mimsy and outgrabe

Last week was our last week of spring semester classes at the college, and in lieu of writing a blog post I was grading.  THIS week has entailed more busyness than you'd think possible for a week without classes -- I was actually in a three and a half hour meeting on Wednesday -- but I've reclaimed my mornings and I've been reading and writing again. M.S. and I are finishing our Sketchbook Project and turning it into digital files that we can submit to galleries for group exhibitions -- although really when I write "we" I mean "M.S." because I don't know the first thing about submitting to art shows, but I'm along for the ride. It's interesting and something outside of my comfort zone, so in the long run probably a good thing.  I'm running triage on my household, which as per usual fell apart during the last month of the semester and needs some serious decluttering and cleaning. How can five people accumulate so much junk? Als...

So this was fun. And weird. People sure like free stuff -- 1349 people (you read that right) signed up over Goodreads to win a free copy of my chapbook. I am not a well-known writer, nor am I under any delusion that there are 1349 feminist scholars out there, or even 1349 ordinary everyday readers, who think the idea of a sequence of poems about a pig who shifts shape is a really GOOD idea and wow, wouldn't I like to own a book like that?  No, people just like winning free stuff. And I am O-K with that. At the very least, I'm hoping that the 10 people who DID win DO actually wish to read the poems inside the free book they're about to receive in the mail. And by the way, Goodreads uses some kind of complex algorithm to figure out which lucky 10 readers are allowed to win books in the giveaway, so please don't blame ME if you didn't win a copy. You can, however, email me if you'd like one. Here are the lucky 10:  (I think it's so cool to ima...

Hahahahahaha. Just kidding. It wasn't bad.

As you may have guessed from this post's title, a rigorous bout of the flu kept me from posting on the blog last week, or from doing anything of substance, really, until Sunday. My son, my husband, and I all came down with some form of the illness around the beginning of the week, and so our household barely functioned for seven days.  Yesterday, after waking up and feeling vaguely human, my husband and I went on a massive disinfecting bender, assaulting almost all surfaces in the house with Clorox wipes, changing sheets and towels, washing said sheets and towels, washing all clothes that may have had a remote chance of being sneezed on or coughed at, vacuuming up all of the dog hair that we'd ignored all week, and then collapsing into two piles of sniffling, coughing lethargy because, dammit, cleaning is exhausting when you've spent most of the week comatose from the flu. In fact, every normal routine task feels monumental. I just put Little Miss Talkalot on the...

I really should expect by now that with Good News comes News I'm Not Quite as Excited About. I received my first rejection from the contest circuit for the full-length ms of Fabulous Beast , and I'm not going to pretend I'm overjoyed about it. It put a depressing final note on yesterday, which was filled with conferences and grading and a really deep kind of exhaustion, as I didn't sleep very much the night before. My eyes were red and swollen and I'm actually thankful to the three or so students that stood me up, because it bought me more time during the day to grade and get myself organized for the week.  I was leaving the office, still really tired but feeling a little satisfied, knowing that I'd managed to get a good number of things done, and then I received the email form rejection. I don't mind the email rejection -- a true child of the information age, I definitely prefer the speed with which I can find out that a journal or book doesn't wa...

This has been a daunting week in many ways . . . and yes, it's only Tuesday.  I guess it feels like my week hasn't really ended, or that my *weeks* haven't really ended, since I've been on "go" mode for most of three weeks, ever since the hurricane hit and my husband disappeared into an endless cycle of overtime. I know that he's the one out there doing the physical labor, but I'm exhausted. It's not like my daily duties increased *so* much since A. began working this schedule . . . I mean, usually we cook dinner *together* and he's around to play bad cop to my lame, ineffectual cop with the kids . . . but other than that, I'm pretty much the lead when it comes to getting them ready for school and then later getting them ready for bed, and I do much of the shuttling between school and after school activities, too. But not having him around as much -- we see each other for about 20 minutes in the morning and an hour or so at night -- t...