It is not a complaint, I love this flat and am extremely happy here, but there are a couple things I hadn't bargained for about the English sabbatical flat! I would have packed slightly differently if I had remembered the following:
In English October and November, it is colder inside than outside.
The thermostat seems basically placed to give the illusion of control, and there is no heat from radiators during the day.
The bathroom has a funny shower like a sort of plastic telephone booth - the water is hot and fully pressured, so that's the most important thing, but the bathroom itself is huge and drafty and unheated, and it is impossible to shave legs either in the shower (because the water runs down your legs in such a thick curtain when you are bent over vertically) or out (because the goose-pimples from freezingness catch on the razor).
The washer-dryer is a good amenity, and the washer aspect works fine, but these double-use machines are virtually useless as dryers, and the drying racks in the flat have to be positioned near functioning radiators if you actually want things to dry in a reasonable timeframe.....
Sabbatical makes twice-a-day exercise a near certainty!
Pants that are good for running are fine for yoga, but not vice versa; shirts that are fine for running sometimes fall down over your head in downward-facing dog and similar.
All of which is to say - I bought a pair of fleece pants a few weeks ago as a home comfort (regretted not bringing my Siberia running pants for indoor wear, and my Patagonia down sweater!), and have just descended on a local running store to repair other lacks: shirts that won't fall down when I am somewhat inverted, full-length running tights in case the leg-shaving conundrum remains insoluble (I think I found a good compromise the other day - it was after hot yoga, so I was fairly warm even after the chilly walk home, and I turned on the shower and left the door open and very hastily shaved my legs outside of the shower with shaving cream).
I may have to get some kind of a fleece blanket - I was so cold the other day I pulled a blanket from the warming cupboard, but it made me wheeze pretty severely and I think I should keep my distance from it!
Showing posts with label packing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label packing. Show all posts
Sunday, November 06, 2016
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Closing tabs
Leaving for the airport very early for a flight to LAX en route to Sydney, and having the usual scramble to get ready to leave town (it's almost 8 and I haven't gotten out to run, must at least do SOME kind of a run though 2hr may at this point be overkill given that I'm not going to sleep much). Austen notes woefully behind where I'd hoped they'd be, but I can at least bring the LETTERS chapter with me to work on, having made a little packet of xeroxes and selected three out of the ten volumes whose bits are more extensive & haven't yet been transcribed by me into typed notes. I've mostly packed. Cleaning up some tabs (was really looking to find one on Austen's letter-writing that I opened a while ago, but will have to use Google to find that again as it does not seem to be here):
Charlie Stross on why interruptions are a disaster when you're trying to work.
That said, Marilyn Berlin Snell on the disaster of the meditation retreat!
Perec in Australia.
Elizabeth Bishop's alcoholic admissions.
An interview with Mary Gaitskill.
Luc Sante on the art of nonfiction.
Geoff Dyer's new book sounds good.
Hermit crabs make homes out of beach trash.
Eighteenth-century documents discovered in birds' nests during cathedral renovation.
Last but not least, a charming bit of nomenclature: "Johnny Blue Pants"!
Charlie Stross on why interruptions are a disaster when you're trying to work.
That said, Marilyn Berlin Snell on the disaster of the meditation retreat!
Perec in Australia.
Elizabeth Bishop's alcoholic admissions.
An interview with Mary Gaitskill.
Luc Sante on the art of nonfiction.
Geoff Dyer's new book sounds good.
Hermit crabs make homes out of beach trash.
Eighteenth-century documents discovered in birds' nests during cathedral renovation.
Last but not least, a charming bit of nomenclature: "Johnny Blue Pants"!
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
44
I need an amanuensis to come and type up these notes for me!
My mood has picked up quite a bit, to my relief - in fact, when I look through past summers of blog posting, I begin to suspect that I always spend June and the first half of July in a state of mild grumpiness (consequence of overwork during the school year plus need to clear minor external writing tasks). I was training a lot more last summer but I don't think I was really feeling good about stuff until round about now, it may just be a structural cost of balancing the workload so unevenly over the academic year.
I have a lot to do before I leave on Friday, including thinking about packing for three totally different climates and sets of activities. Will still be writing Oxford talk next week in Cayman, not optimal but inevitable....
A minor bright spot the other day: my brother found our father's SSA-1099 in a bag of papers that had become separated from the other stuff he took from his apartment, which will let me file his 2014 taxes WITHOUT having to go in person to the local Social Security office and wait in line with complicated paperwork to beg a new copy! This is huge: it might be that the SS office is not as heinous a place as I imagine, but I have built this up into absolutely most-dreaded job, and having the form in hand will save me half a day of high irk and a good deal of dread in the anticipation. PROCRASTINATION WAS REWARDED - my brother was almost afraid to tell me he'd found it in case I'd already spent a horrible day obtaining a new one!
This year brought me several bad things I really wasn't expecting, and I am still pretty much just scrambling through from day to day, but I'm looking forward to the coming school year and an interesting committee-chairing assignment, and after that I will have a full year of sabbatical! I have not made enough writing time in the last year or so, and am looking forward to getting the chance to remedy the omission.
Saturday, September 06, 2014
Weekend chaos!
In minor chaos and disarray at this end! I am having a very good month: my only complaint about it is that all the good things are happening in a very compressed time period, whereas I know there will be long dull stretches at other points that would have benefited from this kind of stimulus!
(New Tana French was so good that I just wanted to read it all over again when I finished. Also enjoying Vikram Chandra's new book - excerpt here - but fuller light reading log will have to await some more leisurely moment. Had a great meeting Thursday with an editor I'm keen to write for, found a very good dress yesterday to wear for my one annual professional black-tie event, new semester still has the glow on it, etc. etc.)
Heading off in a couple hours to New Paltz for the SOS Triathlon. My brother and his family are crewing for me - niece GG just had her first day of kindergarten on Thursday, as well as her fifth birthday on Tuesday, so I am excited to hear all about it on the car on the way there! I'm taking NJ Transit out to where they are - they have just moved into a new house in Rutherford, this will be my first visit (of many I hope!).
Haven't finished everything for Monday's initial seminar meeting, but the syllabus is finalized and I don't teach till late afternoon, so that should be OK - ditto Tuesday's class on Milton. One letter of recommendation that I will try and squeeze out this morning if I can get tidied up and packed in sufficiently good time. One more tenure letter due the 15th, but it was slightly amazing that I got two of the other ones done over the holiday weekend.
Triathlon: sport of stuff!
Syllabus design also breeds an accumulation of things:
And then there's the OTHER syllabus!
(New Tana French was so good that I just wanted to read it all over again when I finished. Also enjoying Vikram Chandra's new book - excerpt here - but fuller light reading log will have to await some more leisurely moment. Had a great meeting Thursday with an editor I'm keen to write for, found a very good dress yesterday to wear for my one annual professional black-tie event, new semester still has the glow on it, etc. etc.)
Heading off in a couple hours to New Paltz for the SOS Triathlon. My brother and his family are crewing for me - niece GG just had her first day of kindergarten on Thursday, as well as her fifth birthday on Tuesday, so I am excited to hear all about it on the car on the way there! I'm taking NJ Transit out to where they are - they have just moved into a new house in Rutherford, this will be my first visit (of many I hope!).
Haven't finished everything for Monday's initial seminar meeting, but the syllabus is finalized and I don't teach till late afternoon, so that should be OK - ditto Tuesday's class on Milton. One letter of recommendation that I will try and squeeze out this morning if I can get tidied up and packed in sufficiently good time. One more tenure letter due the 15th, but it was slightly amazing that I got two of the other ones done over the holiday weekend.
Triathlon: sport of stuff!
Syllabus design also breeds an accumulation of things:
And then there's the OTHER syllabus!
Monday, February 04, 2013
Decisions, decisions
Heading for the airport in an hour.
Read a couple good novels over the weekend for the Young Lions Fiction Award, but discretion suggests I should not blog about them.
The material in the opening chapters of Thinking, Fast and Slow felt over-familiar; I hasten to add that this is not Kahneman's fault, it simply speaks to how very influential and widespread this work on decision-making would later become. The middle and later chapters were increasingly rewarding and thought-provoking.
Things that speak to my experience most directly: regression to the mean clearly explains what happens when you are on a search committee and the candidate who gave a spectacular first-round interview at MLA is disappointing on campus; the general message to be wary of intuition and to embrace formulas is something that committees should keep very much in mind when reading for PhD admissions; and I am sorry to say (it is a very good chapter!) that everyone who is beginning a PhD degree or doctoral dissertation, a book, a home renovation or other major undertaking should read the chapter called "The Outside View" and consider the implications of baseline prediction and the planning fallacy (and revisit the commitment regularly with a view to considering the sunk-cost fallacy).
It is well-known that graduate admissions is a notorious crapshoot - I talked to a former DGS at Yale who had gone through old records (the program used long ago to rank incoming students in order of expectations for future contributions/eminence) to try and figure out what correlation there might be between those rankings and subsequent careers. There was none discernible.
I do think that years of experience have given me certain insights that are legitimate to apply: for instance, the qualities that lead someone successfully to obtain a Rhodes or Marshall Scholarship, which superficially might suggest aptitude for top-level research in the humanities (and will often ensure admission to top PhD programs), are often at odds with the kind of stubborn individualism and low-reward curiosity that really lead someone to excel at research in the humanities, and many of these students will intelligently reassess their choice a year into the PhD program and leave to do something that will be more stimulating and higher-profile in a larger pond elsewhere. When we give these students spots in our program (and they are likely to have multiple offers and take more lucrative ones at Harvard or Stanford!), we lose the chance to admit the less orthodox but perhaps more temperamentally suited students who have not got such uncheckered undergraduate records.
Now I must stop blogging and start packing!
Read a couple good novels over the weekend for the Young Lions Fiction Award, but discretion suggests I should not blog about them.
The material in the opening chapters of Thinking, Fast and Slow felt over-familiar; I hasten to add that this is not Kahneman's fault, it simply speaks to how very influential and widespread this work on decision-making would later become. The middle and later chapters were increasingly rewarding and thought-provoking.
Things that speak to my experience most directly: regression to the mean clearly explains what happens when you are on a search committee and the candidate who gave a spectacular first-round interview at MLA is disappointing on campus; the general message to be wary of intuition and to embrace formulas is something that committees should keep very much in mind when reading for PhD admissions; and I am sorry to say (it is a very good chapter!) that everyone who is beginning a PhD degree or doctoral dissertation, a book, a home renovation or other major undertaking should read the chapter called "The Outside View" and consider the implications of baseline prediction and the planning fallacy (and revisit the commitment regularly with a view to considering the sunk-cost fallacy).
It is well-known that graduate admissions is a notorious crapshoot - I talked to a former DGS at Yale who had gone through old records (the program used long ago to rank incoming students in order of expectations for future contributions/eminence) to try and figure out what correlation there might be between those rankings and subsequent careers. There was none discernible.
I do think that years of experience have given me certain insights that are legitimate to apply: for instance, the qualities that lead someone successfully to obtain a Rhodes or Marshall Scholarship, which superficially might suggest aptitude for top-level research in the humanities (and will often ensure admission to top PhD programs), are often at odds with the kind of stubborn individualism and low-reward curiosity that really lead someone to excel at research in the humanities, and many of these students will intelligently reassess their choice a year into the PhD program and leave to do something that will be more stimulating and higher-profile in a larger pond elsewhere. When we give these students spots in our program (and they are likely to have multiple offers and take more lucrative ones at Harvard or Stanford!), we lose the chance to admit the less orthodox but perhaps more temperamentally suited students who have not got such uncheckered undergraduate records.
Now I must stop blogging and start packing!
Sunday, September 02, 2012
Monday, January 03, 2011
Production of quota
Didn't get started till mighty late today: it was the first day for a week when I really could lounge as opposed to getting up and hastening out of the house to write quota, and then I got diverted onto the complex job of beginning to pack up all of my things, including a vast number of books - I'm going back to New York on Wednesday afternoon, I'll be teaching again in the spring semester.
But I did in the end squeeze out quota.
(I am still disconcerted by the way the shape of the novel has suddenly come into focus for me over the last few days. I don't think it's going to be a very long novel - in fact I would be surprised if it comes in much over 65,000 words max, which means I really am pretty much halfway drafted...)
c. 1,100 words, for a total of 32,117 words
But I did in the end squeeze out quota.
(I am still disconcerted by the way the shape of the novel has suddenly come into focus for me over the last few days. I don't think it's going to be a very long novel - in fact I would be surprised if it comes in much over 65,000 words max, which means I really am pretty much halfway drafted...)
c. 1,100 words, for a total of 32,117 words
Monday, May 10, 2010
The books I want to bring to Cayman
may be too heavy to carry in one trip, especially since I will also be traveling with a bicycle and many months' worth of clothes/gear...
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