My new computer

Because when you're dropping an inconceivably huge amount of money on a house anyway, a little thing like a laptop doesn't seem that big a deal.

Well, my old HP Pavilion had served me through most of my grad school career. I got it in the fall of 2000. It had a cranky, clanky hard drive that needed to be replaced in the first six months I had it, but it was under warranty, so that was all right. In recent years it has started hyperventilating whenever we ask it to do something demanding, like, well, anything, and for as long as I can remember, it has frozen rather frequently for no particular reason. I think this might have something to do with Windows ME, not to mention the computer STDs it has picked up hanging out at unsavory websites. Also the battery doesn't work worth a snot, so I always need to have it plugged in, and if it is accidentally unplugged, as often happens, it shuts off immediately. And it doesn't have a wireless card. I could buy a wireless card and a new battery, and expand the RAM to the maximum 256 MB, but...at some point, you just have to face the fact that a five-and-a-half-year-old computer is inevitably obsolete, by several generations, and likely to give up the ghost right in the middle of an as-yet-unbacked-up chunk of scholarship.

Also we need two computers anyway if we think we can even pretend to write two dissertations at once. Justin got his Sony Vaio, which is light and cute, and I got another HP.

This is the HP Compaq nx6125, and it is a very Crawford computer. Practical, quiet, not too flashy, but it has a big brain. One gig of RAM, a 2.2Ghz processor, and an 80 gig hard drive. I used to have 10 gigs. Which seems so huge compared to my first computer when I started college, which had 80 megabytes. Last summer when Justin and I were shopping around for an mp3 player, the hard drive space was the main reason we didn't buy an iPod. As I understand it, you need to have all your music on your hard drive to use an iPod, or at least it makes life a lot easier if you do. There wasn't much point in buying a 40 gig iPod if we only had a 10 gig hard drive. So we got an iRiver, which functions like an external hard drive that plays music, and named it Sven, so that (I hoped) Justin would not later suggest this as a name for our firstborn. (I'm not sure this will work.)

But anyway, my computer. It weighs just shy of six pounds, which is not the lightest but is lighter than my old computer, and I'm not trekking the Andes with the thing so it doesn't really matter if it would exceed by a pound or two the maximum load of my llama. It is fast (Justin confiscates it to play Civ) and the fan is pretty quiet. The only thing is that the screen, although big (which I like for reading large amounts of text) is kind of dull and hard on the eyes, especially when it's running on the battery, although I haven't really tested the battery yet. In all the reviews I read, though, that was the biggest complaint, and I figured I could live with that. On A/C power it's fine, as I've had ample opportunity to prove since I got it.

And the coolest thing is we have a wireless router for our DSL, so we can both play on the Internet at once, anywhere in the house! Although that could be dangerous. Hmm.

I have named my new baby Minerva, although I have a hard time thinking of her as a "her" yet. Justin's computer is Nestor. We are geeks.

Currently reading...

...Benedict XVI's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. Yes, I know, it was promulgated a while ago. We left behind our old DSL in Berkeley and just got it again.

Reggie, of course, translated the encyclical into Latin.

The encyclical falls into two parts. The first a detailed analysis of Christian love, its grounding in scripture and distinction from love (eros and agape in the Christian tradition are distinguished from definitions, both ancient and modern, that pervert them by isolating them from one another and prevent them from completing one another in the fullness of true caritas), and its dynamic nature rooted in the mutual self-giving between persons, both God and human beings and human beings with one another. The second part, which I am still reading, discusses the role caritas should play in modern society.

The first part is beautiful and moving. This, for example, is good stuff:

In the gradual unfolding of this encounter, it is clearly revealed that love is not merely a sentiment. Sentiments come and go. A sentiment can be a marvellous first spark, but it is not the fullness of love. Earlier we spoke of the process of purification and maturation by which eros comes fully into its own, becomes love in the full meaning of the word. It is characteristic of mature love that it calls into play all man's potentialities; it engages the whole man, so to speak. Contact with the visible manifestations of God's love can awaken within us a feeling of joy born of the experience of being loved. But this encounter also engages our will and our intellect. Acknowledgment of the living God is one path towards love, and the “yes” of our will to his will unites our intellect, will and sentiments in the all-embracing act of love. But this process is always open-ended; love is never “finished” and complete; throughout life, it changes and matures, and thus remains faithful to itself. Idem velle atque idem nolle—to want the same thing, and to reject the same thing—was recognized by antiquity as the authentic content of love: the one becomes similar to the other, and this leads to a community of will and thought. The love-story between God and man consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God's will increasingly coincide: God's will is no longer for me an alien will, something imposed on me from without by the commandments, but it is now my own will, based on the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself. Then self-abandonment to God increases and God becomes our joy (cf. Ps 73 [72]:23-28). (section 17)

There is nothing particularly innovative about the first part of the encyclical, but it says everything we already knew about Christian love in a fresh and engaging way. I think even some of my Protestant friends might really enjoy it.

Oh, but it's hard on the eyes to read anything for long on the Vatican's site, though. The background is just a little too dark.

UPDATE: Do not miss Reggie talking about the daunting task of translating the jargon of modern languages into Latin (not least because he was translating from the Italian, which was translated from Benedict's native German) on his Vatican Radio show The Latin Lover (see "Tender is the Latin").

God wills it!

(This is a special revelation to Justin.)

The latest time-waster to hit the blogosphere: the Church Sign Generator.

Mariolatry

There are a number of questions scandalized Protestants ask in trying to puzzle why anyone would go and do a crazy thing like convert to Catholicism. Here they are:

1. But you believe in all that Mary stuff!
2. And you pray to saints!
3. And the pope! How can you believe the pope is infallible?
4. And how can you believe in transsubt....transsubstant...you know, that thing?
5. Why do you believe in all that stuff in addition to the Bible?
6. And why can't priests be women/married/not pedophiles?
7. Why do you have to confess to a priest? Can't you talk straight to God?

Did I miss any? Those are the biggies. There's also birth control (but I know Protestants who don't use birth control), purgatory, indulgences, an evident excess of "ritual," "so when did Catholics stop being Christians?" etc.

The first one is in some ways the hardest for me.

I really like Mary. Not in the sense that I'm a devotee of the rosary or anything like that. But I think it is cool that the one only-human human God chose to do the most important thing an only-human human has ever done was a woman, and not a particularly important woman on her own merit, but a regular person whose only distinguishing characteristic was that she was open to this great work that God was doing with her assent. Someone who experienced the parturition and the child-rearing and the passion of Jesus has known the entire range of human emotion, from supreme joy to utter grief, and the idea that she lives with God and hears our own expressions of joy and grief (well, if you believe in prayer to saints) is pretty cool.

So in a sense it is disappointing that the Church teaches that she was not, in fact, a completely ordinary person, but was distinguished from the moment of her conception by the absence of original sin. Thus Mary, who in Protestantism is seldom mentioned but is at least an accessible human being, becomes a distant, translucent, unimaginably holy person with a halo propped behind her head from the moment Anna and Joachim welcomed her into the world. The curtain of two thousand years and innumerable iconic Madonnas separates us from her again: She Is Not Like Us.

And then there is the fact that the United States has not a patron saint, but a patronal feast: The Immaculate Conception. It's December 8. It's a holy day of obligation. I kind of have to show up. The Immaculate Conception, as not quite every Catholic even knows, refers to Mary's conception without sin but otherwise in the usual manner, not Jesus' parthenogenesis. Which is why the feast day is December 8, not March 25.

March 25 is the Annunciation. I like the Annunciation. While I was in Europe in 2002, I collected Annunciations--I mean I saw them at museums and churches and bought postcards of them. This is my favorite, Fra Angelico's Annunciation at the monastery of San Marco in Florence. (This is, by the way, much worth visiting, as there are Fra Angelico frescoes in every cell. I only saw it for the last time in 2002, on my third visit to Florence, and I regret missing it until then.) (Larger version here.)



In a lot of Annunciations the angel of the Lord barges into Mary's room in a blaze of glory, and Mary shrinks back from the angel or bows her head in submission. Here, she's leaning forward inquisitively, "much perplexed," and the angel bends its knee just a bit to speak to her at eye level. Also, Mary does not look matronly, but rather young. And the angel has bird-wings with multicolored feathers, which rocks.

She is still wearing a dinner-plate halo, but for a moment Mary flits back down to earth and you think you could touch her hand, or the edge of her robe, and ask her to pray for you. And she'd say, "Isn't it amazing how God is with us? I'm still getting used to it myself."

The Incarnation (the name of my parish, whose patronal feast the Annunciation is), after all, is about God With Us. God shows up in earthly places: in human bodies, in bread and wine, in water; pops up in a song or an image that grabs us, wherein the fruit of human creativity reflects the creativity of God; speaks to us as we speak to each other. Et verbum caro factum est.

I think it'll take me a lifetime to be at ease with Catholic Mariology, but at least that's a start.

Link to those road trip photos

Here.

Click on "View photos without signing in" to the right if you're not a Kodak Gallery member and don't want to be.

Dreams of 2008

We have DSL at home again, and it's weird how quickly my browsings of the political blogs have seeped into my subconscious.

John McCain and Al Gore were running for president in 2008. Justin and I voted at the Barnes & Noble in Berkeley. The ballots were yellow half-sheets of paper with only the presidential race listed on them: the options were Gore, McCain, and Other, with blanks to check next to each name. McCain won, but it took a little while for the results to be certain (not as long as in 2000, though).

Well, we'll see about that, won't we?

A late observance of the Ides of March

(Justin's brother Soren's birthday, by the way. If you can think of a calendar date, Justin probably has a sibling whose birthday it is.)

In case you ever wanted to experience vicariously the summer of love Justin and I spent under the auspices of Reginald Foster, you should read God’s Maytag Man Takes Tram No. 8 to Caesar’s Assassination, an account of Reggie's Ides of March tour very similar to the one we did as a weekend field trip. Ah, boxed wine, Latin songs, and mangy cats. Good times. Gaudeamus igitur iuvenes dum sumus.

Another reason to celebrate St. Patrick's Day

I am just a wee bit Irish.

Most of my ancestors--Jewish, Italian, and various flavors of Anglo-Celtic from the larger of the British Isles--are of humble origins and not particularly well documented. My grandmother, however, is a Trueblood, and there is a whole out-of-print book about the Truebloods in America, not to mention a bunch of websites tracing the Truebloods all the way back to seventeenth-century England. They were Quakers who settled in North Carolina (so in fact I have deeper Carolina roots than my husband), and remained so until a few generations ago.

Anyway, let me see if I can get this straight: My great-great-great grandfather, Elias Trueblood, married a woman named Elizabeth Killey, whose father was from Ireland. Presbyterian, not Catholic. But still, there you go. Green beer this year for St. Patrick's Day.

Road trip, again: the deep South

A couple of weeks ago, around the time we signed the contract on the condo, I dragged Justin to Ikea to buy a bunch of much-needed bookcases and some other furnishings. Now the second bedroom has enough floor space that we can use it, and there is space for guests to sleep, if anyone should so wish. The whole day was one of the most traumatic experiences of our marriage, not least because Justin cannot spend five minutes in any store that isn't a bookstore without breaking into hives, but it's all good now.

So Justin decided that since I got to buy a condo and furniture to put in it, he got to go on a road trip. I was too tired after the Ikea experience to debate further whether this was really the most appropriate time. That was probably just as well, because it was a good trip, although interesting in quite a different way from our Southwest trip last summer.

Here is where we spent nights, so you can kind of plot where we went from there:

Day 1: Knoxville, TN
Day 2: Savannah, TN (near Shiloh)
Day 3: Vicksburg, MS
Day 4: Meridian, MS (after a few hours' detour into Louisiana)
Day 5: Columbus, GA
Days 6 & 7: Savannah, GA
Days 8 & 9: Charleston, SC
Day 10: Chapel Hill, NC

I will link to pictures eventually.

Our sightseeing revolved mostly around historical landmarks rather than scenery as in the Southwest: Civil War sites like Shiloh and Andersonville; civil rights sites like Selma and the civil rights memorial in Montgomery; the Natchez Trace, an old road from the Mississippi to the Ohio Valley, in Mississippi and Tennessee. Justin and I have been on a Civil War kick lately, and I learned things about the Civil Rights movement I really ought to have known anyway when I was teaching American religious history a couple of years ago. This is the South with a capital S. You thought I lived in the South, and if being Southern means being within a two-hour drive of a zillion Civil War battlefields, then okay, I live in the South, but this is the real South, and I hadn't been there yet.

Observations:
1. The people are really nice. People are nice everywhere, basically, except for a few places they're mostly obnoxious, but they are truly nice in the South.
2. The food is wonderful. It is not vegetarian, and it will probably kill you, but it is soooooo good. And what's so great is that the cheaper it is and the more frightening the facilities in which it is prepared, the better it is. My childhood had a severe lack of pulled pork barbecue which I was unable to remedy until I arrived at this latitude. In retrospect, it's probably a good idea we did this trip before Lent.
3. The Mississippi Delta is very flat and even in late winter is filled with lurid colors that exist nowhere else in nature.
4. Go to Charleston. Just do. If money were no object and we could live in any house in any city in the country, I think I'd want to live in Charleston. At least I think so right now.

Becoming homeowners

I have delayed blogging about this because I wasn't certain we'd really do this, but in a few weeks we're going to own our apartment, which will not be an apartment but a condo.

Here's what happened:

About two weeks after we moved in, right after we got back from Chapel Hill, we got a letter from our landlords that they would be turning our apartments into condominiums and current residents would have first crack at buying them. (Technically, as I found out, they were already condos, but the management had been running them as apartments. The same thing, in effect.) Now, obviously if we'd wanted to buy a condo when we moved to Charlottesville, we would have bought a condo. We didn't know (and still don't know) how long we'd be staying, which is why we didn't. But there were several factors that made the opportunity appealing: the management offered to pay closing costs; our kitchen had just been remodeled, so even though our condo was being offered at the same price as all the others, it was more valuable; the price, as we discovered through research and talking to realtors, was competitive with other condos on the market in Charlottesville. On the other hand, the housing market is cooling off, and there are a lot of condo conversions in town lately, so there might be a glut on the market when we try to sell it. And somehow the deal seemed too good to be true. Justin was extremeley skeptical, and this has tested our abilities to make decisions together, compromise, and survive arguments (it always concerned Justin that we didn't argue very much when we were dating, although I was pretty happy with that).

After weighing the pros and cons and trying to get enough knowledgable advice to ensure that my wishful thinking didn't play too large a role in our decision, we decided to do it. I figured the risk of losing money, even if we moved next summer, was small enough that I was willing to take it, especially since we're making a substantial down payment and won't be taking out an interest-only loan. This also gives us the opportunity to buy our first home without all the bother of moving, since we did that already, and it's a darn good thing that's one less thing to make it complicated because it's complicated enough as it is. But gratifying. It's not our dream house, of course, but it's ours.

Places where I don't get work done

I'm reporting from Alderman Library on grounds at UVA, where for the first time ever at this location I'm using my cranky old laptop to check email and do other things. We don't have Internet access at home, much to everyone's chagrin, including ours, but it means we get work done there. Only now I won't get anything done at the library.

I've outfitted our kitchen with a bookcase so I can keep all my cookbooks close at hand and have a place to put my stereo. The nice thing about having a kitchen that isn't an extension of the living room, as in my previous apartments, is that it's a real kitchen; the unfortunate thing is that our loud furnace is between the kitchen and the living room, so I can't hear anything in the rest of the house when the heat is on, and I think I'd like to have music when I'm cooking. I'm hoping that once we get all the furniture we need, once Justin can study up in the man-cave instead of the kitchen table, I can use the kitchen as a studying and cooking nest, writing my dissertation while waiting for my bread to rise. At least that is my dream.

We are here. Really.

We are more or less settled in Charlottesville, although we have not yet come to an agreement about what sort of Internet access we will have at home, if any, which is why I haven't posted in the last month. (Not that we don't love having high-speed Internet access. We do. Too much.)

I moved into our apartment on December 19; Justin arrived several days later with his brother Whitney, having driven across the country in five days and straight from St. Louis in one. We spent Christmas in Chapel Hill, celebrated a quiet New Year in our apartment, and went last weekend to D.C. to visit several of Justin's friends, two of whom have just moved there. This weekend we're going up to Ithaca to watch the Seattle-Carolina NFC championship game with Justin's family, ardent Carolina fans. I don't know if it will be any less intimidating than being the only Seattle fan in a sports bar in D.C. last weekend when the Seahawks beat the Redskins. Justin's brothers are hard core.

With all this traveling, we've spent relatively little time in our apartment, which is a shame because it's quite nice, despite our lack of furniture (we need to get serious about going to Ikea, but it's an hour and a half away). The kitchen exceeded all my expectations. It is well-lit and huge, with tons of counter and storage space. I've barely begun to take advantage of it, but now that I've stocked up on groceries, I'm starting to get adventurous again. Justin's parents gave us a book called The Secrets of Jesuit Breadmaking for Christmas, and I've picked up a couple of other cookbooks in the last few weeks, so I have a lot to try out. Oh, and I finally got the three-quart saucepan that was never in stock when we registered for it. The things I get excited about.

I also managed to be a real resident student again (it was not immediately obvious to me how I was supposed to do this) and regain library privileges! If I get a new ID (my old one expired right before I left; I'm not really sure why they only give them to grad students for three-year terms--who finishes a PhD in three years?), I can even start using the gym again.

Justin really likes exploring Albemarle County and the surrounding areas on nice days, which we've had a lot of lately. There is this one bookstore in Orange, about thirty miles from here, with really cheap books. In contrast to our days in Berkeley, I'm the one who's less enthusiastic to get out of the house, probably because I like it so much. The stacks of boxes in the second bedroom are frustrating, but we'll take care of those sooner or later.

We bought a queen mattress, the first bed either of us has ever bought. (I went through a series of inherited beds, first from my grandparents, who had plenty of spares, then from Anne, then a nice full-size set from Chris, the deacon and music minister at Incarnation, and his wife Peggy, who had somehow managed to share it with several pets.) It is more than we intended to spend, but SO comfortable that I have slept long and sound every night we've been here since we bought it. The one hitch is that our stairway is too narrow to get a queen set up, so our apartment management had to take it out on our balcony and hoik it through the second-story window. Apparently they do this all the time, so that was fine.

So we are settled in Charlottesville, and happy to be here. In addition to bookcases, one of our furniture priorities is a futon or sofa bed (or two)--so visitors are welcome, and I promise you'll like it here too.

Our apartment is nekkid

The movers came yesterday morning and took all our stuff. More than half the boxes were books, which I'm sure will surprise no one. We're now working on giving away all our bookcases and cleanign up the place.

Justin's lived here for four and a half years, which is longer than I've lived in any single place since high school, so there is a lot of feckle to clean up. Cobwebs, dust, cat hair, my hair, and somewhat more suspicious ick in weird corners that haven't seen the light of day in ages.

Phoebe is already in Charlottesville. I'm flying out with Sabina on Friday. Justin is driving across the country with his brother Whitney and part of the way with his friend Jove.

And today is my sister's birthday. Which means two weeks till Christmas!

Uncanny

My sister and nephew moved a couple of months ago to a house in Lake City, near where I grew up. (It's a bit closer to the 47 Beautiful Ladies and Three Ugly Ones than is quite appropriate for a young child, but nonetheless a comfortable home. It is uncanny to see another house decorated with my grandparents' furniture, but that's not the reason I titled my post as I did.) Kate works at the south end of Lake Union and has lived on Beacon Hill south of downtown for years, so I never thought she'd make the move north. But apparently Dad convinced her it'd be best for Ronel's education if they lived in a better school district.

So get this: Ronel is attending Briarcrest, the same elementary school I attended when I was his age. He is playing violin (after trying flute in the Seattle schools and trumpet, briefly, in the Shoreline schools), as I did from fifth grade through high school. Then yesterday Kate and Ronel called to tell me that my teacher from fifth grade (now retired) visited Briarcrest to open a time capsule from 20 years ago, which included letters to the future written by students, and said, "Here's a letter from one of my students, Juliet Crawford" and Ronel was like "WHAT?!?!" I maybe sort of vaguely remember something about a time capsule and letters. Ro also said there was a picture of our class and he recognized me; apparently I look the same as I did in fifth grade. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

(I'm also thinking, "I hope I didn't say anything embarrassing or misspell anything in my letter." Why do I care? I was ten. Besides, I don't think Mr. Orsborn would have let any errors through. I learned to be a perfectionist in elementary school. Also I learned that the longest word in the English language is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. That was genuinely useful when I taught Greek and Latin roots in grad school.)

Fox has made a huge mistake

NOOOOOOOOO!!!!! nonononononononoNO!!!!

Fox is cancelling Arrested Development. For realsies this time, apparently.

Because, you know, Fox always makes brilliant decisions about what shows to cancel (Family Guy) and what shows to keep (Stacked!? Okay, so I haven't watched it, but dude, if you want to see Pamela Anderson's boobs, that's what the Internet is for).

And they're cutting this season's order to thirteen episodes. Grr.

I'm going to go cry into my pillow now.

Sunset in Berkeley

I took these pictures last week, from our roof. Our landlady doesn't really like us to do that. Oh well.

Cat haiku

I can relate to these.

Let us eat cake, and stuff

Just for the heck of it, and in anticipation of a larger kitchen, I decided to create a new blog for recipes, De Re Coquinaria. Come on over if you want to play. All are welcome.

Back together again

We are moving back to Charlottesville.

Yes, we said we were going to go on Adventures, but I think we realized that we didn't quite have the money to spend months gallivanting about the Mediterranean, and that living in one spot with a library would be more conducive to work.

There was that, our lease ending in December, the cost of living here, and...well, we're not really happy in Berkeley (although it has its advantages), and we both really like living a little below the Mason-Dixon line, for many reasons. There is Justin's family and a lot of our friends, who live within driving distance of Charlottesville. There is the fact that it's also within driving distance of places in this big and beautiful country I have not yet seen but seem as enchanting in my daydreams as a souq in Tunisia, in their own way: Asheville, the Great Smoky Mountains, the cities of the deep south. And there is the charm of Charlottesville itself, where I have friends, my school, my church; where Justin and I can hold hands while strolling on the Downtown Mall on a Friday evening and listen to the cicadas from our balcony. (Okay, there aren't any cicadas in December, but summer in all its verdant lushness will return.)

The apartment we've settled on, which Heidi looked at for us, surpasses our expectations, which are low after living in the Bay Area: two bedrooms and two bathrooms, a large kitchen, a balcony (yes, I'm liking the balcony), twice the space we have here. Room for the cats to roam. All for less than we pay here. It is farther away from Grounds than I used to live, but that's okay, because our lives won't revolve around school as much as mine did before. It is close to the grownup things, like the grocery store and the church where we were married and may one day, depending on how everything works out, baptize our children.

I'm not looking foward to moving across the country for the third time in five years. (Nor will the cats, when they find out about this.) And if Justin gets it in his head to go to Stanford Law School, I might have to find a uniquely southern way to commit suicide. But I think the center of gravity in our lives is pulling us back to that part of the country, and this time I hope we make it our home.

Ithaca is Gorges!

It had to be said.



Justin and I went there over Labor Day weekend for a friend's wedding. It was the first time I'd been there when the weather was warm and beautiful. We were only able to spend a few days, but it was so fun just to hang out with his family and drive around town a bit. I'm finally getting used to the Schwab clan and genuinely enjoying all the activity. It also occurred to me (Justin found this amusing) that the reason he talks so quickly and changes subjects constantly is because that's what happens when you have ten people talking to each other at once.

Kate's wedding was fun, and unlike any other I'd ever attended. It was only the second outdoor wedding I'd ever been to (how weird is that? us boring old Christians, always getting married in churches). The officiant was one of their friends who said really kind and beautiful things about what a great couple they are. I don't know them very well, but that's obviously true. The reception was probably one of the most formal I've ever attended, but lots of fun. Can you believe I've never danced the hora at a wedding? True, until now. It does not take much skill besides staying on your feet and it's exhilerating.



Harris and Soren got some dancing in before the wedding, too.



The next day was Justin's birthday. His parents hosted a party for the family and two other couples from the law school that they've been friends with for 20 years (including the bride's parents). Great stories about their kids being hellions and Sandra Day O'Connor getting locked in the bathroom.

Justin in his natural habitat:



I love how little kids smile unnaturally when they know they're being photographed. It's weird but also very cute.