Star Crossed Musing

Here we are, coming to the end of another summer. I'm not ready. My youngest son is going back to Seattle at the end of next week. I won't see him again until Christmas. I'm not ready. My oldest son is starting school on Monday. He's getting a do-over on his senior year. This is his chance to make it work, and I'm overseeing it. I'm not ready. I leave for London in a week and a half, and I'll be there for three weeks. I'm both terrified and exhilarated. I am not, however, ready. Matt's already back at work. Has been since last week. I am still not ready. Next week is orientation for the new semester. Definitely not ready. I want to be ready. I want to be caught up on working and sending stuff over to my advisor. I want to feel like I've spent enough time with my kids, that I'm where I need to be, that I've spent enough time with Matt. Instead, I feel like things are coming to an end and nothing is quite okay, and that's ...

While we had the official McFarland holiday feast of Thanks yesterday, today I have the blog post of thanks! I am officially thankful for the following! Matthew McFarland, as he manages through his wizardry to let me have a semi-normal life with food and friends and gaming and kids and a house and dogs and family and love.  His kiddos, Teagan and Cael, who very patiently stand in with me for my own kids sometimes, despite being awesome kids on their own.  His mom, Suzanne, who is a pretty darn good mother-in-law and who is one of my primary sources of higher ed encouragement. His ex, Heather, who is sane and smart and patient and good-humored. And a cake wizard. My dogs, who remind me that as long as we have petting and food and water and a nice place to sleep, nothing is all that bad.  Alisdair, my eldest son, who is 18 and trying to find his way in the world.  William, my youngest son, who is 16 and cutting a swathe with his humor and dapper choices....

So my boys were here for the holidays -- only one week this time, as they spent one week of vacation at my mom's house visiting their grandparents and their uncle's family. Alisdair is newly interested in playing the guitar, while William has adopted "dapper" as his new primary philosophy. Both boys were in good health and good spirits, and we had a very good time mostly hanging around the house, with outings to Nana's for New Year's Dinner and lazer tag for fun. Both boys are taller than me, and my youngest is now within an inch of my eldest's height. I am fascinated by my boys, in that I can start to see the adults they'll become. I don't know whether this is because I see them only sporadically these days, or whether I'd be doing it regardless, but I'm entirely enthralled by it. Alisdair is quiet and thoughtful and kind and funny, and starting to come into his own -- his time at an appropriately nerd-friendly college in some STEM car...

See what I did there? Of course you do. :) So, things I'm thankful for this year. Firstly, I'm thankful that I passed my exams. Like all the thankfulness that it's done. It pretty much ate my life for a year, and while I don't regret it in the least.... I have a number of other things I'd like to move on to, not the least of which is my dissertation. Secondly, I'm thankful for my husband. Matt made it possible for me to do... well, everything over the past year. He really honestly is the best thing to happen to me, and he makes all the rest of it worth doing. Thirdly, I'm thankful for my kids. Alisdair and William are really the best sons I could ask for. They live much further from me than I like, but I respect their choices -- our time together again will come. They're such awesome people, and it's a privilege to be their mother. Fourthly, I have these dogs, you see. As I sit crosslegged on the couch right now, Si has wrapped himself arou...

So I managed to make it to 50 posts! While I'm not posting daily, I'm posting semi-regularly, and that's something in and of itself. Today's post, then, is sort of a general update. 1) GenCon is done. We did well (I won't say we made money on the con as a whole), but we offset a decent portion of our expenses. We sold through nearly all the stock we brought -- we might have sold more had we been more ambitious about bringing material, but then we might have had to carry stuff home, too, so it worked out. I had a great time, my kids had a great time, and all is well on that front. And now on to Chill, 3rd Edition. *grin* 2) Classes start today. We got glowing reviews from the summer course I co-taught, so I'm thrilled with that. I've got Latin this afternoon but that's the only class I'm taking -- so long as I can order my books today, I'll be fine. 3) I've got a ton of studying and writing to do. No really. You don't even want to kn...

One of the courses I'm taking this semester is Discourse Analysis, not because I felt it had a tremendous amount to do with what I want to study, but because I think it's important to have a varied intellectual toolbox and it's something I'd kind of been interested in, in a roundabout way. For those who haven't encountered it before, discourse analysis is a practice that pulls from a bunch of different humanities disciplines and looks at all manner of discourse, which is basically any information transferred between people (media, laws, emails, forms, recordings of conversation, non-fiction, fiction, discourse represented in drama, corporate texts, PR docs, etc.). It does so to find patterns and determine what the discourse is actually doing, along with what it says it's doing, and figure out how it accomplishes that end. As with all classes, there has to be an end project, and DA's end project is a piece of discourse analysis. I had a hard time choosing a...