beautiful, but I still am hoping for the spring soon.
I spent the day grading undergraduate papers for Anthro 101, trying to work my way through the stack of 75. Characteristically slowly. I need to get a move on, though, because I have to do some writing tomorrow.
I took a little break to talk to Ali, who just bought a blue Prius, and to watch the last episode of Felicity again, while eating a little lunch of roasted broccoli, sauteed grape tomatoes, and quesadillas.
It's a small world after all.
I love the small world of the internet. Today I happened to read an internet listserve message of a listserve I happened to find through another listserve, through a course that I found out about through . . . god, the world of coincidence is paved with other coincidences. And there I found that my old friend Sarah, whom I'd lost touch with, is writing for the blog of the Arete Youth Foundation in Bulgaria now. Now all I have to do is put fingers to keys and I'll be back in touch with her. :)
Otherwise, today wasn't such a spectacular day. I was doing a little stretching to try to ease the pain in my neck, which has given me pain fairly consistently for about a year now. (It goes back to a rainy day in the fall last year when a speeding car rammed an SUV into me after I had to stop suddenly in response to congestion ahead, and the impact of the fender-bender brought an immediate headache and then, a few months later, excruciating and puzzling neck pain.)
So, anyway, there I was, doing a forward bend in the grad lounge while chatting with a couple friends in the department about the vagaries and stresses of academic performance evaluation, when -- what is happening? I was there, all the way on the floor, and I had the sense: I shouldn't be sleeping here now. One friend said: "Did you do that on purpose?" And I had to ask: "Do what?"
When I realized I'd fainted, I tried to gather more information: how long had I been out? What had happened? I was confused and a bit upset. So, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the university health center instead of at home grading papers and writing, where I'd planned to be. A kind, dear friend walked me over to ensure I didn't fall over on my way there.
I went, prescription in hand, to the Kroger pharmacy after my UHS excitement (I lay under a white blanket in a quiet, private, white room for a couple hours, reading celebrity gossip rags and National Geographic, listening to Glenn Gould play the Goldberg variations on my iPod while waiting for the doctor to arrive), only to be told that my health coverage had been cancelled effective 12/31. I was offered the option of buying the drugs for over 100 dollars a pop, and I was less than enthusiastic about this option, so I'll have to wait until Monday when the benefits office opens and I can ask WHY THE ^&*()_ isn't my health insurance card active?
Last night, after a glorious reading from Gary Snyder, a lovely visit with Katie & John, who met up with me at Rackham auditorium to hear the fabulous reading, and a happy, serendipitous visit with my other friend John, who happened to be on his way back to write an abstract after an evening visit to the gym, I arrived to my truck only to discover that I had left my lights on when I moved from one lot to another between administering an exam and going to union contract bargaining, so I had to call AAA to get a jump start.
Thank goodness for weekends. I don't think I could face the world tomorrow if I tried. And tonight, I am hiding away in the comfort of the cottage, eating mac & cheese, internet chatting with friends, and watching Lost and Battlestar Galactica: Razor from the lazy softness of the couch and my own bed, contemplating baking hermit cookies and instead lazily licking sticky, thick blackstrap molasses straight from the spoon.
Otherwise, today wasn't such a spectacular day. I was doing a little stretching to try to ease the pain in my neck, which has given me pain fairly consistently for about a year now. (It goes back to a rainy day in the fall last year when a speeding car rammed an SUV into me after I had to stop suddenly in response to congestion ahead, and the impact of the fender-bender brought an immediate headache and then, a few months later, excruciating and puzzling neck pain.)
So, anyway, there I was, doing a forward bend in the grad lounge while chatting with a couple friends in the department about the vagaries and stresses of academic performance evaluation, when -- what is happening? I was there, all the way on the floor, and I had the sense: I shouldn't be sleeping here now. One friend said: "Did you do that on purpose?" And I had to ask: "Do what?"
When I realized I'd fainted, I tried to gather more information: how long had I been out? What had happened? I was confused and a bit upset. So, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the university health center instead of at home grading papers and writing, where I'd planned to be. A kind, dear friend walked me over to ensure I didn't fall over on my way there.
I went, prescription in hand, to the Kroger pharmacy after my UHS excitement (I lay under a white blanket in a quiet, private, white room for a couple hours, reading celebrity gossip rags and National Geographic, listening to Glenn Gould play the Goldberg variations on my iPod while waiting for the doctor to arrive), only to be told that my health coverage had been cancelled effective 12/31. I was offered the option of buying the drugs for over 100 dollars a pop, and I was less than enthusiastic about this option, so I'll have to wait until Monday when the benefits office opens and I can ask WHY THE ^&*()_ isn't my health insurance card active?
Last night, after a glorious reading from Gary Snyder, a lovely visit with Katie & John, who met up with me at Rackham auditorium to hear the fabulous reading, and a happy, serendipitous visit with my other friend John, who happened to be on his way back to write an abstract after an evening visit to the gym, I arrived to my truck only to discover that I had left my lights on when I moved from one lot to another between administering an exam and going to union contract bargaining, so I had to call AAA to get a jump start.
Thank goodness for weekends. I don't think I could face the world tomorrow if I tried. And tonight, I am hiding away in the comfort of the cottage, eating mac & cheese, internet chatting with friends, and watching Lost and Battlestar Galactica: Razor from the lazy softness of the couch and my own bed, contemplating baking hermit cookies and instead lazily licking sticky, thick blackstrap molasses straight from the spoon.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Gary Snyder reading tonight in Ann Arbor!
National Book Award winning novelist Andrea Barrett and Pultizer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder will kick off the "Writing in Public" conference tonight with a public reading in the Rackham Auditorium at 7:30 p.m.
Full conference information available here.
Sometime, remind me to tell the story of when I went to hear Snyder read at Stanford University when I was a student in Santa Cruz.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Slit: "Do Muslims never get to have an idea of their own?"
Livejournal blogger slit strikes again with another incisive post, with her intrepretation on Western media coverage of the Turkey's recent reflection on the hadith.
Cheap prescription drugs
I was meandering through Kroger last night and noticed an advertisement that they now have $4 generic prescriptions at their pharmacy. And I just thought, huh, that would save some serious cash. I think that's even cheaper than the mail-away option offered through Walgreens. Not to mention, I would have more flexible hours and a more convenient location to pick up my prescriptions.
Mapping Genetic Variation for Insight into Humanity's History
It's an interesting learning experience, teaching undergraduates about race. Some of them have a really hard time letting go of essentialized thinking about groups, and understanding the quite basic notion that race is a social construction with material consequences, but no biological basis.
The fabulous PBS film Race: The Power of an Illusion helps quite a bit for fueling the discussion, so we showed the third part, The House We Live In, to the sections this time around. Somehow roughly a third of the class still missed the question on the exam asking about the biological basis of race, answering that it's "skin color, hair texture, and nose breadth".
As I continue striving to find a way to communicate these ideas to young people, I get increasingly excited about research that may help to clarify the issues. So the image above caught my eye when I saw it on the U of M homepage today. It's a schematic of human genetic variation, with colors representing different genetic types. If you click on it, you'll get to the article on the research the team has been doing. Pretty amazing, I say.
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