Author: Jana

  • Corona Diary: Endings

    SIP Day 55, wearing a black tank and black cotton shorts; writing from the desk in my home office; 75 degrees outside today.

    Tonite is the last class session for HIST 301, the environmental history course that I am teaching this semester. This ending feels more somber than usual, given the struggles to stay connected to students this semester. Generally I feel a strong sense of satisfaction at the end of a term, and I’m not sure that I will feel that this year, and I suspect that this feeling is shared by my students.

  • Corona Diary: Pleasure

    SIP Day 54, wearing a black tank and brown linen pants; writing from the desk in my home office; 73 degrees outside today.

    To offset some of the strangeness and outright difficulty of sheltering-in-place for two months, I’ve allowed myself a variety of small pleasures to offset stress:

    What are your simple pleasures during this stressful time?

  • Corona Diary: Today

    SIP Day 53, wearing a brown sleeveless maxi-dress, writing from the desk in my home office; 73 degrees outside today.

    Today was back-to-back meetings and emails coming in faster than I could read them. 
It was a lunch of homemade chicken salad on homemade bread, by Stijn. 
It was students anxious about the end of the semester. 
It was colleagues with so many questions about what's next for our campus. 
It was text messages from friends and kiddos throughout the day
 reminding me to re-connect.  
It was a cat throwing up at my feet during a Zoom thesis defense. 
It was beautiful weather that I forgot to notice until the sun was setting and then 
it was some small flies hovering over our pasta dinner as we ate together and shared all that had happened.

  • Corona Diary: Semester

    SIP Day 52, wearing a striped cotton tank and black linen joggers, writing from the desk in my home office; 73 degrees outside today.

    It’s the last week of the semester. We will spend this weeks’ classes getting closure on many of the big ideas that we’ve worked with throughout the semester as well as having the student groups get peer feedback on the final draft of the their Final Projects. It’s a time of many endings.

    I have also been taking a class this semester, in User Experience Design. I thought it would be wise for me to have more background in this area due to the fact that I am working with software interfaces all day long. Though many come “out of the box” and we don’t have control over the design, we can control customize some elements of the software experience, and of course we can control how we do outreach and training on the software. Most of what I learned this semester has underscored to me that users have very idiosyncratic ways of approaching new tools based on past behavior and that it’s important to take that into account. I also had my own “user experience” this weekend by playing around with a new to me application: TikTok. I learned a lot from “fiddling” around with it and am getting some ideas about how I would like to create some content for my little homestead garden for the platform.

    Bonus: so much kawaii on Tiktok: I am especially loving the goat, calf, and piglet videos.

  • Corona Diary: Crap Day

    SIP Day 51, wearing a cotton tank dress, writing while on the sectional sofa in the living room; 76 degrees outside today. It’s Mother’s Day and I chatted with both kiddos as well as my own mother today.

    I spent a good chunk of the day shoveling crap: cleaning out the compost bin and finding about a foot deep of worm castings in the bottom of it. Black gold for the garden. I spread it around some areas that needed fertilizer.

    I also trimmed the diseased lower leaves off of forty or so tomato plants.

    Today the tallest tomato plant reached my height. All but a few of our seventy tomato plants have set fruit, but we’ve only harvested a few cherry and grape tomatoes thus far.

    A few other tasks I accomplished this weekend: built a small bubbling fountain for the back porch, edged all of the garden beds, repotted several plants and sowed a new bed of corn. We also deep-cleaned the kitchen, including scrubbing the tile of the backsplash and wiping down all of the cabinet fronts.

    Stijn rebuilt all of the electrical wiring for the sprinkler system and the lighting for the back porch. It will simplify keeping everything running smoothly and will be safer than the tangle of cords that used to hang out of the outlet on the back of the house. He also added a wireless access point on the back porch so we have a robust signal out of doors as well as in.

    I made some tasty lentil-lemon soup, Stijn cooked a small chicken on Saturday and made mussels on Sunday.

  • Corona Diary: Sounds

    Has anyone else noticed that you are hearing sounds that you didn’t before?

    For example, I have noticed train sounds at night and in the morning, that I never heard before.

    When an airplane flies overhead–which happens a few times per day–it is disruptively loud. I didn’t even notice them before.

    The birdsong in my garden seems to drown out the sounds from my Zoom calls, so I feel I must “mute” my sound so they do not disrupt the others in my meetings.

  • Corona Diary: Spine Poetry

    SIP Day 48, wearing a grey tank and white jeans, writing while sitting at the desk in my home office; 89 degrees outside today.

    I recently saw a colleague publishing “spine poetry” made up of book titles. I like a poetry challenge so I set my hand at creating some poetry. This was my first pass:

    stack of books with text of poem
    The Journey Home

    Becoming wise about this life;
    Extraordinary Bodies in and out of the garden,
    Close to the bone; crossing to safety
    The other side of paradise

    The next poem I wanted to be about the pandemic, with a nod to John Snow who first created the cholera map of London, which taught us so much about the spread of infectious disease:

    Stack of books with spines facing out
    Ghost Map

    Before, during, after
    the year with no pants:

    The monster at our door;
    Changes in the land;
    A room of ones own in exile (and other stories).
    The body in pain; dead certainties
    Homesick prisoners of the American dream.

    How much is enough?
    Here comes everybody.

  • Corona Diary: Simplify

    SIP Day 47, wearing a black sleeveless top and black stretchy pants, writing while sitting on the floor my home office; 93 degrees outside today

    Started running the A/C during the day, as it’s hard for us to focus in our afternoon meetings while sweaty. I hadn’t really realized how much of a respite the office environment usually offers in summer, until this week.

    I’ve been having a craving to simplify. Some tasks in that vein:

    • Unsubscribe (again) from emails from every company that I’ve ever purchased an item from or any website that required registration for access.
    • Give away more of my books (local Little Free Libraries, I will be coming to visit you soon)
    • Clear out my kitchen cabinets of all the odds and ends that tend to congregate there, especially the junk drawers and cupboards near the kitchen sink

    Another thing that happened today: I published my first Medium article. It will likely only appeal to lit-nerds like myself, but it made me happy to write this piece: “I Prefer Not to”: Post-COVID Life Lessons Learned from Herman Melville

  • Corona Diary: Teaching

    SIP Day 46, wearing a white cotton blouse and olive-colored skirt, writing from my home office; 87 degrees outside today

    It’s the second-to-last week of classes and about this time every semester I become extremely nostalgic, knowing that the end is near and realizing how much I will miss this most recent batch of students.

    This year has been so much harder in some ways–moving to fully online before I really felt that I knew my students and that we had the ease of having established class norms. It is also the first time that I haven’t had my class over to my backyard, to sit together and nibble on some garden produce and discuss weighty topics of environmental history, such as “What is wilderness?” and “What are the costs of preservation?” It’s not nearly as easy to discuss these ideas while in a Zoom session, nor did it feel that we were relaxed enough to just “talk” together due to the fact that the entire country (if not the entire globe) is in stasis due to COVID-19.

    It’s my hope that the students will take away something that will stick with them long after the class is over, despite it being such an awkward semester. I know it will be one that I will never forget.

    ***

    Finished Reading: The Nightingale. It was a bit formulaic for my taste, but still a moving story of the French resistance during WWII. Would be a good poolside or airplane book, and sucked me in and kept me interested despite the difficulty that I’ve had focusing on novels this month.

  • Corona Diary: Garden

    SIP Day 45, wearing black tshirt and blue cotton shorts, writing from my home office; 82 degrees outside today

    The garden is exploding with plants and about-to-be-ripe tomatoes and zucchini. The corn is about 5″ tall now, although we have lost some to crows. My garden tasks this evening include planting some parsley that we raised from seed, piling some more soil on the potato beds, and pulling weeds.

    Other things I have accomplished today:

    • worked for 8 hours and wrote 32 emails and uncounted numbers of Teams messages
    • ate a large salad that Stijn made, for lunch
    • ordered a Mother’s Day gift for Mom and a book-gift for a dear friend who was recently released from the hospital
    • made a to-do list in my day planner

    Reading: Nightingale

    Watching: Crip Camp (which made me sob. I owe so much to the folks who sat-in for 504 and agitated for the ADA)

  • Corona Diary: Chores

    SIP Day 44, wearing black tank top and blue cotton shorts, writing from my the living room couch; 78 degrees outside today and slightly windy

    My favorite household chore is vacuuming. So much so that if I am really upset I will just go through the house and give it a good vacuuming to calm down.

    Like vacuuming, I love mowing the lawn. Generally we employ a gardener to mow our front and back lawns, but at the beginning of S-I-P, we asked the gardener to only mow the front and we took over the care of the backyard. We are letting the “middle” of the back lawn grow wild and tall and I am mowing each week around the garden beds, trees, and around the outdoor kitchen area. While I am mowing I am ebullient, and then after I’m done I have to sit on the back porch for about an hour admiring my handiwork. I also have an edger and I “edge” around the garden beds, trees, and the cinderblock walls.

    It’s nice to have the time to vacuum and mow and also the time to admire the investment of effort.

  • Corona Diary: Visit

    SIP Day 43, wearing maroon tank top and blue linen shorts, writing from my the living room couch; 82 degrees outside today

    A friend came by today and we sat ten feet away from each other in the backyard and talked for 2 hours. The last time I spent time with a friend was March 14.