I never know what my mother will be up to. When I got home this time, I found that a wee pineapple plant had taken up residence in my old bedroom.

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Both our RSA panels were accepted, so we’ll be headed to Seattle come May. Yay, research!

Of course, there’s the small matter of getting there. By plane? Oh hells no.

Much to see. Of course, there’s problems with this map — we won’t backtrack to Ft. Smith, for one thing. But it’s early yet. Plenty of time for refinement. And plenty of time for writing.

I wonder if I can get a full diss draft together before we leave? It'd be something to shoot for, anyway.

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(Downtown Fargo, ND about a month ago.)

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This is the city hall in Bloomfield, Iowa. The sign outside is quite informative, and proudly reports that the place was once scaled by a human fly in the 1930s. Also that it's a fine example of Second Empire architecture.

It was so much greener just one state south, and the grass pushed the greenness right up against the old glass phone booth that still resides in the city square.

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So we spent ten days more or less on the road, going up to Fargo for Mister Husband’s talk at the Linguistic Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota conference (which I didn’t attend), then back to teach, and then down to Little Rock for Feminisms and Rhetorics. The second part of that was a sprint, driving down into increasingly hotter weather and a veil of green, arriving late Thursday, then leaving mid-day Saturday and heading back up. One morning in Fargo, I put off shooting in favor of an hour drinking diner coffee because it was so nippy outside. The tree outside our bedroom had already turned brilliant yellow, and I was wearing sweaters to night lectures. When I called Mom during my packing to ask if I could get away with wearing a light wool suit down there, she laughed. “Well, what’s the appropriate level of clothing?” I asked. “Nekkid,” she replied. So I packed up a summer conference outfit, and it was the right thing. Except for the fact that it was black, and I roasted in the sun late one afternoon in the 90 degree heat while waiting for Mister Husband to get the car.

Back in St. Paul last night, I wore a coat on my walk to Matt’s talk and wished I had brought a hat. Earlier I had driven to an appointment in the rain, over bright leaves blown across the pavement.

Feminisms and Rhetorics was great, and seemed to run like clockwork. The only possible complaint I’ve heard was about the lack of A/V technology. Barb did a great job putting everything together, and I’m glad to see so many people giving her props on the FemRhet listserv.

I remember wandering around CCCC with Scott back in 2004, when he was fresh out of grad school, and him commenting that it was the first conference that really felt like a reunion for him. This is the first one that felt that way for me. I got to see folks from my Master’s program as well as people from Minnesota who have moved on to the professoriate and folks I know from various other places, and it was great. I got to introduce my old colleague Jessica Reyman’s featured talk on “Copyright, Feminism, and Digital Discourse,” which was all kinds of smart. All of it brought the realization of what an awesome group of women are in the discipline.

Our panel centered around the theme of public trusts. I talked about Wikipedia and Jeff talked about the invisibility of women photographers in 19th century photographic parlors. Mary Jo Wiatrek-Uhlenkott talked about public breastfeeding and indecency law, and got a wonderful reception. Her paper was smart and interesting and her delivery was excellent. And it was a great topic to discuss at this sort of a conference; the Q&A was entirely about her paper. Women really do like to talk about boobs (actually, doesn’t everyone?), and smart women have some very smart things about them. The audience also consisted of quite a few women who are either currently breastfeeding or planning to in the near future. (Mary Jo leaned over to apologize for all the attention after a bit, and I was all, “Don't worry, go for it!”) It was her first conference paper, and it was awesome to see her get such a great response to it. I’m sure it won’t be the last time.

A vaguely related note: We went to the traveling Smithsonian exhibit on Jim Henson with my parents the next morning, over at the Arkansas Arts Center. (More on which later.) Afterwards, I wandered through the gift shop in search of a show catalogue. No luck, but they did have some random Henson merchandise. I ended up a stuffed Fraggle: Boober.

Going to a conference in my hometown was thoroughly odd, because I’m used to being a little bit enjoyably lost at these things, and this time I was one of the ones who knew where stuff was. Walking up the steps to the DoubleTree in downtown Little Rock gave me a flashback to the last time I was there, in 1996. Tori Amos was playing Robinson Center next door, and I was waiting out front with the rest of the faithful, lounging in the brick plaza.

Being home also meant that I got to zip off across town for lunch with my best friend Gina, who picked me up in her new itty bitty convertible with the huge motor. We only get to see each other once or twice a year lately, and we had a great conversation. (No setting stuff on fire this time, though. We took care of that back in May.) I’m hoping she’ll be able to come up here sometime during the winter.

It also meant that we got to stay with my parents and spent some time with them. We only managed dinner, breakfast, and the Arts Center, but it was so good to hang out for awhile, especially since they’re not coming up this way this fall.

Another “The Shuffle Knows” moment: Driving back past Branson, having passed the sign for Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede, her cover of Great Balls of Fire came on. It’s from a Dolly all-covers CD I found in a gas station outside Memphis after RSA 2006, and it’s mostly just Dolly and a Casio keytar, or at least that’s what it sounds like. The versions of House of the Rising Sun and Harper Valley PTA are, how shall we say, quite something else.

(Previously: The Shuffle Knows I and II.)

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Somewhere in the Ozarks, I met these two. I worried for about ten seconds that they’d be upset at us photographing in their territory, until they started begging for petting. They were clean and well taken care of, and we had a grand time. Mister Husband snapped an alternate view here, and had to stop me from becoming a puppy rustler when it was time to leave.

I loves the puppies. And the puppies love me.

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While Mister Husband was busy at a conference at North Dakota State, I wandered around downtown Fargo with the new Nikon D80, which was made possible by a generous grant from my parents. I still haven’t got the exposures quite right on these, but I’ll learn. One of the best things about Fargo is that the inhabitants have mostly held on to their old storefront signs and side-of-building advertisements.

Full set here, which includes quite a few smaller towns along the way. Some photos are with the D80 and some are with my trusty standby Lumix. I have no plans to abandon it — it’s so small that people don’t really take it seriously, whereas the D80 makes most folks a little shy. I also shot with the Nikomat, but it’ll take me awhile to get around to having those processed.

When did I become a person who hits the road with at least three cameras on hand? It turned out not to be enough, because the long stretches of prairie made me want to dig out Mister Husband’s 4x5 Speed Graphic and figure it out.

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Laura Ingalls Wilder’s birthplace in Pepin, WI is only a couple of hours away from the Twin Cities. Yesterday afternoon was beautiful enough for a last short road trip. Mister Husband suggested heading over there, and so off we went.

There’s nothing original left on the site, and it’s certainly not in the woods anymore. The new Little House has a cinder block foundation and swallows in the rafters. It’s still a nice drive, though, and it’s interesting to see the lay of the land. It’s still pretty much in the middle of nowhere. The site closes when the snow starts and opens after the spring melt, and I can see why. The roads would easily be nearly impassable in the winters. If Pepin’s location is even remotely the same as it was in the 1860s, Pa’s trips to town would have been up and over pretty significant hills. Between seeing that and reading a couple of the books again earlier this year, I’m impressed by the level of physical fitness one would have needed to survive in a basic way on the prairie.

There are still Ingallses in Pepin, as evidenced by the headstones in the town cemetery. Some have already crossed over to Jordan, and some are preparing with highly reflective headstones. You don’t even have to go looking; there’s a huge headstone visible from the road.

(More photos at Mister Husband’s flickr account. Oh, and if you’re reading this in RSS you’re probably not able to see the PictoBrowser gallery at the top of the entry. If you’d rather, you can go straight to the flickr set.)

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This is a lucky shot from a moving car. It’s also the first photo I’ve made that I think really needs to be viewed in large format in order to work correctly. (My preference would be even bigger than that, really. BIG. But that’s the best I can do here.)

I think maybe I’m about to want to start shooting in RAW format.

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Edison was all about the claims to realism. (Photographed at the Edison House in Louisville. One more here.)

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Detail from a riverfront diorama at the Sioux City Welcome Center.

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20 days. 4,440 miles.

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While we were driving from Louisville to Nashville, the shuffle kicked out the best old-skool driving mix, completely with an uncanny selection:

Purple Haze (Hendrix)
Down the Road Apiece (Rolling Stones)
The Wait (Pretenders)
Mr. Grinch (Mojo Nixon)
Armenia (The Who)
Poor, Poor Lenore (The Handsome Family)
My Sharona (The Knack)
F the CC (Steve Earl)
The Grip of Love (Tom Verlaine)
Eurotrash Girl (Cracker)
A BBC 4 Front Row interview with Rufus Wainwright that contained thorough discussion of “My Old Kentucky Home”* and the intricacies of Judy Garland
Brick (Pinehurst Kids)
Sweet Emotion (Aerosmith)
In the Engine Room (Mike Watt)

*The Shuffle has gone all meta this year. Last year it was more direct, and played Liz Phair’s “South Dakota” as we were, yes, leaving South Dakota. Then it played Springsteen’s “Nebraska” when we were pulling up to a hotel in Ogallala.

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I would never have thought that the antidote to exams and proposal reading would be juvenile fiction. For the past eight months or so, I’ve been looking up some of the things I read in 4th or 5th grade and sprinkling them in the midst of all the grown-up stuff, which means that I end up reading things like The Wealth of Networks, The Pleasures of the Imagination, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler all at the same time. During a winter lunch of pad thai, Em mentioned her love of The Long Winter, so when I ran across several of the Little House books in a used bookstore they went straight into the stack. She was right — they hold up surprisingly well.

So when Mister Husband spied a sign for the original Little House location just southwest of Independence, Kansas, we stopped. The cabin is a re-creation with an electrical outlet on the back, but it’s still a remarkably stirring location. The descriptions in the book place the site about 40 miles away in Nowata, OK, but evidently all the available data points to this spot 13 miles outside of Independence. All of the topographical features mentioned in the book are indeed there, and census records show the neighbors that became characters lived nearby, including Dr. Tann. The curators say they’re completely positive that the well behind the adjacent later-built farmhouse is the actual well that Pa hand-dug, and that they then tracked down the nearest foundation and rebuilt the cabin there. It’s all enough to make you believe, to stand there imagining the wagons making their way across the plains and the tribes making their forced march in front of the cabin as they were driven from the land. The amount of emotion I felt shocked me.

The women running the center that day were both part-time librarians who are wonderfully devoted to preserving the Laura Ingalls Wilder heritage. One has made it her life’s goal to visit all the graves of the Ingalls and Wilder families, and she showed me her album of the houses and grave sites. One of the best parts of working there, she said, is that nobody who visits is ever in a bad mood. Even if they’re not so invested in the idea of Little House themselves, they have a daughter or wife or sister who is, and whose delight is contagious.

While we were there, a tiny blonde urchin in a pink sundress came tearing around the corner from the well. She grabbed her daddy’s hand and said, gasping, “I know how the well works! I read it in the books!” In the car later, we thought that this is really how history and conservation works. In the end, it doesn’t matter so much if this is the exact precise site, although I really, really want to believe it is. It matters that the place is alive for another eight-year-old girl, and that when she goes home and turns the faucets in her bathroom, she’ll still know how a well works, and how life worked for a little girl on the plains in the late nineteenth century.

(My Little House flickr set is here. Mister Husband's is forthcoming, I think. And the Wikipedia Article on Little House is fascinating.)

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We got back to Minnesota yesterday afternoon. There’s still some residual trip posts to come, since that fell by the wayside on the last leg.

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This is the view from the dock at my grandparents' river house.

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The Muhammad Ali Center was one of the best stops of the trip so far. If you’re in Louisville, make a point of seeing it — not just for boxing or cultural history, but for the multimodality of it all. It’s got the best-done multimodal installations of any museum I’ve visited in recent memory.

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My attitude about Detroit and my attitude about Computers and Writing aren’t the same at all. This was my first time at C&W, and it was all kinds of fun. (After we got through presenting, anyway.)

I’ve finally made peace with the fact that my deafness makes me a lousy conference blogger, though. I’m always too busy listening and filling in the gaps of what I hear to actually take notes or report back on anything. But I can say that the several panels do stand out in my mind:

• first Ong panel, during which Michael Day critiqued his own earlier work in such as way as to give hope to grad students everywhere
• the Saturday panel with Jim Ridolfo, Doug Eyman and Jake McCarthy. (Jim’s presentation was particularly strong).
• Matt Barton and Bob Cumming’s talks on Wikipedia. I appreciated Matt’s observations about the organizational differences between Wikipedia a few years ago and the way it’s working these days, with a more guild-like arrangement.
• Steve Krause, Robin Murphy, and Kimberly Lacey’s talks on Blogging, News Communities, and Rhetoric. Steve’s new project on EMU-Talk is interesting, and I like the fact that he’s still working with Bitzer. All sorts of folks have noted Bitzer’s flaws, and his idea has been rehabilitated in various ways. This project seems to provide a lot of room for extending it in a way that can account for audience agency, and for fluid movement between audience and author status. I’ll be curious to see what Steve’s come up with a year from now.

I probably won’t go to C&W next year, because it’s an RSA year and I do dearly love that conference. Plus, I haven’t been to Seattle yet. But I’ll most certainly be at C&W again in the future.

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We spent the afternoon at the Henry and Clara Ford Estate. It’s completely worth the time. The estate is vast, but not as vast as the typical robber baron estate. The engineering is marvelous, as one might expect — drainage experts still visit to see how the early 20c sprinkler system works. But most intriguing is the constant rhetoric about Ford’s environmentalism that’s woven through a space that demonstrates a heroic effort at beating the land into submission and turning nature into a “natural,” tame place.

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My momma always told me that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

At least the driving here is interesting. It’s like a combination of New Orleans (the functional, required u-turn), Omaha (no left turns ev0r!), and the UK (M+# freeway names).

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General impressions of the Upper Peninsula, having just driven across it: They got lotsa trees up there. Of infinite variety. For miles and miles and miles. You can see the copper ore in the hills. The lakes are indeed great, and also pretty. And it’s the only place we’ve been where a wolf crossed the road just ahead of us.

We’re in Detroit now, baby. There’ll be none of that sort of thing here.

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This was the view outside our window in Duluth. About 60 degrees, slightly rainy, a little windy — my kind of weather. I could totally live here.

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The first full day of the 3rd Annual Kennedy-Ward Center-Sectional Tour was busy:

We started out wandering around downtown Bemidji, where we had spent the previous night. Paul and Babe are from Bemidji, dontcha know.

Then we went to Itasca State Park and walked across the headwaters of the Mississippi. This was a strange little travel milestone for me — I've now been to both ends of the Mississippi.

Then we went to the Judy Garland Museum in her hometown, Grand Rapids, MN. No ruby slippers, since they were stolen a couple of years ago, but it’s still marvelous. I’ll upload more photos from there later.

Today we’re headed across the Upper Peninsula and then tomorrow we’ll land in Detroit, just in time for Computers and Writing.

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People I work with wonder about us when we leave and drive for weeks on end. Walking the streets of St. Paul with G. on Friday, he asked, “But what is it that you do when you’re in the car all that time?” He’s not the first to ask.

We talk and we don’t talk. We listen to music. For the first day, I am antsy and agitated and I pick fights. But then the miles begin to sweep my mind clean and I want nothing more than to keep moving. It’s not ambition, it’s just go. I won’t want to drive for less than ten hours at a stretch, following the prairies down into swamps, tracing the yellow lines. The other day, I tried to explain that the point is to drive until your head is utterly empty and then stop somewhere interesting and strange. Fill up your mind, give it lots to chew on, and then drive until it empties out again. Repeat. Repeat. Spend time with your companion, and then spend time apart. Repeat. Drive.

We’ll leave next month, as soon as grades are submitted and my prospectus is defended. And I won’t come back until someone makes me.

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BFF G. has come out the other side of the Sahara and is safely nestled in Agadez. And she’s starting to tell her stories again.

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So we’re over in Madison, working in the Wisconsin Historical Society archives for a few days. It’s primarily Mister Husband’s dissertation research, but there’s an authorship angle that I’m ferretting out.

The campus is indeed beautiful, and the brats are tasty. Further bulletins as events warrant.

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On one mutual trip to the ATM in the Peabody lobby, I finished up first and turned around to survey the goings on. Directly behind us, waiting patiently, were a bride and groom in full get-up. They couldn’t have been a day over 19, either of them. They were giggly and a little embarrassed, and the bride was adorable in an Allison Hannigan sort of way. She was quite tiny, and clutching a mostly-drained magnum of wine that was about a quarter of her height. I couldn’t help but grin at her, and she blushed even more.

Then we drove by a sign for a roadside fish shack that said, “Catfish and Walleye.” Clearly, we were exactly in the middle.

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If you were here, I’d tell you that you picked the right day for it. Sunny and green and blue outside, hot but not humid, breezy. I work mornings now, so if you were an early riser I’d point you toward the Walker Sculpture Garden and tell you that there’s all kinds of lovely things to eat if you head down Hennepin. Also lovely things inside the Walker, and all the postmodernism you can stand. If you were worn out from travel or conferences or life, I’d tell you to sleep in and then take a hot bath. There’s plenty of bath salts in the closet and juice in the fridge. Either way, I’ll meet you at noon, and maybe Mister Husband will come too.

If you just had a few hours before you had to go on, I’d suggest that we drive along the Mississippi and head over to St. Anthony Falls. Maybe walk across the river towards the A Mill and St. Anthony Main and have a beer at Tuggs. If you’re a city history geek like us, maybe we’d go to the mill museum. If you’re a book geek like us, we’d go over to The Open Book.

If you had the rest of the day after that and felt like walking or riding bikes or lazing around in the shade, we’d go over to Como Park and wander around the lake and drink iced coffees. There’s a concert at the pavilion tonight, and the sun will take forever to set over the lake and golf course. We’d spread out blankets on the hill above it all, under the hundred-year oaks. Mister Husband would read and you might nap, and I’d scribble on paper and keep an eye out for suspicious bugs. There might be some fun dogs. We’d lounge under all the rustling green until it was time to grill burgers and shrimp and who knows what else, and eventually we’d contemplate strawberry rhubarb pie or maybe one made with fresh Michigan cherries, and watch all the people below us coming to the pavilion.

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We made it home last night around 10:30ish. 16 days, 10 states, and almost 4,000 miles were logged on the 2nd Annual Kennedy-Ward Center-Sectional Tour. We played Peoria on our last day.

I did in fact take my camera along, but never even bothered to change the dead batteries in it. In contrast, Mister Husband has been rather productive. Those inclined to enjoy pictures of other people’s vacations may want to drift through the last 30 pages or so of his flickr account. Alternatively, you can view by locale:
Southern Minnesota
South Dakota
Nebraska
Kansas
Oklahoma
Arkansas
Memphis, TN
St. Louis, MO
Illinois
Iowa

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When my maternal great-grandmother, my Momo, was dying, I would go most nights and sit by her bedside. The room was dark, and the heavy lucite radio that had always been next to her bed glowed. Since it was 1991, it played Walking In Memphis over and over again in the nights.

One midnight I sat there with my momma and grandma, listening as we held her hands and each others too. I gazed into the bedcovers, and eventually saw that we all had the same small hands. Thinish fingers, long nailbeds, similar knuckles. I was 15, and I saw what my hands would look like at 39, and 65, and 81. An odd, small peek into the rest of my life, lit by a lucite radio and that song.

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- I didn’t realize that I’ve been weeding some of the Suhthuhn from my demeanor for the past couple of years until I got around the Peabody porters. Whenever you ride in the elevator, they ask where ya’ll from and how’s your stay, and suddenly I find myself telling them that while Mister Husband may claim to be from Minneapolis, I just drove over from Little Rock and so far everythang is jes’ fahn. It’s been awhile since I heard myself talk like that.

- Sore throat, but not sick in bed so far today. Thanks for asking.

- Secret Message to Speaker #2: I grade my Sci/Tech Presentations students on whether or not they maintain a supportive stance during group presentations. When I lecture on this, I talk about how hard it is to look attentive sometimes while sitting on panels at conferences. No matter how boring it is, it’s gotta be done, because otherwise you look like you’re convinced that you’re the most fascinating person up there and none of your colleagues are worth listening to. Which is exactly what you did, with your doodling, aimless staring, and facial contortions. You were most certainly not representing. Also, a literature review is not a presentable conference paper. You really should have a point.

- The book exhibit here is small but choice. But a mosey through it revealed that I already have all the ones I’d want. I think this means I’ve been buying too many books. Except maybe that new one on digital literacies...

- I have run into one of my advisors on four separate occasions today. This isn’t at all a bad thing because I quite like him, but how can one small man be so ubiquitous? Some people think their advisors are everywhere, but mine really is.

- Thinkin’ ‘bout fried chicken for dinner. (Click through there — Julia Reed’s essay on the topic is quite correct.) Or maybe I can talk somebody into bringing me a soup bowl full of bread pudding. Probably not, so probably chicken.

Thass all.

Update: You really must take yourselves down to Front Street and get on a trolley or walk about eight blocks left. Keep going until you smell hot grease and see a bright yellow sign for Gus's Fried Chicken. Go on in and order sweet tea, fried green tomatoes, and a two-piece plate of hot and spicy chicken (which is the only kind available). It really is as good as everyone says. I hereby add it to my official list of glow foods, which saw no additions at all in 2005.

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Drove over to Memphis from Little Rock today. The Peabody is lovely, but our RSA experience thus far consists of the inside of the room, lots of beverages, and TheraFlu. I think it’s just a little, sudden bug that can be cured by a lot of sleep, though, and we’ll be out and about at the 8:30 sessions tomorrow.

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Mammoth Site, SD

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Thus far: dusty, sunburnt, freckled, sweaty, washed, barbecue, frozen custard, beaded glasses of tea, the curtain of green. Fambly and friends.

But damn, there are ghosts around every corner in this town. Last time, there was just the overwhelming sensation that I don’t live here anymore. This year the memories lurk, and I can’t drive through downtown without twenty years rushing in on me, or turn down a backroad without remembering that it’s also the road to X’s mother’s house, and wondering why I wasted so much time on him.

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I rarely get homesick when I travel, so I’m always surprised when the landscape around central Arkansas tugs at me. In March of 2000, I spent a couple of weeks roaming around Scotland and not missing America much at all. At the end of the long flights home, we came into the Memphis airport and I looked down at the dirty red lakes and ponds that dotted the landscape, and something inside me leapt a little. Red clayish water = home.

This time I’ve been watching the landscape change for 2000 miles, turning from low, flat prairie to badlands to high, rolling prairie to scrubby red dirt to Ozark foothills. I drove halfway across Arkansas through twilight and dusk, and when the kudzu began its creep up the trees something leapt again. Somewhere inside me drips with humidity and creeping vines. I was drunk on the greenness, feeling dangerous, and could have kept driving all night through the damp Southern veil.

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(Written May 16)

Driving home across South Dakota last summer, I was suddenly seized with determination to find a buffalo. I hadn’t been particularly interested in them before, but some of the best longings come out of the blue. I failed in my search, mostly because we were drifting along the far east ledge of the state, and didn’t think much about it afterwards.

When we set out across the plains this week, I was suddenly interested again. Plenty of skins and heads were strewn in tourist traps, but I didn’t find a live one until we hit Wind Cave National Park, which has a free-roaming herd. We pulled over, and I stood on an overlook watching four or five of them lazing about in the sun. The land below them was covered in prairie dog holes, and the prairie dogs were sunning themselves, scritching around in the grass, and holding spontaneous conferences between the holes. There were so many den openings that one wonders how stable the ground is, since it must be a honeycomb underneath. Acres and acres of prairie dogs.

The next day we visited Scouts Rest Ranch, and the guide told me they had just brought the buffalo in the day before. Four skittish young buffalo were in a corral on the far side, alternately huddled together and chasing each other around. They certainly wanted nothing to do with people.

Later on, I was going into a gas station when I saw out of the corner of my eye a buffalo about 60 feet out back, and people standing next to it. A pettable buffalo! I didn’t think there was such a thing, given all the park warnings. But when I actually went out and looked at it, it turned out to be made out of barbed wire.

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Things about today:

1. The Mount Rushmore park is very nicely done. I ended up being more moved by the monument than I’d have thought — not by patriotism, but by the idea of creating something huge and permanent as a record of our presence for future civilizations, which was Borglum’s intention. Choosing four dead white guys to symbolize that is both perfectly right and perfectly wrong for this country.

2. Crazy Horse is indeed huge. The thought of one Polish sculptor laboring on it alone for 40 years is amazing. If one is me, one wonders why the tribe wasn’t up there helping him. Mister Husband claims it’s because only white people are crazy enough to dangle off huge rocks whilst stuffing them full of dynamite.

3. I’ve always said I couldn’t live far from a city of at least some size, but after today I think I could live on the rolling prairie just below the Badlands. There’s nothing quite like realizing that you cannot see any trace of humanity for miles and miles and miles. So I’d buy a couple thousand acres and plunk my house down in the middle of it and watch the sky for a few decades. Now I know that about myself: either lots of people and things to do, or nothing whatsoever. But not any part of the range in between.

3a. We wondered if The Who wrote I Can See for Miles after their first American tour, which would have taken them across the plains. And then I pondered a playlist of stalker songs: I Can See for Miles, of course (both Who and Petra Hayden versions), Every Breath You Take, I’ve Got You Under My Skin (many versions).... What else?

4. The Mammoth Site is an ice-age sinkhole filled with mammoths who waded in, got trapped by the steep slopes, and died. Every single last one of them was an adolescent male. So now I have this whole children’s mammoth book in my head, where the Mommy Mammoths tell all the Children Mammoths about the sinkhole, and how if you go there you’ll die, and Ghost Mammoths live in there and if you’re Bad Mammoths maybe we’ll just leave you in the sinkhole. And then all the boy mammoths get to be 14 or so and rebellious and curious and go down to the sinkhole at midnight during a full moon because shit, they aren’t scared. And yep, they all die. The End.

5. We always travel with the RoadTrip set on shuffle. A little while after we left South Dakota, Liz Phair’s South Dakota (from The Girlysound Demos) came on. And as we pulled up to the hotel in Ogallala, on came Springsteen’s Nebraska. The Shuffle Knows.

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The pollen count has been four times higher than normal lately, and for whatever reason that always makes me quieter. Probably because I’m too busy with the Kleenex to type. But I have managed to free my hands enough to pack a carload of stuff, and we’re heading out this morning for the Annual Center-Sectional Tour. This year it takes us over through the Dakotas (Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, maybe some mammoths), down through Nebraska and Kansas to in-laws in eastern Oklahoma, then over to Little Rock for my family and friends, and then another few hours east to Memphis for RSA. All of this plays out over the course of two and a half weeks, and then we drive straight back really quickly so I can get back to the Project beta launch on June 1.

It’s very hard to stop working, though. Especially with the exam clock ticking. I’m determined not to work for five days as we drive down. I’ve packed the articles for my subfield in a 3" binder, and put it and two of the slimmer books in a bag that will be hard to get to until we unpack the car. But once we actually light somewhere, I’ve got to start throwing down some daily page counts.

I’ve been sort of proud of the balance I’ve managed this past year, which involved a fairly finely-tuned balance of work and goofing off. There’s been some recreational reading and trips around town. I feel that balance starting to slip now, which I suppose is pretty normal for exam-time. But still, if I lose sight of it altogether (as I’m prone to), I’ll be burnt out by August. Must remember to play.

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I don’t believe I’ve ever admitted something like this before, but Mister Husband is doing a much more interesting job of documenting our lives than I am lately. Strong photos, as well as his take on CCCC and SPEC. Plus wonderchickens and comments on rebel flag thongs.

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The Hotel: By the time we decided we were going to Cs this year, all the hotels anywhere near the Loop were booked. So I widened my Expedia search and found The Carleton Hotel in Oak Park. Historic and reasonably priced — about a third of anything in the city. Their website is a model of truth-in-advertising. Old, well-preserved building, tasteful rooms, excellent service, free wifi, great area. Decent dining, and within an easy walk of many other eating options. Tonight we walked a little further and hit the Whole Foods to stock the room for a night in. The El is two blocks out the back door, and a 20 minute ride takes us within two blocks of the conference hotel. The Carleton is now our official abode when in the Chicagoland Area.

My morning: Mister Husband was part of the Blog Workshop this morning, so I had several hours to kill. Because of our late planning, I hadn’t pre-registered for any of the other workshops, so I adjourned to the downstairs cafe and read a stack of articles on Wikipedia. Then I sauntered back into the hotel, thinking I’d get a haircut. I meant to attend to the pre-conference beautification last week, but was thwarted by blizzards. (Since true Minnesotans never cancel appointments because of weather, my hairdresser now hates me.) So I headed to the downstairs salon in Palmer House. Then I wandered back upstairs to spy on the Blog Workshoppers progress and got called in to answer a couple of TEACH Act questions. Then I toured around in the arcade shops and got into an interesting discussion on transformation in derivative works with the owner of the Russian Knicknack Shop. All in all, good morning.

The Palmer House Salon: They worked me right in. I’ve had my brows done for years and years now, and this was the most meticulous brow wax I have ever had. It was accomplished by Julia, who came to Chicago 45 years ago when her family left Cuba. She has many theories about how the size of men’s hands and feet reflect their innate character. (Other attributes were not discussed.) Then she turned me over to Angela, whose family fled the Tunisian revolution in 1956, first to Italy and then Chicago. She owned her own salon for years and years until she decided to “retire” by selling her salon (and ditching all the paperwork that went with running it) and working a few days a week for someone else. She gave me the most incredibly mathematical haircut, lopping off a generous couple of inches. If I lived here, I’d go to her all the time. Now I’m stocked with a bottle of Feria Copper Shimmer in the hotel bathroom. It’s been awhile since I’ve dyed my own hair, but I bet I can remember how.

Not reviews, but noted: In my meanderings, I met Collin, Jenny, and Jeff. They were all exactly as I’d hoped they’d be. Also ran into Jim Ridolfo, who I met a few years back when we were visiting Michigan State and have been running into ever since. Always good to see him.

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Leaving in a bit to drive down to Chicago. This photo is from when we were there last September, driving around in the Little India section, lost and happy.

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Turns out we’ll be going to CCCC this year after all. Feel free to drop one of us a line if you’d like to meet up there.

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Chicago park pigeons are inordinately friendly. And I am inordinately busy. And I find the fact that I’m blogging Chicago three weeks after I went there quite curious.

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We decided to drive over to the conference in Ann Arbor, which is between 650 and 800 miles away, depending on how you handle Chicago. It sounds crazy, especially in the middle of a semester, but there were several good reasons: research for Mister Husband in Chicago, not wanting to cross the Northwest picket line, and not wanting to accept the fact that our summer traveling was over. So after the teaching was finished on Wednesday afternoon, we took off.

We pretty well sprinted the first couple of days, although we did stop off at the Indiana Dunes. I took a number of photos there that were eventually lost due to operator error. Friday and Saturday were spent at the conference, where we saw an excellent panel, a terrible panel (no, I’m not saying who), and a quite enjoyable plenary session with Charles Bazerman, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Jessica Litman.

Our own panel was a new experience for me. The room seated about 35, and people kept drifting in until the seats were all filled. Then they filed in and stood along the back wall. Then they crept in and sat on the floor. I had never spoken to such a packed room before, and I wasn’t at my best. The requested A/V setup was late in showing up, so I was powerpoint-less and less extemporaneous than I normally like to be. And I had trashed my still-healing ankle with all the conference walking, so it seemed the better part of valor to do my 20 minutes sitting down. As a result, I wasn’t able to project the way I normally do. My co-presenters (Jeff Ward and John Logie) each delivered much more extemporaneous talks, and there was quite a bit of discussion at the end. Afterwards, I met Amit Ray and one of his graduate students (whose name has escaped me — so sorry!), both of whom were smart and funny. They’re the first folks from RIT I’ve met, and I’m looking forward to hearing more from their Lab for Social Computing.

(My paper was titled “What Does It Matter Who Is Speaking?”: Situational Authorship in Wikis. I’ll post more about it later.)

We left pretty much right after our session ended, and spent the night somewhere in Michigan. I was very sad not to have time to stop off at Battle Creek and look into the cereal history of the town, where Harvey Kellogg built the Battle Creek Sanitarium. But the next day we hit Chicago and spent the afternoon at Millennium Park. Jeff’s paper centered around Cloud Gate, and we spent quite a bit of time with it and the Crown Fountain (photos to come).

Then we headed back through Wisconsin, skirting Milwaukee and heading for the Wisconsin Dells, where we spent a few hours today. It’s a combination of curious, beautiful, eerie glacial carvings and tourist stuff (“We’ve come to Tacky Town!”) and history. We got caught up in a photo history site and didn’t see much of the Dells proper, but I’d definitely go back.

So now we’re home, with papers to grade and reading to do and class to teach tomorrow morning. And an LSAT to take on Saturday, but that seems minor after the conference sprint of the past few weeks.

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create your own personalized map of the USA

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