CSA

Picked up my very first CSA* box yesterday (I have to thank Mel for telling me about these). Lots of salad greens, spinach, baby leeks, turnips, white radishes, oregano, and rosemary. I cooked the turnips tonight and washed up all the salad greens so that salad will be easy all week, and then tomorrow I'll turn the spinach and leeks and some of the herbs into something quiche-like, with eggs and cheese and a crust (maybe -- if I don't feel like making a crust, it'll be a frittata instead). Not sure what I will do with the radishes; I don't really like radishes, unfortunately. Maybe I'll try one on a salad and see if these are more my style than the usual supermarket red sort. It would be nice if SO were around to help eat and enjoy all the bounty!

*CSA=Community Supported Agriculture. You pay a fixed amount in advance to a local farm, and then for a specified number of weeks, you get a box of whatever was harvested that week. So fresh, local, often organic (mine is, yay!) produce.

What makes it worthwhile

I was honored by the History Club, the undergraduate group in my department, at our annual departmental banquet last Friday; they chose me as the Professor of the Year. I was surprised and pleased and very touched. Sometimes it's hard to remember that all the work isn't wholly unappreciated, after all.

LibraryThing

LibraryThing is an extremely cool online way to catalog one's books. My sister told me about it and I decided to sign up, even though I already use EndNote on my own computer. For one thing, then she (and others) can see what I already own, if they're thinking about giving me a book as a gift. (Well, assuming I'm good about keeping it up to date!) My catalog is here. You can even add a widget to your blog that will show random books, or recently added books -- look to the right and you'll see it!

Post-Valentine

Well, I survived V-Day without hubby; we talked the day before and day after, as it's not possible for us to talk really except Tuesdays, Thursdays, and occasionally on the weekend, between our two schedules and his limited phone access.

I had somehow thought that having him gone would give me a lot more time to get things done, but it doesn't apparently work like that. I'm just barely not falling behind in class prep and grading, I have a conference paper that needs to be finished in the next 8 days that I have hardly started on, and the house is filthy. *sighs* What I want is, like, a fortnight of time that has no commitments whatsoever, just to let me catch up on things. Not going to happen, is it?

Solitude

So, my husband just left today for his sabbatical trip to Sweden. He won't be back until August. I'll be going to see him during my spring break in March (the plane reservations for that are already booked) and then again in May or June, after the end of the semester (not yet set, and probably for two weeks rather than one). It feels lonely already, although I have lots to do to keep me busy: two conference papers both of which involve some new data; a couple of articles to finish up and get out; usual housekeeping chores; teaching, including a course that's mostly new and will be a lot of work though fun; personal writing. Yup. It'll be interesting to see whether I can get it all done, whether his absence will mean less distraction and thus more accomplished, or less help and thus less accomplished.

Close enough to taste it

The end is in sight; I have one more essay question to grade for the exam in the Civ class (that is, 58 essays), and then it's calculating the grades and turning those in. After that it's time to read the 33 research papers for the upper-division class, which at least ought to be reasonably literate by comparison and are also typed.

I really, really want to get these all graded and finished with by Monday morning, because a friend is coming over from Other Big City in the state for the afternoon and evening and I would like to be able to hang out with her with a clear conscience. But I also have to attend commencement tomorrow, and a luncheon, and do the usual things like grocery-shopping, cooking, talking to my mom, etc. So... we shall see.

Bad and good

So, I've been kind of bad in not posting here very much, partly from the end-of-semester business and partly because I've done a lot of posting elsewhere. In the holiday season I write drabbles (little 100-word pieces of fiction) by request for online friends, and this year I've written 26 of them which I'm posting one per day this month. So that's the good thing, to be giving something that I hope makes the recipient happy.

Today I need to finish wrapping some gifts so I can mail them off Saturday morning, if possible. Once I've finished teaching (last day, hurrah) I'll dash home to do that, because my spouse's departmental holiday party is tonight and I said I'd go. It's a bit of a pain to make an extra 3-hour round trip for that, but at least he's driving. We also need to write our holiday letter this weekend, and I want to buy and put up the tree; three weeks or so is long enough to have one for me (it comes down on January 1), so I hadn't done it earlier, and I don't have any class prep now of course so there's time to buy and decorate.