first efforts

Filing for academic dummies

When I got back from Nashville I decided to clean up my campus office, which got a little, um, musty while I was gone. I swept, dusted, unpacked boxes, and reshelved books. My file cabinets were already stuffed to the gills when I left for sabbatical, and I came back with lots more to file and no space in which to file it. With no room to add another file cabinet, I ordered up one of those giant barrel-sized recycling bins and set to work purging.

Some stuff was easy to get rid of. The forty-sixth copy-edited draft of that essay? Gone. Articles originally read for my MA program's non-rhetoric courses? Gone. Former grad students' dissertation drafts? Gone. (Sorry to any of the authors of said dissertations who might be reading this, but you've gone on to bigger things anyway, right?). Teaching stuff has always been pretty easy for me to handle. Old exams and papers? I usually dump and/or shred those after a couple of semesters, so they don't hang around long. Data about final grades and how I calculated them? I keep that forever.

Some stuff, however, left me stumped. For example, the galleys from my first book, which was published over four years ago. I was about to toss it all into the bin when I suddenly wondered whether this was something I should keep, like how you are supposed to keep your tax returns forever. I can't imagine why I would need them, yet they just didn't seem like something I should throw away. Is there a scholarly equivalent to being audited? (Or maybe that's what tenure is, and I already have that.)

You know how personal finance books like Personal Finance for Dummies have those lists about which financial documents you can toss after a certain time period (e.g., credit card statements, cancelled checks, etc.) and which you should keep forever (e.g., titles, tax returns, etc.)? Academics need one of those lists for filing. How do you know what is okay to purge from files and what isn't? What can you ditch and what should you keep forever?

Writers need readers

Rachel Toor in today's Chronicle argues that we writers all need good reader friends who will "shield" our "academic flanks." And she's right. Who's got your back?

Eat local

Tis the season for eating locally! Last night I had Bengineer over for dinner. Apart from the broiled fish I served, which was decidedly not local, here was our menu:

sliced tomatoes with goat cheese and basil

corn on the cob

roasted green beans with thyme

homemade zucchini bread

Very organic, very local. The tomatoes and goat cheese came from our local farmers' market (my own tomatoes aren't ripe yet). The basil came from my garden. And the corn, beans, and zucchini came from the thriving garden of G&J, who like nothing better than to stuff my car with fresh produce when I go down to their beautiful place for a visit.

Yum.

How you know you've had a great Monday

1. You get enough work done so that you can pass as a professional.

2. You get $100 worth of rebate checks in the mail.

3. You have a lovely, wide-ranging chat with Dr. RJ, who is headed off tomorrow to spread the Illinois Rhetoric Gospel to the hoosiers over in West Lafayette.

4. You top it all off by having dinner with a group of fabulous women colleagues, where you learn, among other things, that pop songs make great teaching philosophy statements and that you can never have too many neighbors named Mary Ann.

A letter to my inner runner

Darling,

We go back a long way, you and me. Remember those track meets in high school? All that 80's hair and those old-fashioned shoes that didn't even control my overpronation? Good times, good times. And we have stayed together through thick and thin, haven't we? From the highs of finish lines and age group awards to the lows of getting pelted by ice and rain or suffering through that nasty hamstring pull, we've always been there for each other.

Until now. Let me just say it straight: I don't even know who you are anymore. I am still getting out there with you 3 times a week but when we run it's like you have nothing left for me. I try my best to be a good companion. I hydrate, stretch before and after, and never, ever make you run during the hottest time of the day. But even when I give you all that TLC you respond by being lumbering and slow and embarrassing me in front of my faster friends. What gives?

Now, I know you'll say it's my fault and maybe that's partly true. If I'm not injured and I'm not sick, you wonder, then there must be some other reason why I'm not seeing you as often. Perhaps you even wonder if I am cheating on you with power-walking or swimming (though you have always allowed me to keep yoga and Pilates on the side, and for that I thank you). Or maybe I've just gotten lazy. But I remain faithful only to you, despite the fact that the romance -- not to mention the endorphin kick -- is gone. I will admit that lately I'm wondering if it's all worth it. Maybe we really don't belong together after all. Maybe we have grown apart.

But my darling, I love you way too much to end things now, when I'm finally comfortable in the 35-39 age group. I beg you, can we begin again? Can't we try to find that spark that brought us together all those years ago? Please say yes. If you say yes I promise to start this week, today even, right now. I'll take you out to the trails in Mahomet. We haven't been out there since we got back from Nashville, and I know you love that five mile loop so very much. We'll leap through the prairie grasses and jump across the muddy parts of the trail with the sprightly grace of a faun. We'll even chase butterflies. And when we're all done, we'll come home with wet feet and muddy calves and renewed spirit. You'd like that, wouldn't you?

And later this week, we'll try to rekindle our own love by helping others kindle theirs. We'll go to the first meeting of the Second Wind Running Club's beginning women's running group, where we'll mentor new runners and help a whole new group of women find and fall in love with their own inner runners. It will be as good for us as it is for them, don't you think? It will help us remember why we're together. It will help us fall in love with each other again.

Please, darling, let's give us another chance.

Yours always,

Cara

Morning glorious

While I was away the morning glories went insane on my patio, creeping and crawling their way up the side of the garage, bursting in a riot of purple each morning. Overnight rains this week produced this lovely photo op...

Ode to the two week vacation

As we were heading north for our annual cabin-on-a-lake trip, we ran across media coverage of a recent study that ranks the U.S. last among the 21 richest nations in the amount of guaranteed vacation time. And it's not just that Americans often don't get -- or don't take -- time off, they apparently don't take enough days at once. A spokesperson from the group Take Back Your Time observed that "studies show" people need about two full weeks to actually relax and get the benefits from time off. And this time must be taken at once, not cobbled together with a few days here or there.

Our two weeks in the woods offer strong anecdotal evidence for the importance of a longer stretch of time. Based in our cozy cabin-on-a-lake and close to lots of fabulous places to take day trips, my beloved and I unconsciously fell into a kind of day on/day off schedule: one day of "doing stuff" (hiking, sightseeing) followed by one day of "doing nothing" (hang-around-the-cabin fare such as walks, sitting on the dock, "taking a float" in the lake on an inflatable raft, reading, napping, etc.). It turned out to be the perfect recipe for actually relaxing. By about Thursday of the first week (we arrived Saturday) I finally felt relaxed. How much would it have sucked if we'd had to go home just two days later?

Because I am water-deprived here on the prairie, I instinctively made sure that every one of the long hikes we took was dominated by running water. After a lot of May and June rain, the rivers were running fast this year. Unfortunately, most river hikes also happen to be dominated by stairs. Lots and lots of stairs. Long climbs down and up stairs, courtesy of the designers of the Superior Hiking Trail, who apparently never met a steep set of stairs they didn't like. Fishing on East Bearskin, our home base, was terrible. But a small finnfam contingent did have great fun on a half-day charter on Lake Superior, where we were guided by the aptly-named Fishin' Chicks, twentysomething sisters whose motto is "Life's too short to fish with ugly men." See the slideshow below for a thrilling action sequence of my adventures with a lake trout.

The final highlight of the trip was a culinary one, believe it or not. This year, for the first time, finnfam managed to organize and pull off a progressive dinner -- for twelve! We started with appetizers and sparkling wine in our tiny cabin (see here for the three recipes I served). We then moved on to other finnfam digs in the lodge, where we enjoyed GeekBro's awesome citrus salad and Auntie Jan (aka the Dean's Queen) stuffed us to the gills with surf 'n turf: short ribs and crab cakes with a side of mashed potatoes and an amazing spicy vegetable slaw. We finished the night up the road at the gorgeous hilltop house of our beloved friends, Dave and Barb, who wowed everyone with a decadent ice cream cake.

And now for the slideshow, which I have just figured out how to add to my blog (thanks, Lu!)...

Post-Vacation Guide to Handling Email

My beloved and I just completed a glorious trip (gratuitous big fish photos to follow) that left us happily without cell phone or email access for more than fourteen days. I can't remember when I have gone that long without checking email. Maybe in 1993. Needless to say, he and I were both a little nervous to dig back in when we returned. We'd both set away messages via automated response, so folks knew we were gone. But still, what horrors awaited us in the in-box? We circled the computer like lazy dogs for a full day before we turned it on and logged in.

Although I'm sure one exists, I have yet to encounter a guide to how one should most effectively and efficiently handle all of the email that piles up after a vacation (note to guys who wrote Send: something like this would be a good addition to the next edition). So here's what I did:

Begin by imagining the worst possible professional news awaiting me in my email; my beloved suggested we do this so that whatever we actually encountered wouldn't seem so bad. (I can't believe I didn't think of this myself, being Scandinavian and all).

Open in-box. Make a first pass at all new messages by opening nothing and reading nothing but subject lines. Delete all spam, outdated news updates from Chronicle of Higher Education, notes from Ilse at MoveOn.Org, and the like. This alone cut my new messages by nearly 60%.

Make a second pass at all remaining new messages by reading each. Do not reply as you read messages! Simply star (I use gmail) or flag any messages that require an actual response or action on your part. (Not replying before you've read everything once through is important, otherwise you'll look like a boob when you discover, five messages later, that the party you said you could attend on Friday is really now scheduled for a Monday). 

Finally, make a third pass at only the starred messages and act on those directly. (Note to those of you who sent me what you believe to be one of these kinds of messages: I'm still working through this stage).

This strategy really helped me manage things and had the added benefit of reminding me that I really am not so overworked and important after all. The proof: Of the 298 messages awaiting me when I got back, only 94 were ones I actually had to read. Of those 94, only 20 contained anything I actually had to directly respond to or act on. Which makes me really glad I didn't waste my time hauling a laptop to the Great White North or combing the tiny town of Grand Marais, MN looking for free wi-fi.

Cool Canadian breezes? Check. Boreal forests? Check. Sky blue waters? Check.

Gone fishin'