Blogging on the Powwow

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...

Yes, another blog post about running.  I've been in an injury rut for a long time now. Or, a partial injury rut. In the late summers or early falls of 2011, 2012, and 2013 I sustained major running injuries in the same location. These injuries were severe enough that they kept me away from running for as little as 5 weeks in one case and as long as 4.5 months in another. My problems have focused on my left foot: stress fractures in the metatarsals (about which I have blogged numerous times, here , here , and  here  for starters) and then some nerve-related problems . As a result, I've been told to cross train, work on my core, and strength-train. So, in late winter 2013, I started swimming, which I have been doing 1-2 times a week for close to a year-and-a-half. Same with strength-training -- 2-3 times a week, and working on my core -- 3-4 times a week. This is in addition to my regular runs or workouts if I am on a hiatus from running . I was told many, many t...

Our first black Labrador Retriever, Blackberry, had health problems. He started having seizures between 6-9 months of age. We discovered that he had epilepsy and successfully treated his condition with  phenobarbital  for 9 years. The bad news is that it slowly destroyed his liver. We made that trade-off because alternative medications were much more expensive. So, we lost Blackberry when he was 9. I still think it was the right decision. Blackberry lived a happy life. He was the center of our family and even part of the community. Everyone seemed to know him. Neil was once exercising Blackberry in the Saco River in Biddeford and a school-aged girl with a fishing rod passed by them and commented to her father, "That dog's name is Blackberry." Neil had never seen that child in his life or since. When the UPS man would arrive at our house, he would hand us a package and look in through the door, saying, "Hi, Blackberry!"  Despite this condition, he had a pretty ...

I met Trevor in fall of 1987, I believe, at Deering High School in Portland during a rehearsal for the Portland Youth Symphony Orchestra and the Portland Youth Wind Ensemble. These were, and still are, music ensembles for select young players in southern/central/midcoast Maine. Trevor played oboe, too, was two years ahead of me in high school and we became good friends. It helped that his high school music program in Camden and my high school music program in Topsham (SAD-75) were usually top-ranking in state competitions. So, in addition to seeing him weekly in Portland, I would occasionally see Trevor during other music events throughout the academic year and at All-State Music Festivals. Then our schools did an exchange and performed at each other’s schools. My family hosted Trevor and some of his friends during this exchange. Then I got my license and being the “willing to drive anywhere, anytime, any distance” person that I am – my friend, Kathy and I, made the occasional trip to...

I was a couch potato as a child. Wait, I guess that's not exactly true. I played outside a lot, but I was never involved in sports or anything athletic. I don't know why children's worlds often break down into "the arts" versus "sports," but that does seems to be the way things went, at least when I was a child. I, and my family, were firmly planted in the arts. I took piano, oboe, and voice lessons at one time or another from age 5 through my teen years. I was in several music ensembles in school, several community ensembles, and when I was in high school I stated traveling 132 miles  each way  for voice lessons. This is not to say that I never ventured into the world of sport and exercise as a child. I was in track for one season when I was in the seventh grade and I went to one softball practice when I was 9. I also took swimming lessons here and there and swam weekly in the summers at my grandparents' camp on Echo Lake in Mount Vernon, ME. That...

Technology doesn't come easily to all of us. I feel competent dealing with most of the technology that I encounter, but I certainly don't consider myself an expert. My husband, Neil, however, struggles mightily with technology. We've been working on how to save a file on his computer (not the same computer) since 1995. I think that it got it a couple of years ago. Despite the many challenges that technology presents to him and his tendency to want to be a Luddite, he sits in front of his computer every day - throwing himself into the work that technology presents him, struggling to master what he wishes to accomplish...email, Word documents, web searches, YouTube, photo editing, music notation software and the like. It's rough work, but here's there everyday, mastering technology, which can only be done with the assistance of some curse words and regular threats to throw the computer in the river. Neil was fascinated by smartphones long before he ever had one. We ...

Yes, another blog post about running. And, yes, I have a runner's high, even though I crossed the finish line about nine hours ago. Unlike my high school classmate-turned marathoner, Steve Howe, I am not a fast runner. I'm not a fast anything. But, I am getting faster...at least I'm moving in the right direction, even if I can't seem to qualify for the Boston Marathon. Nevertheless, today, I officially felt fast. I might have even been burly, but I had better not get ahead of myself. (See a previous blog post for more info on that saga.) Today I ran The Classic Hangover 10k  (which is 6.2 miles), in Salisbury Beach, MA. I only decided yesterday to run. In fact, I had to pay an extra $10 on my registration fee because I was so late in making the commitment. I may have run ten marathons in the past six years, but I have not run a 10k race since 2006. I did do a "test" 10k last September when I was training for a marathon. It can really throw someone off to ...