If only...

Right now, I'm in hour 2 of my third try at rescuing my laptop. I'm writing this on my much older but apparently much better desktop while I wait for a scan to finish up. Grump.
Maybe it's because of the isolation of my job, but I think my inner voice is getting louder. Yes, that sounds insane. I mean, at least it's still inner...eventually, after enough silent hours hunched at my desk, and to the great annoyance of my inferiors more junior colleagues, it will become an outer monologue, and then I'll know I've really arrived as an academic.
Anyways, during this horrible, terrible, stupid quest to extend the life of my laptop until I have time to research what I should buy to replace it, I've spend a lot of time with my inner voice. And it's telling me I could not have chosen a less useful more different path than what I should have spent the last decade studying. I should have been learning computer science. I should have studied html for my foreign language (a real option at Mac) instead of German or Russian or Turkish.
Grump.
Update: it's two days later, and I think my laptop is clean again. Clean enough to use, at least - I'm writing this on it. Score ten points for humanities! I need all the small victories I can get.

Top 10 reasons I haven't posted lately

1. I am an academic (there, I said it), which also makes me a professional procrastinator. More on this in a later post.
   
2. The longer I wait, the greater the pressure from the three people who read this to post something mind-bogglingly funny/enlightened/inspiring/newsworthy.
3. There are a lot of other blogs out there, and sometimes it's more interesting to read them than to write on mine. Just admit it, that's why you don't have a blog.
   
4. January, the month when it's too cold to take my fingers out of my sleeves to type, and nothing worth reporting seems to be happening anyways.
5. Winter break, that special time when there are no important projects I should be doing instead of blogging. Right now, I'm avoiding a mid-size ethnographic project proposal, two grant applications, and approximately 150 pages of reading, half of which is written in Fraktur, a special gothic-style script designed expressly to cause headaches, and all of which is written in very dry, very tedious, very academic German.
   
6. Bathroom remodeling.
7. Trying to think of ways to blog about how silly certain aspects of my professional life are without getting fired/ruining any chance of future employment in my field.
   
8. The great Laptop Virus Catastrophe of 2010 (I kept thinking I'd just wait until I had it fixed to blog).
9. Toying with the idea of moving my blog to Wordpress, putting ads on my blog, making it a Real Project.
   
10. Watching seventeen iterations of this epic battle every day that I am home and should be doing productive things:

George attacks from Lindsay Lawton on Vimeo.

A Little Ray of Sunshine

I see that it's been over a month since I posted. The thing is, I wanted to post, meant to post, kept telling those well-meaning people who encouraged me to post that I would definitely post again soon, maybe tomorrow, or sometime next week. But I also wanted to keep this blog from becoming Lindsay's House of Whining, so I decided to wait until I had something positive to report, foolishly thinking that Something Positive was right around the corner, that it would jump out and surprise me when I least expected it, except I was sort of expecting it because expectation is a necessary component of hope, and also dizziness and light-headedness are side effects of the drugs I'm on for my headaches, so chances are that if it really surprised me I would probably trip over it and hurt myself somehow.

Aaaaanyways, point is that I've had a hard time lately coming up with Good Stuff to write about here. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of good things in my life, which I truly, deeply appreciate on a daily basis, and I could go on and on here about my wonderful husband or the great new sweatpants I got at Target last week. It's just that I've had a hard time focusing on them (or anything, really) since the headaches started, and then the weather turned bad and school got hard and Rob got the flu and I got the flu and the weather stayed bad and the house still wasn't finished. Which leads me to the reason I'm finally posting, even though my head still hurts a lot and I'm having a hard time with the side effects and school is still hard and it continues to be the coldest, soggiest October I've ever witnessed: the house is finished!

Well, basically. There are some little things that still need to be taken care of before we can completely sever our relationship with the contractors, but I'll take good news where I can get it. The roof isn't leaking and there are storm windows to keep out the rain and we don't have to lunge to get up to the porches because we have stairs again. In case you aren't sufficiently impressed, here is the before picture:

Not bad, huh?

The Headache

I've had a headache for several days now. This is the Headache to End All Headaches. It has its peaks and valleys, but it hasn't gone away completely no matter how much advil I take. And despite the heightened awareness of all the horrible and unfair and outrageous things going on in the world that comes with being back in school and taking certain classes, this headache is ruining my life. Cue melodramatic whimper. (Ok, it would make you grumpy too. This is the time to bail if you'd rather not have to witness more grumping.)
The thing is, I've never had a headache like this, and I've had headaches all my life, including migraines for most of college. There is this stabbing, sharp pain when that comes out of nowhere and brings the rest of my life to a standstill: what I was saying, what I was doing, which bus stop I get off at, where I put that glass of water. It is breathtaking. And really disruptive.
And so I put aside the fact that I really don't like being called a hypochondriac and I went to the health clinic and waited in a room full of people in face masks who may or may not have swine flu to meet with a nurse, describe my symptoms and medical history, wait in an exam room, describe my symptoms again, do a neuro exam, clarify my symptoms, answer the same questions several times (do they do this to see if you're making up symptoms, or because they didn't listen to you the first time? ugh.), listen to the RNP assigned to me say that it's stress, then that something must be making an artery in my brain spasm, then that it's probably stress and "we don't always know that we're stressed," then that she honestly doesn't know, then after consulting with a physician that it's an "atypical migraine" and that there's no way to know what triggers it or how to prevent it, but there are some pills she'd like me to take that might cause dizziness, nausea, and fatigue and to call her next week.
And then a nurse came in and said my test results were in and I have mono. What's that? My name's not Shannon? Woops, wrong room!
When politicians talk about fixing the health care system, I wonder if they know the kinds of feelings that come from episodes like these. I'm in kind of a lot of pain, and instead of help or even reassurance, I get charged $20 for some glorified tylenol and to be told that it's either nothing, something they won't/can't treat until it messes up my vision, coordination, or speech (mess it up more, I assume, than the drugs they gave me), or something they don't understand any better than I do.
If anyone knows a good primary care physician in the Twin Cities, now would be a good time to mention it.

Welcome back!

I'm back at school now. It's been busy, obviously, as you can tell by the recent lack of posting. Welcome week at the University of Minnesota can be summed up like this: we're all going to get H1N1, and oh, right, due to the economic downturn we have to all do our part and pay higher fees. I am not exaggerating when I say that I get an email about H1N1 every single day. The advice? If you feel sick, stay home and drink lots of fluids. If you live in a residence hall, though, you should go back to wherever you came from. Oh, and if you're going back where you came from, please don't use public transportation to get there. Because the first thing most students will do if they come down with the swine flu is to walk back to Coon Rapids.
In other news, work on our house is going forward. We have said goodbye to our old siding, our storm windows, our chimneys, and one back door. And our yard. And what I now understand as the luxury of opening windows without letting bugs or the noise or dust in. The upside is that this project is a great excuse to put off cleaning/filing/organizing anything and everything.
All the same, it's nice to be back in a routine that's a bit more challenging than messing around in the garden all day. The dogs are adjusting fine, but the garden is having a hard time understanding that I just can't be there picking tomatoes and beans and canning all the time. We're going to have a long talk this weekend and see if we can't work it out.

The Mad Canner

It was my last real weekend before school started. Classes don't actually begin until September 8, but this week is orientation, and I actually have to be on campus 4 of the next 5 days, so this week sort of counts as school rather than vacation. And while some students might use their last real weekend before classes begin to organize their files or brush up on their calculus or drink a case of whiskey, I opted to spend my last homework-free weekend up to my armpits in produce.
Saturday I spent the whole day in the garden, restaking tomatoes for the umpteenth time because they are so heavy with fruit that they keep tipping over and smashing my basil, ripping out the bush beans that ripened weeks ago while we were on our honeymoon, and planting some last-chance onion sets that might not grow before frost kills them but probably wouldn't be any good by next spring anyways. And, obviously, harvesting. We got something like 50 pounds of tomatoes (50 POUNDS!), 15 pounds of cucumbers, and at least a bushel of beans. The bushel of beans is a guess. A bushel to me is a really vague measurement that is more than my biggest mixing bowl can hold.
All this produce meant it was also a big weekend for Home Food Preservation. I feel like a renegade imposter housewife, being neither a mother nor a Mormon nor a farmer's wife and still getting excited about the produce and all the ways to save it for winter. But I cannot possibly eat more tomatoes than I am right now, and I'm running out of dishes that involve both tomatoes and beans, and I just can't bring myself to throw away perfectly good produce, especially since I haven't gotten around to starting a compost bin. Rob and I have been learning about canning, and it turns out that without a pressure canner, we can only can acidic things (pickles and salsa). This would be a problem, but a) we seem to have plenty to do canning salsa and pickles, and b) we bought a big freezer to keep non-acidic things (beans and spaghetti sauce).
So. Sunday morning we got up and I went to the farmers' market while Rob washed mason jars. The farmers' market here is truly amazing this time of year. The market here is one of my absolute favorite places to be. The produce is all so beautiful that I have a really hard time remembering that there are only two people to feed in this house, that we have a budget, that there is really no good reason to buy 30 ears of corn and a bushel of eggplants. Apples are coming in already, which makes it even better/more dangerous. Really, I can't exagerrate how lovely it is.
We used the market to fill in the gaps in our garden. Peppers and onions (we had those, we just ate them all already) and cilantro. Then we made salsa. And it's a little weird to compress the day into that single sentence, because it was the whole day. 19 pints with two different recipes. We also froze beans, and just for good measure and because we had the water boiling anyways, we made another 7 quarts of pickles. And then it was 8:30 at night and we were exhausted and covered with tomato seeds and we had vinegar burns in our lungs and Rob couldn't get the jalapeno oils out from under his thumbnails, but damn if this whole garden/canning thing hasn't been the most rewarding thing I've done lately. And then I went to scrub the salsa out from under my fingernails and I glanced in the mirror and that renegade housewife? I guess everything has a price, even all those beautiful jars of salsa, because I really looked like her. At 43. After she got into the cooking brandy.

Wedding photos