It's humid in here.

The gap between posts perfectly sums up my semester. I look up in the afternoon these days and it has suddenly become midnight (not literally). I consider my journaling here and realize that it will have to be a semester end summary instead of a play-by-play--that's okay. I'm told that you are forgiven your first year of the tenure-track. That the gaps in your work (and life....please say and life too) are expected--the subtext reads: as long as they don't continue into your second year.

Now, some summary detail:

I taught a class. A big one. Some people loved it. Some people hated it. That's how it goes with these large lectures. The good news is this: I only teach this one every other year and it's my only large lecture, also, I'm not holding out for universal popularity.

I started my new research. I have some seed funding from my hire negotiations and as a result I was able to hit the ground running with my new project. I am excited about this project for a number of reasons, but non-academically speaking, I am most excited about the part where I'm only gone for 2-3 weeks at a time instead of months. Plus, the food is good.

My first site visit was during the end of September - early October and the highlights were the wine, the cheese, and the pintxos. Oh and the scenery, I suppose. I arrived early to have meetings with my research partners, adjust to jet lag (I really think I am better at this than I am--I must strive to improve--suggestions welcome). These extra couple days also allowed me some tourist time, and I took a long walk through the city which I found to be a beautiful blend of old and new. Museum. Odd sporting event. Graffiti. Food. Wine.

I met some fabulous people and it was hard at times to remember that I was there as a researcher. This is my research on knowledge exchange in the food system and to that end I visited food co-ops, dairies, organic farms, bakeries, cideries, wineries, urban farms, and so on. Some photos here, but there is a link to a full album of shots on the right hand side where I keep such things.

Guggenheim

Nuns watch the cliff diving event

This just seemed odd to me.

"reading" at lunch

 

old facade, "modern" beyond

1930s stone mill

In prep for cheesemaking

My "expiration date" made me a bit nervous because it was my flight date too.

They make this sound easy by saying it's only 240 steps...

2 days old

So I could get back through border security after walking around farms.

These peppers have a special place in my heart--

Grape press

This photo is misleading because it is from the beginning of my fieldwork

This makes up the first episode of what I hope is a much longer term research venture. The next trip is in January and I get to bring a special research assistant with me (read: Joe). The site is especially interesting to me because the major push for normalizing relations, beyond the diaspora is the big ag companies, so multi-year research that starts during this transition phase should be spectacularly insightful....(read: I hope this works).

Oktoberfesting

This upcoming trip is our major travel for the year, but we've done some other regional exploring and had a moment of unexpected travel that brought us home for Thanksgiving.

We have checked out some sights near and far, headed south to see my university peeps from last year in a make-shift Oktoberfest, gone apple picking (50 pounds of apples ended up not being enough, so we went again...), attempted some hikes (we're learning slowly that state parks here are not analogous to what we're used to), saw some old friends, and tried to make the best of a short trip west (where we saw hiking goats!).

Westy from the West

This is December (75 degrees)

This is November (50 degrees)

Seeing our mountains--it was in the 30s in OR

Not mountain goats

Still December....

It has been ridiculously warm here--which I secretly delight in because I'm cold all the time. It's in the 70s today and chance of thunderstorms. It's warmer outside than in our house, but it's also quite humid so we're staying in our artificially temperate world.

I just looked up again and it's dark. The time flies.

pre·ten·tious

I am a total snob about food, on a number of levels. I know this.

It not only makes up an important part of my work: research + teaching; it makes up an important part of my daily life.

We spend a lot of time trying to make choices about what we purchase, put in our bodies and support with our forks and finances--and sometimes we're just hungry and throw it all to the wayside (sometimes). What that has meant for us is a lot of discussion about how we want to interact with the marketplace and how difficult (or easy) that might be with all the attention now on the actual creation of environmentally sound, healthful and whole food options and the artificial crowd-pleasers.

What this means in practice since we moved has been a lot of research and whining (mostly from me) about options in our immediate area. I keep thinking about how spoiled we were before. We had a butcher we knew by name and who we could talk with about the suppliers in the area and their practices, we had the Valley and its wonders. There was a local, organic, fresh, diverse politics of food that we could immerse ourselves in that did not have us relying on increasingly watered-down standards and ambiguous claims and labels (see for example: "all natural"). In fact, I think I may have gotten too comfortable, so much so that I started to forget to look into practices and sourcing for restaurants, blinded by creative menus and "local/authentic/craft/scalar" claims. Side note: we can talk about local later. I've spent a lot of time thinking/writing/teaching about it.

So we've tried out some new things, done some research and I am happy to say that we found a winter CSA to tide us over while we figure out our new foodshed. And in the interim, we've tried to be a new/different version of ourselves...hmmm...or maybe retooling some of our ideas around region together....or realigning/readjusting...searching for ourselves again.

We found a bit of ourselves yesterday in the orchard, searching among the brambles for berries and then partaking in the farm market.

Raspberries

We also drove a bit out of our way to seek the simple pleasure of a seasonal, organic, free range, local, grass-fed, hormone and antibiotic free menu. The place we went for lunch was very very proud of themselves, and I thought "why shouldn't they be?" they are one of a few in this region starting to promote this type of menu. But after awhile it did start to grate on you and Joe remarked that they seemed to be trying much too hard to impress. But it was delicious, and I suppose I am every bit as pretentious...

Before the storm

I fully realized on Friday afternoon that this is my last weekend before the academic clock begins to tick. Yes, classes begin on Tuesday and yes, I teach my first class on Wednesday...and suddenly I will have almost 200 students to teach (read: deal with). But it is also the start of my tenure clock at a major research university. As always I have had the competing work/don't work entities on my proverbial shoulders basically all summer and especially this weekend.

So with that in mind I did not sync my files and bring them home. I did not bring home the textbook for my class. I left all my writing on campus. In fact, before checking out for the weekend, I don't think I even woke up my computer to tell it to go to sleep or shut down what I was working on before 5 hours of meetings swept away my productivity earlier in the day.

Instead of doing what I should be doing...I spent the vast majority of yesterday reading for pleasure. And finished the day by enjoying an extravagant meal in an odd setting. It felt good to be generally avoiding campus, not just because it might be one of my few opportunities to actively do so in the near future, but also because it is move-in weekend...and I remember what that's like.

And stairs

I didn't mention that this house has stairs. This is, in fact, the first house we have lived in to have stairs. This may not seem like a particularly interesting detail, but when your sense of scale (around the house) changes things start to feel very far away. Seriously, leaving things upstairs is my new nemesis.

Also, Risa has seen stairs and dealt with them at my parents place, for Pocket and Catch this was a first. I desperately wish that I had video of Pocket's first attempt down the stairs--human toddlers are more daring. Not to mention that we started them at the top of the stairs (having closed them in a small room while we moved in) and it took both of the boys the entire day to work up the courage to head downstairs. For Catch, food did the trick, but Pocket resisted even being carried down the stairs. So you can imagine that watching him sit at the top of the stairs and consider them for some hours and then finally take the plunge, making sure to put each paw on each step before proceeding was quite the event.

The first state

We only did one day of unpacking so we could have a day of exploring while my brother was still with us.
Our new state is the first state and the second smallest in the country. The east side is all coastline, 117 miles of it to be exact. So we thought we'd go to the beach. Apparently that's what people do here.

Now you can imagine that our desire to drive any distance was limited, so we thought we'd try for the coastline in our county. Just as a reference there are 3 counties in DE and we are in the northernmost. The most popular sandy beaches are in the southernmost, in fact they are about as far away as you can get from our little town and still be in the state--and that's saying a lot. Go ahead look at a map, and come back.

We found a very nice fishing pier with a small stretch of sand. We also found a crab shack that fully embraced both the art of alliteration and homonyms to create a raunchy yet kid friendly atmosphere. Blech. But they did have some very nice patio seating and seafood, which we took as our consolation prize for not going in the ocean. We did see the Atlantic at least, which was enough for Blake.

I want to emphasize that for this place, this is tame

At the pier

We also stopped at a different seafood shop on the way out of town where I bedazzled the staff with my complete ignorance of soft shell crab--"I'm from the PacNW you see, we eat the dungeness kind there" I explained. Meh. Anyway we brought home some soft shell, which I fried up and was delicious but somewhat eerie to behold:

It still looks like a crab.

We also sampled a new restaurant in town that boasted "craft beer"--I think they're still working on their beer menu. IPA fail.

can you spot the error in the IPA?

Joe and I tried again this past Sunday to see about some beach, we traveled through every county (and seemingly every state road--there are a lot here) in our state and instead of going to the most popular beaches, which we had been to before as younger people, we opted for a less claustrophobic setting. It wasn't really a good swimming beach (okay for me!) and there were many rocky spots, but that kind of made it feel like home a bit. We did wade out a bit, me somewhat less than Joe (surprised?) and in the end decided it would be a good place to go if you didn't want to worry about waves and/or excessive amounts of people.

It's about 2 feet deep for a few hundred feet

Joe waded out to the end of the sandbar/ledge/whathaveyou and bathed on the other side, while I sat on the beach in my eternal mental rocking chair.

sand and breeze

Meanwhile, Joe has begun work, so we're sampling his new wares and I am trying to put my office and my fall semester class together. Occasionally we consider unpacking the few remaining boxes that are scattered about.

Onward...

Catch: "WTF"

We sold a house. We packed. We scared the living daylights out of the cats pretty much everyday. Our last two days in the house I work up to this:

I have less of the pillow than he does

Cats huddled all around me, head to toe--perhaps they were afraid we would leave them? Perhaps we were afraid we would leave them? mwahahahahahaha

Joe and I packed the truck in 12 hours (mostly). I channeled my inner dentist (if you know my Dad you will get that joke) and per self-review "was surgical with this shit." I took all our mismatched boxes and found the perfect! home for them.

damn we're in a tight spot?

Joe jigsaw puzzled the furniture

We had excellent help for driving across the country...

Enjoying our last meal to not come from a cooler

...and drive we did. I took exactly one picture of my view, which was pretty steady for the most part, not WY though, WY was stunning)--we did OR to WY on the first day, WY to NE on the second, NE to IN on the third and IN to DE on the last day:

Bug splats and all

Blake and Joe had charge of the cats in the pick-up (saints these men, or demigods) and I drove the moving truck and the trailer (it felt like driving the 12-passenger van for my field class...really really, plus I've done this before--a few times). 

The catmobile

it's longer than it looks...

I had a lot of time to reflect on leaving the place that has really become our favorite. I kept my shit together for exactly 30 minutes of the first day. I had music blaring, the window down, and the whole of the high desert filling up my windows. But after a little bit, the full weight of leaving this place hit me. Maybe it was seeing the mountains in the rear view mirror. And I know we'll be back, maybe not on a permanent basis, but you can't keep me away from that skyline. Some prefer the skyscrapers, I prefer the peaks.

I also decided to claim the PacNW as home, or at the very least as where I'm from when people ask me. Usually I just tell people I'm not from anywhere (which surprisingly goes very poorly for the conversation). I just haven't stayed very long in any of the places I've lived--this of course can be measured at different scales (houses/schools/cities/states/countries), but I grew up a wanderer as part of a military family and it just stuck to me. I view this as a positive thing--I've rarely felt that I couldn't go somewhere or not achieve a goal because of distance. But now I also feel ready to settle down. I know we're not going to just yet (rental housing for one, partnership for the other), but, for example, I am ready to buy pieces of furniture with a specific room in mind, or knowing that I might not have to move it again...despite my many moves I seem to have excellent amnesia about how much packing and unpacking sucks. Or maybe it's just the excitement of a new place that balances it out...

At a rest area on day 1

The drive was, as expected, exhausting. To drive across with minimal stops in four days would tire anybody out, but we did it. In fact I can put it in writing now, since we're here...as far as the "on the road" piece goes, this was the smoothest trip I've done across country (and I've done 9--4 of them as an adult). No traffic, minimal disruption from construction, no accidents, no major roadblocks of any kind. We made it to each of the hotels that I reserved each night, we lost nary a cat, and aside from my spectacular skills with a truck and trailer had very few issues. As an aside, I can now include "backing up 200 feet with car trailer" as part of my skill set (may or may not include furious cursing). At least we didn't have to take the car off (again).

I also have to say (because there has not been enough cat-talk in these posts--cue eye roll) that the cats were not total asshats in the hotels. Which is kind of important, since we needed sleep and energy for the drive the next day, and they needed to shut the hell up and sleep the whole time...catlife is sooooo hard.

Pocket as overlord of the room

We rolled into town on evening #4, picked up our keys on the morning of the 5th day and unpacked the truck (it was very very very hot) in a few hours. Some things took some serious finagling to get into the house--our oversized couch for one, and moving the kegerator (gregerator) is always a delight.

New (old) house!

Our house was built in the 1930s and has had a hodgepodge of updating. So far we all (cats included) love the sun porch, and are trying to figure out how to tolerate the dollhouse-like nature of the upstairs--either people were not tall, or they cared less about hitting their heads all the time in the 1930s.