Hi, I'm Back

When I last posted, I was in Honolulu at an NEH Institute on Chinese history and philosophy. Since that time I have flown to Syracuse, driven to Cleveland, driven back to Canton, New York, then driven to Bethany Delaware, then back to Canton, and then I drove in a big moving truck full of all of my possessions to Bay Village, Ohio, where I now reside in a house which is far to large for our current needs, but which may seem less oversized once Joey and Caroline are teenagers, but which is nevertheless a mere 200 square feet away from being considered an environmentally unfriendly house by the standards of the legislation recently proposed by Rep John Dingell (D-MI) which would revoke the mortgage deduction on McMansions, defined as any house of 3,000 sq. ft. or more--now you might think that this clearly means that I have joined the ruling class of bloated, myopic plutocrats who are so blinded by their own luxury that they are unaware that the world is falling down around them, but let me assure you that occupying this house actually reminds me that the world is falling down around me because the house itself is falling down, with a leak appearing in our first night of occupancy, dangerous levels of radon in the basement (which right now we are mitigating solely by staying out of the basement, although we plan to do something more sophisticated down the line [although I actually can't find anything on the EPA site which indicates that radon accumulates mostly in the basement, or that staying out of the basement does any good or that we aren't all four of us {five counting Edie} smoking the equivalent of several packs a day and not even reaping the benefits of looking cool and getting a little buzz]) electrical outlets that are not up to code because ungrounded circuits still have three pronged outlets--an environmental insult made the worse because I so far have been driving to work at my new school, Lorain County Community College, which is a fine institution, even though it does not subscribe to jstor and I was specifically told that they had a jstor subscription when I toured the campus as a part of my job interview and this assurance helped me to think that by working at a community college I was not dropping out of the world of higher education (the librarian just now told me that jstor was too expensive and only contained advanced materials which were outside of the educational mission of the college, even though I wanted to access jstor specifically to get a journal article which I was going to assign to their students); all of this as you can imagine has kept me more than a little busy, which is why blogging has fallen by the wayside, kept alive only by the tiny ghost embodied as list of articles about Chinese environmental issues which I have been planning to blog, and the admission by a few people I know in the real world that they actually keep up with me via this blog (hi mom), and the general sense that I will know my life has finally settled down once I have enough time to blog, a sense which gave me something to hope for, a heartening image which helped me when in the times when Caroline gets an impetigo infection which grows to a sore three inches in diameter under her left arm and we need to see a doctor the day before we are supposed to move, which is three days after I told my new employer and several other people in the Cleveland area that we would be in town, an image that is finally realized now, after my first day teaching at the new school, which turns out to be a lot like teaching at all the other schools I have taught at, except more students seem to bring their kids to campus, which actually makes me feel quite nice, since I frequently brought my kids to the SLU campus and they just seemed to stand out, although I did see Karl Shoenberg bring his kids to school once; and now that I actually have had time to blog, I feel quite nice, although most of my possessions are still in boxes, my syllabi have an alarming number of days marked TBA, and filling those TBA's will be more difficult now that I don't have access to jstor and the school policies don't allow me to simply hand books to the support staff and have them scan large sections which I can put on my classes' Angel page, and I am teaching five sections with four preps this semester; again, despite all that, I feel quite nice, perhaps because a bit of the traveling around I have done in the last month did involve a trip to the beach, where I got to see pippy, hali, james, ingvild, sequoia, picabia, mom, dad, peyton, erin, katelynne, quinn, flo and cody, and perhaps because the new house really is a lot of fun, and since I am now tenure track, we can make serious improvements to the house, including making it more environmentally friendly, or at least not poisonous and I know that unless I displease the Gods somehow, I will never ever have to move again.