Starting From Down Under

It’s an interesting feeling as I sit in an unexpectedly quiet part of SFO, starting up this blog I fitfully kept in previous years, usually when I was traveling and thought family and friends might be interested in updates.  All the doubts come back--why bother, don’t take yourself seriously, don’t waste your own or others’ time, etc.  I don’t follow many blogs myself (still reading new on dead-trees, at least occasionally), though I have noted some patterns that I want to avoid and some I’d love to cultivate (at least occasionally I have laughed out loud reading some of the funny people out in the blogosphere, but there sure is a lot of drivel, too)--more on that anon. 

Enough navel gazing.  Time for me to take my own writing-teacher medicine, “don’t get it right, get it written”--though perhaps without enough of the concomitant “and then revise like crazy.”

Ideas as I sit here at SFO in strangely quiet corner: I struggle with texting on new-old phone, never that good at it anyway--but I’m struck at how strange it is, this contrast between constant connectivity (and the expectations both ways--of connecting and being connected to) versus the old way (snailmail, expensive landline calls, long gaps where no one actually knows where you are in your journey, etc).

I’d like to put in something on the aerie, our temporary home for a few weeks because we sublet our regular house.  Strange transition, not home but just up the street, far less traffic noise, far more nature noise (and yappy dog noise), someone else’s choices of layout / furnishing / books etc, living out of a suitcase in effect, but all of it also making me realize how much STUFF I don’t actually need--hence more trips to Goodwill are in my future. 

Here're some pix, no time or energy to format 'em:

 

Fears and anxieties in response to all the people who’re saying “Oh you must be so excited” and all I can think about is being petrified... about unfinished business from the previous year, about logistical details still unsettled, about the courses I’ll be teaching, about possible idiocies / idiots to deal with amongst the students--hell, after my experience in Summer 2011, about the students themselves, about Alex and whether we can get into a regular school here or whether we’ll be having home-school struggles in an alien environment--will this be a nightmare of arguments and teenage sit-down strikes, as part of our Europe time has been of late. 

But hey--this is the adventure and I am on it.  I can do anything if it's only 90 days long... 

Well that was really fun

Both of you who read this blog, you know the haps in broad outline. The last two weeks of the course were a true challenge on a whole lot of levels. I'm typing this in the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, waiting here instead of having taken a later bus from Oxford becaus, well, you don't want to leave a damned thing to chance or traffic or any of the nine million minor f-ups that could occur and will occur if you count on people to do the right thing. Alex is temporarily engrossed in his iPod, and I should be marking papes, but I wanted to at least get a placeholder up before embarking for the European finish of this tour.

All the halflings checked out of college, and there were only a few little curveballs in the process. Nothing like the stuff that started two weeks ago as I started hearing about mutinous rumblings and then had a horrendous encounter with modern-era Mean Boy Syndrome, lots of wishing I could go back in time and clarify my expectations and accommodate he un-satisfiable, all in all a strange and sad revisitation of high school or middle school, tapping into all that old geeky stuff as you realize people are smiling to your face and stabbing you behind your back.

I am pretty confident I made a good save of the last week of the course, with a hastily but competently written explanation / exhortation of my methods and my concerns. No one really fessed up to being part of the Complaining Group (according to a mole there was a petition being readied about my running of the academic side of the course (discussion / papers at end rather than lecture-and-quiz) and the lack of organized activities (expecting them to take charge of sightseeing and college visits according to their own interests rather than follow-the-umbrella tours). The fact that the previous syllabus (such as it was) was still posted made it clear that my rendition fo the course would be different, but it provided a template for complaints. One student went to me--and to this day I do not know confidently whether she overdramatized the unrest, or whether she was the true mole who rescued the program by her courageous ratting out of her fellows. In the event: had three or four sleepless nights and complete bunker mentality before I could put this horrific episode behind me. I will try to put this into words another time.

Meanwhile, we're off to Paris, Alex and I are, to join up and send a couple of nights there before heading to see the bro and family.... More soon, as you-know-who is pissing and moaning about how much he has to wait....

London, and Family

Bit of break from the Peregrination Channel, but will try to post a few pics and paragraphs to get caught up before it gets too late. Thursday we did the London extravaganza, a little differently from the way the GT went at things--I did schedule a boat ride because that was so successful in Paris, there were some rumblings about the trip because so much time was spent in transit and going down to Greenwich. I have to say it's always a trade-off: do I give people lots of time off to manage on their own, or do I schedule events and group outings for the people who can't or won't schedule them themselves. In the end I ended up doing a weird hybrid thing where I took several events in the original inherited schedule that might have been lock-step group things, and made them into schedule-it-yourself parts of the London trip: a fixed amount to cover their own transport down, the boat pass, and a Harry Potter VII ticket. If some of them figured out cheaper ways to do various items, then more power to them.

We did luck out with the weather, and I actually had a decent time with the kids--and only a pair of them made it late-ish to the 11 AM rendezvous at Westminster Pier for the boat. I should point out that this student is one of the smartest in the class, and I totally forgive her for checking on her iPad in front of the Houses of Parliament.


The family time began with a certain amount of drama, as I discovered when I called the hotel that they had overbooked for the first night, and overflowed us into what on paper was an upgrade a few blocks away but was in fact a ghastly Ibis across the street from the Earls Court Exhibit Hall, sort of London's answer to the Moscone Center. Yikes. But with no way to warn Amelie, who was going to the original hotel after Tube-ing in from Heathrow after a layover night in New York. This meant schleppage for them and a frisson of frustration for me, compounded when we found that the breakfast that had been included in the original hotel was an extra £9.50 in the new, but we were welcome to walk back over between 7:30 and 9 and get our oh so delicious not quite British second B of the B & B. Rather than create a big stink we went with it OK, and it all turned out satisfactorily. By the time I arrived Alex was zonko and Ams was off foraging for cell phone SIM cards. Ams got to visit her old haunts in Holland Park, we had a nice but expensive dinner for which we were woefully underdressed, and got a decent night's sleep.

Next day after transferring to the other older hotel (typical warren--and the bathroom has the most spectacular plaster stalactite ceiling, with drips adorning the soap dispenser) and dumping bags we did our own Greenwich excursion, this time with more museum-ing along with an hour in a cafe by me marking blue books, and then it was back up the river to the London Eye.

London was absolutely jammed, as we were joining what seemed like hundreds of thousands of tourists who also thought the Elgin Marbles and other attractions were a good idea (it was compounded by the rain on our British Museum day--felt like the Vatican, but the guards were less pushy). In previous visits I had not bothered to drop £18 and wait in line, but the Eye was kind of cool, I have to say. Maybe not £18 cool, but I wasn't that disappointed in the end. In amongst spending money on touristic stuff we had some jet lag or blood sugar or teen angst, but overall no major meltdowns. I am vaguely concerned about how obsessive I have to be on these gigs, and worry about whether I am neglecting my family, but so far we are managing all right. I'm sure in two weeks when it is all over it will seem worth it.

Now I just have to survive tomorrow--the bus trip to Bath and Salisbury and Stonehenge, sure to provoke vomit noises from the cognoscenti. I have a set of papers to mark, and have to compose an e-mail firming up the schedule of due dates; this week we have been bumped from the classroom we had the first two weeks, and I ended up in a side-by-side seminar room with 20 chairs and 30 people, plus A & A arriving late. But we squished and things worked out. A lot of this is about Keeping A Positive Attitude so the kids thmeselves don't get psyched or skittish...