The Secret Stash

One of the best things about owning a bookstore was getting the shipments of Harry Potter books several days before the official release dates. We had to swear in writing that we would keep them absolutely secure until we handed them out at our midnight release parties. I have to say, it was pretty darn cool being on the inside of it all.

Shucks

A favorite summertime family tradition: shucking local corn on the porch of the cottage at Lake Geneva. Eating it is even better.

The Test

My students' turned in their final research papers in class tonight. I've already been through most of them once, so I pretty much know what I'm getting into. I see the light at the end!

When I discovered it was an option, I decided to test out of freshman English in college. We selected a book to read from a short list, then under strict supervision with access only to our copy of that book, we were given one essay question and were expected to create a handwritten masterpiece in the blue books we brought.

I chose Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl because I'd read it before (and, so as not to appear too lazy, I knew it would be worth reading again). I don't remember the essay question I was assigned, but it turned out that passing the exam wasn't going to be a no brainer.

The English department had two readers evaluate the essay, and if there was a disagreement between the two readers, the department would have a third reader take a look at it. My first two readers disagreed. One thought I did a fine job; the other thought I hadn't answered the question. I was a little nervous, because I could see the second reader's point.

Thankfully, the third reader thought the essay was worthy of a pass. Whew!

High

Tonight we went to the Utah Symphony's Magical Music of John Williams concert, conducted by the charming and passionate Vladimir Kulenovic. They played pieces from Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Close Encounters, Superman, and, of course, Star Wars. My favorite piece, perhaps ironically, was the Shark Theme from Jaws.

We sat way up on the third tier, which gave us a marvelous view, but it took nearly half an hour for me to adjust to the height. I don't do very well with heights. And Jack leaning over the railing didn't help.

I first became aware that I had an issue with heights on a trip west we took the summer I turned six. We stopped in Aspen, Colorado, and rode a chairlift up to get a view. I was fine at first, but then we passed the first peak, the ground fell away, and we rode to the second peak at a height I'd never experienced before. It felt like my legs, and especially my feet, were going to fall off. No, no, heights are not my thing.

Moving Up

This evening I picked up my class schedule for teaching next fall at Utah Valley University. They've got me assigned to two sections of English 1010 Introduction to Writing at exactly the times I need to fit with the rest of my schedule.

I started teaching as an adjunct instructor at UVU back in the early 90s when it was actually Utah Valley Community College. Even though my masters degree is in political science, I'd been working as a writer and an editor in the corporate world for five years and the college loved hiring people with workplace experience.

I taught for a couple of years, then left to do some other projects, then went back again for a couple of years in the late 90s. By then it was Utah Valley State College.

In 1999 we started our bookstore, so I left teaching again. This next week, I'm wrapping up the end of my fourth year back at the now university. Each time they re-hire me, I seem to get a "promotion" just by virtue of the fact that the school keeps evolving!

Zen and the Art of the Family Vacation

I have no rule against posting about new memories this year and we just made some good ones during four fabulous days in Oregon. Four-day trips seem to suit our little family. Long enough to get away, but not so long it breaks the bank or drives Jack too batty hanging out with his parents.

On Thursday we got up early and flew to Portland, then headed straightaway toward the coast. We visited the huge old Naval blimp hangar in Tillemook and, of course, the cheese factory there. We watched them package 40 pound blocks of cheese heading to storage for aging. Then a drive to the beach at Oceanside, which we remembered from an earlier trip, for a couple of hours of sand, wind, and wave time. Then a drive up the coast to spend the night at a seaside motel in, well, Seaside, where we enjoyed a beautiful sunset on the beach.

On Friday we were up early to enjoy the beach at Seaside, then after we checked out of our motel, we drove down to enjoy Cannon Beach and the tidal pools there (we all saw starfish and crabs, but Jack was the one who spied the octopus below). In the afternoon we headed inland again to see the Hughes Flying Boat, also known as the Spruce Goose, at the air museum in McMinnville. It's wingspan is crazy wide! On to the hotel, some dinner, and a movie.

Saturday we headed into the city and fed our souls. First to Powell Books for a leisurely browse and a nice stocking up. Then to an art supply store for drawing pads and pencils. Then to the Japanese Garden, which we'd heard was amazing and it did not disappoint. One of my favorite moments was when I looked up just as petals from a blossoming tree caught a breeze and gently showered down on me like a blessing. We ended the day with dinner with my cousin and her family in their quintessential Portland bungalow.

Today we drove along the Columbia River Gorge. Hiked stunning waterfall trails. Saw the Bonneville dam and locks. Visited the largest fish hatchery I've ever seen. Drove over the Bridge of the Gods. Then headed to the airport.

Our plane was late taking off from Portland, but that just meant we landed exactly as the sun set over the Great Salt Lake.

I am declaring an official end to my winter funk.

Misconstrued

When I was a kid, we'd often drive through a nearby town called Ayer. Sometimes I'd ask my mom where we were, and she'd say "Ayer" but I'd think she said "air" and I imagined we were in the space between towns.

Scared

We finally saw The Hunger Games tonight. We've all read the books, so we basically knew what to expect, but it was still pretty intense. I'm not sure I would have gone to see it when I was Jack's age.

The movie Jaws came out when I was just a little younger than Jack, and I decided that I couldn't bear to watch that. I figured that if I was as freaked out as I was by the picture on the book and the movie posters, I wouldn't be able to handle the movie. It took years for me to swim, even in freshwater lakes, without picturing a gigantic shark coming up from the depths.

I suspect my life long inability to deal rationally with snakes might have roots in watching the 1960 version of Swiss Family Robinson when I was little. Remember the scene in the river when they have to wrestle the gigantic snake? I didn't. When I saw the movie years later I realized I'd completely repressed it.

And I was afraid lepers would sneak into our house at night after watching Ben Hur when I was maybe six or seven. I didn't know what lepers actually were, but I knew people were afraid of them. I finally figured out that if they were going to try to come in my second story bedroom window, they'd have to use a ladder. I'd lay in bed at night listening for the ladder to hit the side of the house so I'd have fair warning.

I don't scare as easily now. But I still covered my eyes a couple of times tonight.

Pacific

The first time I ever saw the Pacific Ocean was on a trip I took to California the summer I turned 17. Some old friends of our family had moved to Acadia, and they invited me out for several weeks.

Of course we did Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, but by far my favorite memories were of a week of Girls' Camp on Catalina Island. We took the ferry, then piled into open trucks with all of our gear, drove for several hours on a dusty road to a remote beach, and pitched our tents.

The beach was wild and our camp was perpetually encircled by buffalo who eyed us suspiciously. We braided our hair and laughed and built huge fires when the sun went down.

Pacific. They got that right.

Freedom!

One of my very favorite feelings was the feeling I used to have when I finished final exams in college and headed home for Christmas or summer break. It was the feeling of having absolutely nothing hanging over my head.

I don't exactly have absolutely nothing hanging over my head, but our taxes are filed, I'm caught up on laundry, I handed back a huge stack of graded papers to my students in class tonight, and I won't be going back to work until Monday.

It's feeling pretty darn good!

Tomorrow Is a New Day

I'm just going to whine for a moment about the most horrendous head cold I've been suffering from for the past couple of days. It's extra sad because it has been so nice out, I had to miss the family Easter party, I had to work on taxes, and I still have a huge stack of papers to grade by tomorrow.

Sigh.

So I thought I'd write about something worse: the time I barfed in the bus line waiting to go home in the first grade. Oh, I felt so awful.

But the part I remember the most? When the boy next to me said, "Teacher, some girl threw up back here." All I could think was, "He knows my name!" Of course, I have no memory of who that boy was. Self involved much?

Sigh.

The Wang

When we're talking about revising papers in my UVU writing classes, I make sure my students know I went through my entire undergrad program using a typewriter. And that we had to do full-blown footnotes! No cushy in-text citations. It's my walking-uphill-both-ways story.

I didn't learn how to use a computer until the summer I graduated from college. I took a job working for the staff attorneys at the federal court where I interned my senior year. One of my tasks was to listen to recordings of case summaries and type them up on the computer in a format that would fit on index cards, which meant I had to do a ton of abbreviating. (If I was a tweeter, all that experience would come in handy.) I also had to type up court opinions which easily ran 20-30 pages and included a boatload of lengthy footnotes. Thankfully, the software had just been updated with a cutting edge feature: automatic repagination. That meant I didn't have to repaginate the text and footnotes by hand every time someone made a revision.

We used Wang computers at the court. That doesn't date me too badly, does it?

Beans

My niece Megan and her husband Scott, who got married in last night's post, started a new blog this past week called The Holiday Candy Review. In their first post, they set up a bracket and tasted 16 types of jelly beans (graphic below shamelessly stolen from them.)

Jelly beans were an essential part of our Easter mornings when I was growing up. Mom--er, the Easter Bunny--would hide them along with the eggs we colored and one bigger treat for each of us, like a chocolate rabbit.

Every year without fail we'd find black and white jelly beans on the piano keys. I tried to be the first to get them because the black ones were my favorite.

Charmed Life

Jack has no idea what a charmed life he leads. He just seems to attract good things. Like the time we were at our niece's wedding in Salt Lake a few summers ago, and friends of her family showed up in pioneer clothes with old muskets to salute the couple with a rousing volley. Jack missed it because he'd gone off to find a restroom.

But wouldn't you know, when he returned and discovered it was over, the guys took pity on him and offered to let him shoot. Lucky kid!

Island Getaway

We woke up to snow this morning after being teased with temperatures in the 70s. I decided it was time for one of my favorite summer memories: swimming out to the island near my grandparents' beach on Long Island Sound.

Honeymoon and Stars

A friend and I went up to Salt Lake City tonight to watch a live performance of Radiolab at the Capitol Theater. The show was all about light and dark. Each audience member was given a little disk battery and a tiny lightbulb that we were to put together and hold up at a certain point during the show.

When we did we were suddenly plunged into a sea of stars.

The spring before Roger and I got married, I attended a conference at the Cliff Lodge at Snowbird. One of my favorite memories was having the rooftop pool all to myself after dinner. I floated on my back in complete silence under the starry night sky for a long time.

Roger and I decided the hotel would be a good place to go between our wedding on Tuesday and our reception on Saturday. But it was impossible to recreate the magic of that spring night. The hotel (including the rooftop pool) was full of ecologists there for meetings. Lots and lots of earthy ecologists.

We escaped the crowded rooftop, but no worries. We managed to find a bit of heaven anyway :).

History Repeats Itself

In 1981, my parents, my sisters and I spent the summer driving across country to deliver me to BYU for my freshman year. One of our stops was Dinosaur National Monument in Vernal, Utah.

This is my sister Maryann, who was almost four then.

When Jack was almost four, we happened to take a family trip to Dinosaur National Monument. Had to take a picture of him with the same bone, which is more exposed after 22 years. A couple of cuties, I say!

Hot Wheels/Cold Wheels

I bought my very first car at the beginning of my sophomore year of college from a friend's parents. I'd moved off campus and into an apartment with five other girls. All six of us could fit quite comfortably in the car--an ugly green 1972 Ford LTD sedan. I don't think I have any pictures of the actual car, but resourceful Roger found this one for me on the internet. (I'm pretty sure that's me and my boyfriend there, maybe off to the club for lunch.)

When I bought the car, the seller told me that the horn had a funny short. When the weather dropped below a certain temperature, he said, the horn would start blowing and I'd have to disconnect it to make it stop. Of course that happened on a Friday night after midnight when I was in my pajamas. I ran down the stairs to the parking lot of the apartment complex, and while a crowd gathered, I threw up the hood and disconnected the horn.

Driving without a horn all winter broke me of some of the (possibly bad depending on your perspective) habits I'd developed when I learned how to drive in Boston.

Three friends and I drove the LTD to Seattle for Thanksgiving that year. At some point we realized that the heater had stopped working and we got colder and colder. We crammed all four of us in the front seat--which wasn't all that much of a cram because the car was massive--but eventually I couldn't tell that it was my frozen foot on the gas pedal. We decided it might be smart to stop for the night and drive the rest of the way the next morning.

And then there was the day I somehow edged out into the lane of oncoming traffic when I was waiting to make a left turn and dinged the front end of a car driven by a lady with a French poodle. Luckily she was stopped at a red light so it was a very low speed accident. But, hoo boy, a lady with a French poodle. She was downright chilly about the whole affair.

By spring, I wisely decided to trade in the old car for something a bit more reliable (and not as huge). I wanted to be sure I could get all the way home for the summer.

Nemesis

More than once in my life I've burned out.

The first time I was working for a software company, managing the documentation department. All of our product shipped just before school started and we typically had to produce 25-30 manuals simultaneously, often before the software was finalized. I had a very small staff and a very tight schedule, so in addition to my job as manager, I assigned myself as many manuals as I assigned any of the others.

One Saturday I was at work after a long, hard week, pushing myself to make an overwhelming number of changes to an overwhelming number of files. Something inside me snapped. Tears ran down my face as I sat in front of my computer feeling as though I couldn't bear to make another keystroke.

Somehow I made it through the deadlines. But burnout is like mono. It takes a long time to recover, and once you've suffered from it, you are more susceptible. I'm worried that I'm experiencing the warning signs again, and I'm not sure how to combat it. Chocolate only helps so much.

The Magic Bus

I recently booked my plane tickets for a cousin's wedding in D.C. in May and was talking to Roger about relying on public transportation rather than renting a car while I'm there.

"There's a bus I can take from BWI to the city," I said.

"Is that the Magic Bus?" asked Jack.

Oh, the Magic Bus. A solo trip from Paris to London to rejoin my group when I was on study abroad.

You know when you see someone board a bus or a train or a plane and you think, "Ooh, please don't sit by me," and inevitably they do? (I think it might be that karma thing.)

In this case I spent hours and hours next to a chain-smoking, extremely talkative drama teacher from Canada wearing a kilt that rode a little too high on his thighs.

Oh, oh, the Magic Bus.