In the US, we have a 3-day weekend to celebrate Memorial Day. As an official holiday, it's supposed to commemorate those who served in the armed forces, but I think it has roots in older customs of tending graveyards and giving them a good spring-clean when the weather warms up enough to do so. So the theme for discussion this week is a dish or meal that you associate with someone you'd like to memorialize: Grandma's cookies will do fine if you don't want this to get too heavy.
I hope you've had a good week, and that Contingent Cassandra and heu mihi are enjoying their travels! Late additions are welcome, as some of us are still goal-setting for the session, so if you've been thinking about it, here's your engraved invitation. Please join in!
For a bit of inspiration (I hope), roughly five years ago we were imagining magical assistants to help us tame the monster of preparing to teach online in the fall. If you want an alternative to this week's food theme, is there a magical assistant you'd like to have for this session?
Let us know how you did with last week's goals, or what fun things you did on vacation!
Daisy
Catch up from conference absence
Extensive journal tasks
Read and edit thesis chapters
Read and edit three student project proposals
Write outline of paper from conference talk
Dame Eleanor Hull
* prep food for 2-day symposium, go there, try to have a good time
* finish new raised bed and plant veg
* swim x2
* write 2x 1 hour
* scholarly reading/note-taking 2x 1 hour
* hang out with visiting friend next weekend
JaneB
1) set session goals in personal and professional spheres
2) TRY to get caught up with feedback to graduate students on written stuff (four items to do - realistically I should manage two)
3) mark two pieces of undergrad work that had extensions
4) set up a new teaching notebook
5) do gentle stretching workout three times
6) DON'T do any work work at least two days at the weekend
Julie
Finish marking exams (due Thursday)
Book travel for two workshops in June.
Finish assembling new patio furniture (unless it rains); buy new pots and plants for patio.
Prep for daughter's birthday party on Saturday.
Susan
1. Keep plugging away on Famous Author. With luck get everything just about done by Friday. Including asking for permissions.
2. Exercise
3. Enjoy myself in my last two weeks here.
A dish to memorialise someone is easy: lasagne. It was my husband's favourite, both to make and eat, and while he was alive, I let it be one of his signature dishes as in, I didn't make it. He had others, but lasagne tended to be a celebratory dish. Ironically, it was the meal we were given most in the weeks after he died. For a long time, I couldn't bring myself to make it. Now I do, quite often, and while it's not quite as good as his, it isn't bad. I quite often make a roasted vegetable version and I recently discovered a recipe for mushroom and taleggio, which is excellent. So I suppose I have both kept his tradition alive and put new twists on it, which is quite a good metaphor for life after bereavement.
ReplyDeleteHopefully that isn't too heavy for a comment! To lighten the mood, I'll also pick a magical assistant. Not very originally, this assistant will answer emails, do boring bits of admin, and sit through boring meetings. I am on research leave next year, so no teaching to prep for, but if the assistant could handily remind me this time next year of all the curriculum changes I will have to factor in, that would be great.
How I did:
1. Finish marking exams (due Thursday) - YES
2. Book travel for two workshops in June. - MOSTLY (just trains to and from London left)
3. Finish assembling new patio furniture (unless it rains); buy new pots and plants for patio. - MOSTLY (it did rain yesterday and two chairs will require assistance); YES (patio now has a lot more colour, I just have to keep them alive).
4. Prep for daughter's birthday party on Saturday.
This week:
1. Mark three dissertations.
2. Mark one exam script that slipped through the net.
3. Reference for former PhD student
4. Read book and write review.
5. Book London train tickets.
6. June birthdays: niece, MIL, FIL.
7. Finish patio furniture
8. Pay in cheques.
9. Self-care: healthy eating, exercise, sleep.
I used to make a spinach-bechamel lasagne, from a recipe in one of the Moosewood cookbooks (I think "New Recipes from the Moosewood Restaurant," anyway an older book but not one of the first two Molly Katzen ones). Then I started adding portabella mushrooms to it, and that was even better.
DeleteCurriculum changes, oh great Cat, yes, it would be very handy to have such an assistant. Enjoy your refreshed patio! I have chipmunks digging in the pot I planted with flowers, alas, though so far they are leaving the herbs alone.
For me lasagne is an autumn meal - delicious!
DeleteThis thread is making me hungry!
DeleteHmm, dishes to memorialize someone by. Two choices: one would be the pasta recipe I did last week, which is known in the family as Point No Point pasta, Point no Point being where my father & stepmother built a house. Every time I make it my father is there, with his love of food. The other is my mother's orange fruit cake, which astonishes people who say they don't like fruit cake. I have her recipe, stained by years of use, including the instruction that "I use tins from the 5 & 10 so I don't have to get it out of the cake pan."
ReplyDeleteMy magical assistant would remind me of all the things I'd forgotten, do silly but time consuming errands, and plan travel. This week, it would be like one of the creatures in the Walt Disney Fantasia, whisking around and packing stuff in an organized way.
How I did last week:
1. Keep plugging away on Famous Author. With luck get everything just about done by Friday. Including asking for permissions. ALMOST
2. Exercise MEH. Not so much
3. Enjoy myself in my last two weeks here. YES
I mean, I have a few more permissions to request, but I'm almost there. The exercise has been not good, but I've been sleeping, which is good.
The coming week is my last here so it's both finishing work and packing up stuff. Next Saturday I drive home. I've scheduled a massage for Saturday afternoon, which I will desperately need by then!
Goals for this week:
1. Finish most of last work of Famous Author:
-- Request permissions
--- Read through one last time
(There are a few minor references I will do when I get home, but my hope is that by the middle of the day Wednesday, I can turn my attention to other stuff.
2. Re-read book I'm supposed to write 3000 words on by June 1. (Goal: June 6)
3. Return all books to library stacks, scan stuff that will be useful to scan
4. Pack up my books and get them approved to leave the library
5. Pack up apartment
6. Keep having a good time
7. Try to get some exercise!
P.S. I forgot to note that last night I made JaneB's recipe from last week, which was EXCELLENT. And easy. That will go into the rotation!
DeleteI'm glad you enjoyed it! Packing up is such a slog... and unpacking at the other end is always rather offputting too, but I hope it all goes really well
DeleteOoh I need to go back to last week and see the recipe! Good luck with the packing; it's great that you're almost done with Famous!
DeleteEnjoy your last two weeks. Feels as if that has gone super fast!
DeleteAnd magical assistant can definitely book my travel and claim my expenses, too.
DeleteA recipe... well, my sister and I LOVED Grandma's pastry (fruit pies with ice cream were always the pudding after Sunday dinner when we visited them), but we found out decades ago that she bought it as a prepared block! Home-made lemonade is one from that side of the family (thinly peeled zests of three lemons, 6 ounces white sugar, tartaric acid. pour over 1.5 pints of boiling water, infuse for several hours, when it's cool, add the juice of the lemons and put into a closed/covered jug and refrigerate until needed. Delicious! Especially drunk whilst sitting under the "loggia" looking over Grandma's roses whilst a summer shower drums on the roof and wreathes the space with petrichor. Both sets of Grandparents lived in London, so we mostly used to see them in the summer, when my parents would take us to London and we'd stay in the attic space of Grandma/Grandpa's house for a couple of weeks (my Dad would often go home after a week to work) and do museums, visit Granny/Grandad, various Great-Aunts and Cousins etc. (highlight was the guinea pig enclosure in the Battersea Park Children's Zoo - they had a large happy free-range herd of piggies...).
ReplyDeleteMagical assistant - one which would go through ALL the photocopies of old articles around my office, and either scan them or download pdf versions from the web, and generally transform the papers I've been collecting since 1990 into something digital, so that most of them can get recycled (most. The ones I actually use a LOT need to stay as paper, because, paper is just better for articles one has conversations with). Boring, but necessary. If they were truly magical they could maybe also magically sort out some colleagues, but that feels like it might not be white, purely helpful magic (as mentioned, we did NOT lose some of the PITN not exactly reliable on teaching/admin matters colleagues, and their effects are stronger with fewer people around to dilute their impact, and one of them currently only replies to emails from their superiors (i.e. Not Me even though I'm the person their (lack of) action is affecting) so I have to keep asking someone else to ask them for stuff, and it's just burning through the last few fibres of patience I have left! nearly there...
THIS PAST WEEK:
Was the last week of assessment, officially. So technicially the trimester is OVER (and the new trimester starts tomorrow - today is a Bank Holiday in the UK as well, although our equivalent of memorial day is Remembrance Day in November), but we still have to get through the last of the marking (long extensions etc.), setting summer resits, exam boards where we formally process the marks etc. The semester only feels "over" in late June... when we have maybe 3-4 weeks before attention turns to Clearing and preparing for the new academic year. This summer my subject area is part of a reorganisation, there'll be new computer systems launched (one has to worry when main repeated message at the pre-launch briefing is "this will be successful if you all have the Right Attitude" even if it is true that many of us are very weary of change), and we'll be working on a longer term review of programmes. Plus all the admin roles in the School will be changed around, so that's a lot of uncertainty which I Do Not Like. So a typical summer in academe these days!
SESSION GOALS:
Deletefall into two main areas.
Home, self and life:
1) Building better habits: more small things that bring joy, especially in terms of making stuff/doing art. More things which engage my brain and are Not Work (D&D, reading for fun). Paying attention to eating as a self-kindness not as a tool to shut up the toddler/appease the negative brain weather.
2) improving my environment: sorting out the war/floor-drobe situation, doing one big Improvement Thing (I'd like that to be getting a sofa - so would ShoutyPants!), getting the front gutters replaced, doing a big turn out of the spare bedroom/craft space/home office where I spend most of my time at home.
Academic work (the job and the work both):
3) use the block model as last summer - aiming for 24 blocks (3-4 hours of future-focused work like preparing for teaching in the following year). Aims are to get on top of teaching prep and maybe do some "just for me" research tasks (exploring future ideas).
4) I have a lot of writing projects (grant ideas and journal articles) which all involve other people therefore are not fully in my control - I'm setting the goal of substantial progress on four of them this summer.
5) supporting graduate students (it's only sort of a TLQ thing, but it is taking up a larger than normal amount of my summer, and it is important, so I'm including it).
These all read a bit vague, but to be precise I'd need more words!
LAST WEEK
1) set session goals in personal and professional spheres see above for the big picture - some of the details are work in progress, see next week's goals
2) TRY to get caught up with feedback to graduate students on written stuff (four items to do - realistically I should manage two) I did two, and one isn't really on my list any longer - a last few results came back from external analysis, they are not as expected in a positive way but means the student does need to rework that section with the new results so it's not worth me putting work into the draft at this stage
3) mark two pieces of undergrad work that had extensions done!
4) set up a new teaching notebook I set up all the layouts, just need to add the details. JUST!
5) do gentle stretching workout three times twice. My foot hurts, and I was really low energy this weekend
6) DON'T do any work work at least two days at the weekend well yes, that went along with the low energy but still!
GOALS FOR THE COMING WEEK
DeleteIt's a three day week (because I don't work Fridays) and it's got multiple meetings every day (sigh). And it's a transitional week because it's the last week when late marking might arrive etc., and because it feels logical to my brain that my attempt at "academia summer" starts on 1st of June.
1) building better habits: three gentle movement sessions, one creative thing with the hands
2) Environment: get caught up on chores, contact decluttering person
3) blocks: make a list of teaching-related blocks for this summer
4) writing: make a list of all the writing projects and where they are on 1st June. Do (much postponed) task for the Wednesday meeting this week.
5) grad students: this summer my "senior" PhD student defends her thesis, my "junior" PhD student is deep into writing with a submission date in September, my "senior" Research Masters student should be writing up (due date around December realistically) and is dealing with some major personal life drama which is hitting her already low academic confidence, my "junior" Research Masters student has a lot of field work and skills acquisition to do (they should be done with everything except microscope work by September), and I'm supervising the projects of two Taught Masters students (they start next week, submit mid-September, so short intense research projects) one jointly with a post-doc from another part of the School and one on my own. PhDSenior's practice viva is this week so I need to prepare some questions, PhDJunior is on holiday and I have a chapter draft of theirs to read and comment on, I have meetings with both ResMs, SharedTaughtM is getting a lab work briefing, and I need to chase up SoloTaughtM again as they haven't replied to my emails from last week...
Wow, that is a LOT of grad student activity right now! I'm tired just looking at it. But I like how you've mapped out your session goals here.
DeleteI like your block model and may copy that! Jonathan Mayhew once said his goals were (something like this) to do good research and give students his best self, and I agree that it is important to support grad students; I'll have a fair bit of that this summer, as well.
DeleteYour childhood memories are so lovely! Agree with Heu mihi, you always map out session goals well.
DeleteA memorial dish.... I've got plenty from grandparents, but I'm trying to think of something that I would associate with my beloved stepmother Pam, who died in 2022. Maybe a gin and tonic? :) Or prosecco.... She cooked, too, but there's no particular food that I connect with her. I do believe that she would be fine with G&T! (Also one of my mom's favorite drinks--they enjoyed quite a few together, while my dad favored bourbon and soda. My parental relationships are a little unusual.)
ReplyDeleteI missed last week because I was in Norway, so here are my session goals; I've also posted them under last week's post, for easy findability:
1. Research/writing: Complete copy-edits of book, submit revised article, submit abstract for MK, start working (idly) on research for MK, read and review book
2. Creative: Finish green sweater, work on knit dress, make a book or two, other projects!!
3. House: Clear out storage area, fix basement doors that don't close properly, wash windows at some point
4. Family: Costa Rica album, anniversary book, vol. 2 of uncle's memoirs
5. Personal: Read Italian novel vol. 2, get outdoors as much as possible, lots of exercise
6. Misc. work: Update program website, prep new class
Norway was gorgeous and glorious. We had amazing weather--five days of sun! In Europe's rainiest city! Don't worry; it's back to raining this week. It really made the fjords sparkle, though.
I'm happy to be home and ready to jump into summer (almost; I have a few lingering work-related things and some grad student business). Here's the plan for this week:
1. Finish and submit abstract (due Friday)
2. Work through copy-edited version of Front Matter, Intro, Chapter 1, Chapter 2--aiming for one document a day for four days
3. Read prospectus (and prepare for Thursday defense)
4. Start Italian novel
5. Maybe?? begin storage room clear-out
6. Exercise
7. Put feedback on essay into one place so that I can easily access it later
That's more than enough--I want to start the summer out strong so that I can seriously slack off later on....
Glad Norway was good. YAY! for copyediting. That really means the book is almost done.
DeleteAs for complicated families, while my mother did not share cocktails with my step-mother, she did visit my father & step-mother at Point no Point. When my father died, his funeral and burial were at the church where my step-mother's ex-husband and his second wife attended. So we recently got pictures of the memorial garden where Dad was buried from my step-sister after the funeral of HER stepmother. (And I see my step-brother or his wife at certain professional meetings, so there's that!)
I think it's awesome to have someone in your life who is best commemorated by either a G&T or prosecco! I hope someone will remember me for my insistance on champagne, or some sort of bubbly, on every possible occasion, along with my firm belief that the more champagne there is, the more married you are.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteGlad you had a good trip. Norway sounds great. I am loving both the idea of memorialising people with drinks, and stories of parents and step-parents getting on well. Complicated maybe, but so civilised.
DeleteAlso a question about your creative projects: are you knitting a dress, or sewing one out of a knit fabric?
DeleteAnd on the prosecco front: my grandmother had a case of champagne in her closet and when she was dying she showed me, and said it was for the reception after her funeral.
DeleteGiven the food sensitivies I've developed, I'll never be able to eat pizza again, but I miss my mother's version. She learned from a friend who married an Italian man, and his mother taught her daughter-in-law to feed the man properly. It was a thin-crust pizza, cheese under the tomato sauce. For my 12th birthday, my parents let me have a pizza party at home, 12 girls seated in the formal dining room with soda in the good wine glasses, my mother making pizza in the kitchen, and my dad acting as butler (I know butlers don't usually serve, but the butler's pantry connected the kitchen and the dining room, so . . .). (This may sound like I grew up in a very grand house, and in some ways it was, but my dad got it cheap b/c it was falling down.) It was a very fun party!
ReplyDeleteHow I did:
* prep food for 2-day symposium, go there, try to have a good time. YES: I forgot some items, but it was useful and I did have a pretty good time.
* finish new raised bed and plant veg: YES. Very pleased with this one.
* swim x2: YES (last chance for three weeks, as pool will be closed for maintenance).
* write 2x 1 hour: one x half hour.
* scholarly reading/note-taking 2x 1 hour: YES to reading, no notes, and mostly on something that might turn out to be a new project (stop that! no new shinies!) though it could be sorta-kinda related to my two main projects right now if you squint a bit.
* hang out with visiting friend next weekend: YES. It was good to see her.
New goals:
* celebrate birthday and anniversary
* 8 hours work toward first/most important conference paper
* 2 hours planning summer TA work
* gym x 4, yoga x 5
* do some poking at one course proposal
* make appointments for physical and eye exam
Pizza parties are the best. 12 year old me would have loved your fancy version. Our kids had a few that involved putting their own toppings on, always a hit and saves inevitable 'I only eat margarita pizza' complaints. Another thing my husband did was make pizza dough, in the bread maker. I haven't tried it, but my son did once and it came out really well, so perhaps he can be in charge of that tradition.
DeleteAnd on the magical assistant front, I want one who will make all my cats get along as well as feeding and medicating them. I spend a lot of time being Cat Wrangler, which is a great position, but then I'm also Chef as well as Scholar, and it gets to be a bit much.
Delete