the beach and a break

Well, I’m off to Florida today and then to Jamaica on Tuesday–a nice break before summer school starts the following Monday.

While I’m away though, I have to finish putting together my syllabus for my summer class. Composition & Visual Rhetoric. I’m excited to teach it — it will be the rehearsal for the same class in the Fall (which, how very cool, will be taught to Junior-level Interior Design and Architecture students!)

And I still have 3 articles to revise and send out, 2 of which have been accepted for publication and 1 that I’ve not sent out before. I really meant to get to them this week but most of my days were spent dealing with the paperwork and bureaucracy that goes along with trying to teach an additional class while being a grad student. The approval process for ad/comp has changed (lengthier…) so I spent quite a bit of time on my request packet with the hopes that they’ll (the grad school) just say yes and be done with it!

gardening and my favorite summer dessert

well, we were late getting our spring garden together (very late) but we finally got some yellow, red, and habenero peppers, tomatoes, and herbs into the ground. we’re hoping to get some other things (okra, arugula, squash, more herbs). we used the square foot gardening method which is an above ground, no tilling, no row, VERY easy to do method. Really. All you do is put down weed cloth on top of the ground/grass. Build a box out of (non treated) wood (or brick/concrete) and deck screws. Place it on top of the cloth. Mix 1 part course vermiculite with 1 part compost with 1 part peat moss and put it in the box. Visualize (or mark) each square foot with string. Plant crops!

In fact my students created 4 different 4×4 foot gardens for an elementary charter school downtown as their service-learning project this semester (pictures from the project here).

I can’t wait for our basil to go crazy this summer—I had a dream about an appetizer like grape leaves but with goat cheese stuffed inside basil leaves and wrapped…

And speaking of recipes, i thought i’d share my favorite summer dessert–the apple/peach bake.

Slice about 2 green apples and 3 peaches (around 5 cups) and arrange in a casserole dish
Mix 1/4 cup of water, 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon, and 1/2 tsp salt and pour over the apples and peaches

In another bowl mix 1 cup sugar, 3/4 cup flour, and 1/3 cup butter/margarine (melted). Toss the mixture until crumbly.
Pour over the fruit in the casserole dish.

Pop in the over uncovered at 350 for 40 minutes.

That’s all.  Yum!

I’m thinking that next year our pineapple guava trees will be producing fruit and I can throw those in the dessert too!

the birthday and the egg

So the chickens (Sunny, Kiwi, and Olive) turned 20 weeks old yesterday. And today we were graced with….our first egg! We were thrilled of course–and it might be why the girls were so excited this morning at 7:15. They were cooing and squawking every 15 minutes on the dot until about 8:30 or so. I just wrote it off as being annoying and went back to sleep. We’re not sure but we think that this is Kiwi’s egg since she is the most mature/aggressive (Sunny can’t even eat until Kiwi has had her fill or else she gets pecked). So Sunny and Olive will probably start laying in the next few days or so too. And then? Then we can expect almost 2 dozen eggs a week until the beginning of December and then again starting January.

I’m thinking that it might be fun to give some “chicken and egg” facts based off of the things I’ve learned:

• There is no nutritional difference between brown eggs and white eggs (or any other color). An egg’s color is determined by the color of the hen’s ears.
• Hens lay one egg at a time and generally about one a day except in the winter months (some breeds)
• Hens don’t need Roosters to lay eggs–only to lay fertilized eggs (and we have no desire breed chicks)
• In most cities it is legal to have up to 3 hens
• If you refrigerate eggs right after they are laid they’ll last about 6-8 weeks. A rule of thumb is that for every hour they are left unrefrigerated is one day less that they’ll keep

And now some notes on our girls. They love bread! They also love our scrap vegetables and fruit like kiwi, grapes, tomatoes, and squash. Since we’re vegetarian it’s obviously important for us to feed the girls vegetarian feed. Most feed that you find at the hardware store has ground up chicken pieces in the feed! Yuck. Luckily we found one place right outside of Baton Rouge called Dodge City Feed Store that carries veggie feed.

the bar and the brew

andy has just finished brewing three beers and a cider and they are ready for summer evening drinking. one is a sierra nevada clone, another is a strawberry ale (from fresh louisiana strawberries), an auburn ale, and an apple cider. we hung a large piece of chalkboard and drew labels for each. See the pictures on flickr!

organizing and map-making and lists

to do list.

• compile list of fellowships, detail, and transform into timeline
• design summer class
• tweak WGS website
• map out the 3 possible dissertation projects
• find concept map software (suggestions? please?)
• meet with campaign manager for David Brown’s state house of rep race
• design and build garden for front yard
• design and build (andy) egg laying station for our chickens–olive, kiwi, and sunny
• meet with new rhet comp students (yay!)
• revise and submit consumerism and photoshop chapter
• revise and submit technomob and performance chapter
• revise and submit alternative media in the classroom chapter
• buy new knitting needles

leather bound dissertations

is there an alternative to the leather? fabric maybe? or vinyl?

just curious….

surely others have sought an alternative but i can’t find any discussions on the matter.

good news in spite of absence

I know that the only people that still check to see if I post anything here are related to me but…

Finally! I’m ABD.

When you’ve been out of coursework for so long and the only accountability is to yourself….hearing that you’ve officially made it to the land of ABD is worth tons!

And this semester certainly ended with lots of good news…I am happy to say that I was awarded the departmental grad student teaching award as well as the college of arts and sciences grad student teaching award too!

I’m also accepting a new assistantship with the women’s and gender studies program this fall that I am very psyched about. I’ll still teach a class in the English department, but the WGS position will allow me to be involved in programming, organizing, as well as curricular issues. I’m really excited to develop my class for the fall though–it’s a visual rhetoric composition class that I’ll be teaching to 2nd and 3rd year Interior Design and Architecture Studio students.

So now the summer will be committed to crafting the perfect dissertation prospectus. It’s great to be reinvigorated!

day two

I was surprisingly productive today. I referred back to my chart on Lefebvre’s spatial triad:

1.    Spatial Practice (Perceived Space)

a.    Seemingly rooted in materialism
b.    Embodies daily and urban realities
c.    The route that the person takes to work
d.    The use of the person’s hands and the function of the organs
e.    Not logically conceived or intellectually worked out

2.    Representations of Space (Conceived Space)

a.    Seemingly rooted in idealism
b.    “Conceptualized space” (38) – “the dominant space in any society” (39)
c.    Architext’s Space
d.    The height, weight, and measurements of a person
e.    Tends towards a system of verbal, intellectually worked out signs

3.    Representational Spaces (Lived Space)

a.    Rooted in between perceived and conceived
b.    Space “as directly lived through its associated images and symbols” (39)
c.    Anthropological Space
d.    A person’s inner thoughts about traffic
e.    Tends toward more or less coherent systems of nonverbal symbols and signs

and I’m now starting to piece together some of his commentary on counter-space with Nancy Fraser’s counter-publics. Tomorrow I plan to get back to outline-drafting.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying looking through AREA’s newest issue which has a nice feature on freedom schools in/of Chicago.

day one of exams

today is day 1 of the 42 days of our department’s version of the general exam process (it’s actually 56 days if you count the 2 weeks that the committee gets to read what you’ve produced in those 42 days).

the first of the three questions on which I’ll be writing is as follows:

In recent decades, the field of literacy studies has expanded, been challenged and revised. Arguably, the biggest impact on the field has been the New Literacy Studies, led by James Gee, David Barton, and Brian Street. The New Literacy Studies offers the view that meaning-making, specifically reading and writing, only make sense when considered in the context of political, social and cultural practices. While the view of literacy as a social practice has generated a great deal of research concerned with ideological and historical contexts, few theorists have considered the importance of physical contexts, i.e. spaces and places, to literacy practices. How then, is place and space attended to in literacy scholarship? How does where things occur matter to the formation of community and meaning-making? What is gained (or lost) when these physical spaces go virtual?

Now, the answer to this is probably an entire dissertation, but somehow I’ll be addressing it in about 15 pages…

The most useful thing that I’ve read is The Production of Space–although I’m still looking for other seminal space-geography books to cram into my head before tackling the question…

exams

Well, now that CCCC is over, it’s time to tackle the exams…which officially start tomorrow. Our department’s procedure is pretty different as I think I’ve written before. After reading for about 3 semesters or so for 3 different reading lists on 3 different fields or subfields, you receive 3 different questions and write 3 papers. You also put together syllabi for upper and lower level classes based on each of the syllabi. Then after 6 weeks of writing all that, there’s an oral exam and BAM. You’re done. (or rather, BAM: you’re ABD).

My general plan (which I’ve spent weeks perfecting…and probably won’t stick to more than 4 days…):

• Make Outline for Exam Essay 1 (EE1): 2 days
• Gather quotes for EE1: 3 days
• Write EE1: 5 days at about 3 pages/day
• Relax a day
• Develop Killer Syllabus 1 (KS1): 1 day
• Make Outline for EE2: 2 day
• Gather quotes for EE2: 3 days
• Write EE2: 5 days at about 3 pages/day
• Relax a day
• Develop KS2: 1 day
• Make Outline for EE3: 2 day
• Gather quotes for EE3: 3 days
• Write EE3: 5 days at about 3 pages/day
• Revisit KS1 and KS2 to tweak and finalize: 1 day
• Last 7 days (revise and/or finish each essay)

I usually work well with a schedule–I guess we’ll see how disciplined I can be!