You know what? Cheerfulness, contentment, and a work life that includes a lot of full and interesting days are all very good things. But these are not optimal conditions for blogging. If I were still back in the midwest, keeping irregular sleeping hours, stressing out about teaching, and fretting about my future, I’d probably be […]
I’m back in Charlottesville, and I’ve just moved into my new apartment, the one I’ll be staying in for the rest of the year. The trip homeward from Pennsylvania was instructive, in that I made two major discoveries: that unless you lift weights regularly, it’s a bad idea to test your strength by trying to […]
The move is over — or at least Phase 1 of the move, Phase 2 being the part where I find a more permanent place to live and get my stuff out of storage. Everything went fine, even with down-to-the-wire packing and three airplanes to catch. I arrived in Charlottesville on Friday and spent the […]
Yes, it’s yet another post about packing. Sorry, but that’s pretty much all I can think of right now. Those of you looking for hardhitting critiques of academia, random poetry, or amateur music-criticism, try back in a week or so once the dust has settled. And I mean that literally: I just vacuumed under my […]
A week from today and I’ll be in Charlottesville. Lots of packing still to do. Expect light blogging for the next couple of weeks. In other news, I saw Chicago the other night as part of the outdoor film series, and it’s just as enjoyable on repeat viewings (I’d seen it twice or three times […]
1. You drop off a few pieces of clothing at the dry cleaners’ and then forget to pick them up until the beginning of the following week, at which point you discover that the cleaners have closed for the summer and won’t re-open until September, by which time you will be long gone. And your […]
Yesterday — one of the few hot days we’ve had so far this year — I was walking across campus when I noticed that it was getting darker, rather rapidly. I looked up and saw a bank of dark slate-blue clouds moving in. At the same time, the wind suddenly picked up, almost buffeting me […]
Summer is here in spades: it’s supposed to get up to 90 this week. Which means that it’s officially summer movie season chez Household Opera. While I’m no great fan of the kind of summer movies that feature car crashes, meteorites, and/or giant tidal waves swamping New York, I nonetheless find my cinematic tastes changing […]
There’s a great passage in the first chapter of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler in which the unnamed Reader (always addressed in the second person) enters a bookstore and is confronted by the intimidating legions of Books You Haven’t Read. Calvino arrays them into categories, including: the Books You’ve Been Planning […]
Just got back from my trip to Charlottesville. Found an apartment for the summer, in a quaint, charming, historic building (yay!). Freaking out about what to do with the furniture I’m keeping, as said apartment is pre-furnished. (Storage, most likely.) Freaking out about moving in general, but otherwise quite happy. Charlottesville is a town of […]