Blogging on the Powwow

I have no idea if Percy Grainger led with his chest. But, it's a nice play on two themes that carried me through the academic year that is coming to a close (2014-2015). In the 2010-2011 academic year, I returned to the oboe when I was on a fellowship and released from all teaching/campus responsibilities. As I have written before ( here and here ), it was like magic, and Neil and I dubbed that year, the Year of the Oboe - YOTO. I think of this most recent academic year as the Year of Percy Grainger - YOPG.  In case my readers have not been exposed to the world of concert bands, allow me to be so humble as to introduce Percy Grainger to you. Percy Grainger (1882-1961) was a composer and concert pianist, wildly famous, who mostly lived in Australia, England, and the United States. He was most well known for his innovative and fresh compositions involving British folk music. I will insert a side note to add that Mr. Grainger was a very generous friend of the oboe. It would...

Massachusetts has a new law: if your wipers are on, your head and taillights also need to be on. It's a safety issue. I like it. I hear that some Massachusetts lawmakers want to repeal it . But, I digress, as I often do when blogging. It's a new law in Massachusetts, but Maine has had this law since 1997. I know, because I did a research project on this law during my first semester of graduate school. That was fall of 1997. I completed an assignment for a research class on this new law. I was interested in how people know if a new law has been passed. This was before widespread use of the Internet and unlike now, there were no electronic signs along the highways. How would people learn about this law? I conducted a project in which I assessed the extent to which Mainers were compliant with the law. On five or six days when it rained, I parked on several different roads in Saco and Biddeford and among cars with Maine plates, when the wipers were engaged, I recorded wheth...

It was mid-March in 2006. I was four years out of my PhD program. I had completed a two-year post-doctoral research fellowship, which is a position for new PhDs, but I'd been floating, looking for a job for two years. I had steady employment, health insurance, and a book that was slatted to come out soon, but I had not secured the most coveted job in academia - a tenure-track position. (For those who don't know, this "coveted" job comes with a license to work someone nearly-to-death until s/he applies for tenure, when supposedly things can slow down. Three years post-tenure, I have not found that to be the case, however.) The phone rang in our kitchen in Saco, Maine and the caller ID read: Bridgewater State College. "Bridgewater," I thought to myself, "I think that I applied for a job there." I'd applied for dozens of jobs in the northeast and had only been offered one position, which I had turned down. My degree, in public policy, was not an a...

I can really be a jerk, sometimes. I make assumptions and pass judgments on things that are important to a majority of people, when they are seemingly miserable and uninteresting to me. I don't do this all of the time; just some of the time. The best part of this is that I'm often wrong . Granted, this doesn't keep me from passing these judgments again in the future, but it does offer me opportunities for self reflection and surprise.  I'm attending a conference in Orlando - at a Disney resort. I haven't been to Disney since I was 13. There's a reason for that. I don't like crowds, lines, amusement or entertainment parks, manmade wonders, and I especially don't like paying three times the going rate for anything. I had these same feelings when I attended a conference in Las Vegas in 2012. As I have blogged about before, I was right ; Vegas and I are not a good match . If I never set foot in that city again, it will be too soon.  I was sure that I wou...

I spent my 20s with my head down - finishing my undergraduate degree and then five years in graduate school until I finished my PhD when I was 29. When I wasn't studying I was being a part-time parent to Dorothy and whatever neighborhood kids were in our house, and running a Girl Scout troop. I hadn't even started jogging yet; I wasn't playing the oboe; I barely ever cooked anything beyond baked potatoes, pasta, or steamed broccoli. We had a dog and I walked him daily, but that's pretty much it. Neil only saw me when I was studying. It was an extremely focused and somewhat narrow time in my life.  I didn't invest in friendships very well. I maintained contact with some high school friends; the distance is probably what worked well because we kept in daily touch through email. I could fit that in between writing papers and even in the wee hours of the morning when I was too tired to study any more. We had friends with whom we celebrated our holidays, were friendly ...

Neil gave me permission to write this post in case it helps someone else. My husband, Neil, used to smoke...a lot. He smoked in the shower, when he was riding a bike...he even kept a cigarette between his fingers when he practiced the oboe so he could take a few drags when resting his chops. If you know Neil, then you know that Neil never did or does anything small. It's been several decades since he lit-up, but when his doctor asked him if he wanted to go for a free lung cancer screening for people with a history of smoking, he reluctantly said yes. He was sure that he would have a false-positive, which is of course when health professionals think there is a problem, but there is not. Well, it turned out that there was a problem -- he had a true-positive. A small, active mass in his lower left lung. My good friend, Kathy, said, "You tell those doctors that Neil doesn't have cancer. He can't have cancer. It's just Oboe Lung...a small collection of reed dust in ...

I've been on sabbatical for the past year, which among other things, has allowed me to play in not one, but two, community bands. Yes, these are the things that academics do on sabbatical. Rather than prepping lectures, I was squawking away in rehearsals in New Hampshire. Rather than grading student papers and fielding emails from panicked students, I was practicing. Every night. Okay, almost every night. It's been awful and wonderful at the same time.  It was just about four years ago that I was facing the fantastic opportunity of my first year away from teaching - a year-long fellowship at full salary. It's hard to beat that. Better  than sabbatical, in fact. I don't even remember why, but I got the crazy notion to take up the oboe again, a topic that I covered in a previous post . With the exception of a 5 month period when I played in one of Neil's student groups in 2000 or 2001, I had been away from the oboe for 19 years. Count them...19 years. But, I decided...