Tag: labor

Fractally Branched and Oozing Sap

/ Derek Mueller

A month ago, around February 13, SW Virginia sagged under an ice blanket, everything coniferous leaning or buckling or some combination thereof. Roads blocked, downed lines, a pop rocks concert throughout the long dark of night. We lost power for 48 hours, only to have it restored just as steady rains rinsed through the region dumping more water than we’d gauged in one day in these three plus years. The holler washed, toggling from soil course to water course, to what I would guess was a depth of at least 10 inches. And the creek spilled over the driveway, another first, though the washout was minor in the end. Not that there is any such thing as an end. A weather event lashes down. We clean up. And so that’s pretty much what I’ve been up to for the past several weeks, aside from joining Is. and her roommate E. on short trip to San Diego, and then being sick for a solid week at the end of that trip. Friday I was back in the yard again for some tree cleanup.

Figure 1. Shed and coops at mid-holler, facing north, where a tall stand of white pines populates the ridgeline. During a mid-February ice storm, 5-7 pines split and fell over, littering the terraced slope with branches and trunks.
Figure 1. Shed and coops at mid-holler, facing north, where a tall stand of white pines populates the ridgeline. During a mid-February ice storm, 5-7 pines split and fell over, littering the terraced slope with branches and trunks.

A mature stand of white pines towers weak and leanerly over the north side of the holler. It has ‘we are soon about to fall down’ energy. Are they thirty or forty years old? I’d guess so. Fifty or 100 trees dropped in the ground in, say, 1985. They are bedraggled, showing lots of signs of shedding whole trees or major parts of trees in recent years. I am older than them; I get it. February’s conditions brought down four or five of them, and elsewhere throughout the holler as many as ten more trees snapped off their tops or leaned over kaput. I have a decent Echo chainsaw. It’s plastic, nothing to brag about it’s bar length, so just one notch up the model numbers from a child’s chainsaw. But just this once, I decided I could use an extra hand. I texted a landscaping crew we’d used a couple of times to weed eat the creak bed last summer, and they were interested, said they would stop by, then didn’t. No show. No message. Just blew it off. So I crawled back to the drawing board, a new query posted to Everything Christiansburg, and found a generalist willing to cut the trunks into 15-inch pieces, wood burner sized.

I have brushed a few of the trunks so as to introduce a gradual, incremental method to the cleanup. I’d told myself this week, spring break week for VT, would be good for two hours a day in springlike weather, late afternoon breaks from the computer to chip away, saw away, branch dragging into piles, the slow clearings not long behind. Two hours on the Echo chainsaw is about two refuels, allowing for interruptions to clear branches and make space. But then I got drawn waders deep into detailing the pond, and that cascaded into bigger pond retaining wall problems than I was bargaining for, so there went a day, and I still don’t know enough about hydraulic cements but the pond wall still stands. And it will be repaired, eventually, or even likelier, it will crumble. Masonry not being high on my short list of competencies.

When I look at the trees in various states of brokenness and leaning along the banks, I size up their cleanup and think it will quick, manageable, even basic. They look small, no more heavy or complex than a nub of steamed broccoli. I’m really ready. Gloves on. Water bottle. Appropriate footwear. I let the chickens out and get to it, sawing then hauling, bigger branches then smaller ones. I am not getting better at guessing correctly the work involved. I always underestimate. The cleanup is slower; the work is more; the wood is heavier. The chickens, if they notice at all, quietly celebrate that there will be more snail’s-paced afternoons free-ranging as I trundle along, small branches in this pile, medium limbs still needing chainsaw work here, the rest stacked in the woodshed.

A blue Ford Maverick loaded with 12' sheets of corrugated metal, sandwiched between a few framing planks, flagged with pink plastic, and secured with nylon straps.
Figure 2. A blue Ford Maverick loaded with 12′ sheets of corrugated metal, sandwiched between a few framing planks, flagged with pink plastic, and secured with nylon straps.

Tree cleanup notwithstanding, dubious labor estimates favor me now and then, meaning that sometimes I imagine something will be arduous and it turns out to be a cinch. This happened to be the case when, after weeks of overthinking the tools I would need to cut sheet metal, I got started on the chicken coop roof. I’d read around about needing right and left curving sheers, about grinder blades, about using a circular saw with a cheap wood blade on backwards, about nibblers, and so on. Phone calls to my dad and to my brother. How would you cut it? And then I ordered the metal, picked it up, and got started, figuring it would be the hardest part of the job. I was convinced I was going to screw up a few cuts. But then I tried it, and it was nothing, a breeze. Measure twice, Sharpie line, and tin snips eased through it swiftly, straight lines, not much hazardous waste (I was worried about curls of sharp metal too small to clean up effectively and right-sized for harming the chickens). This kind of being wrong about labor feels light and the holler saturates again with hues of hope and possibility.

Photograph of a chicken coop and run, an 8' by 8' metal structure wrapped in hardware cloth and covered with a shiny metal roof.
Figure 3. Photograph of a chicken coop and run, an 8′ by 8′ metal structure wrapped in hardware cloth and covered with a shiny metal roof.

Such is wayfinding in projects. Venture in and rarely is it as I imagined it would be. I’m routinely off at guessing how many hours it will take to clear a tree. Yet, in another project, like the coop roof, a task I imagine to be immensely complicated turns out to be as easy as cutting a sheet of construction paper. As grand inconclusion goes, these puzzles are a lot like scholarship, grounded formations beholden to the unpredictability of labor and materials and time.

Rock Smoosh

/ Derek Mueller
Slate chips
Figure 1. Slate chips for bucketing into the side shed until the fingertip blood blisters form and then do just five more bucketfuls.

Filling Lowe’s buckets one at a time and then hefting them for dumping at the side shed floor, until back muscles tap shoulder yoohoo “aging one” and yet a heap of slate pieces 1-3/4″-2″ remains for moving, leveling, tamping around, as if any song is suited to the famously unpopular one-footed dance, rock smoosh. I rest, check email, forwards and replies, traipse back again for another five bucketfuls, which I’d psyched myself into because the uncovered portion is shrinking and soon will be rocked over somewhat decoratively.

Upon Not Panicking and After

/ Derek Mueller

The inventory I wrote nearly three months ago proved perspective-setting at the time, so I’m trying something similar here, trying to recover that feeling of checking back again on what the ever-living high tide has happened this summer, especially with work. The August Workshop runs next week–that’s the Composition Program’s week-long seminar that in focused ways anticipates the start of classes on August 26.

Summer has been work-intensive, but it hasn’t been all work. I’ve biked and swam, made several trips to Pickerel Lake, camped in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., and Ludington, Mich., swam in Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, drove to Blacksburg then Nashville, also to Baltimore, also to Lansing for Computers & Writing. I’ve seen a few movies (Last Black Man in San Francisco, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and some TV shows (Euphoria, Barry, Chernobyl, When They See Us, Big Little Lies, probably something I’m forgetting). I flew to Albuquerque for Native Vision, but didn’t fly anywhere else. I got one massage. I will go for a tattoo tomorrow. I cooked my daughter’s birthday dinner on August 1. And I held my granddaughter a few times but not nearly enough, never nearly enough. I made several gallons of fermented vegetables. Ate some of them. Results were mixed. I started drinking coffee again. At neighbors’ request, I stood at a condo association board meeting and read a law about non-profit organizations and about how voter lists must be available at meetings where votes are being recorded, and I was shouted at by a lawyer, also called an asshole. So the summer has had range and depth and balance.

My to-do list remains feral more than tame. I complete things, experience a moment of calm, then get surprised by its biting or clawing or sometimes stinging out of the blue. Here are a few of the things that have been on the list in the last three months. I suppose I should keep track of things differently than I do.

  • Around May 20, I learned that we had sixty-one unstaffed sections of first-year writing for fall. And that set in motion a quickened pace search for thirteen new instructors. The search is still unfinished, so I shouldn’t say a whole lot about it. In terms of workload, it has been a steady and as measured as possible ten weeks. We still, as of today, have six unstaffed sections of first-year writing for fall. Fall semester begins in 20 days.
  • Since May 20, I have received 1154 emails and sent 763 emails. Be the email reduction filter you want to see in the world. But, too, 763 sends is more than I’d prefer for the three months between spring and fall. Notably, not all emails are equal. Some are flits and some are more intricately built. What would it look like to operate in an administrative capacity where email was infrequent, discouraged, altogether abandoned? What, instead, might we use? Are there Slack-only writing programs? Are there in 2019 administrators who decline to use email?
  • I received, read, and returned 42 course equivalency requests since May 20. How does this compare? Who knows. But I’m keeping track of it.
  • I wrote, submitted, and approved edits on an encyclopedia-like entry on heuristics.
  • I presented at Computers & Writing in Lansing and also collected a book award for Network Sense.
  • I attended CWPA in Baltimore, going to a handful of sessions and also participating on the executive board for the first time.
  • I gathered into one place something like 6,000 words toward an article I’d like very much to have sent off yet this fall. But hours dedicated to writing feel both spare and distant at the moment. So this one can sit quietly until early September.
  • I drafted a chapter for a collaborative project (7,000 words plus sixteen figures). Sent that off. And am almost done with revisions on another chapter for that same project (6,000 words plus seven figures). One more chapter is due by the end of the fall semester.
  • I made modest revisions to the chapter I’ve contributed to the Radiant Figures collection. Also mocked up two model chapters and, with co-editors, fine-tuned and submitted that collection’s proposal, which we should be hearing back about before the end of August. With any luck.?
  • I worked with VT colleagues on the finishing steps toward compiling a writing programs self-study report that’s gone off to the CWPA evaluator-consultant service and, as well, to the two C-E visitors we’ll have on campus at the end of September. The self-study is maybe 5000 words, but it includes fourteen appendices and thus expanded to something like a 101-page PDF. Next will be scheduling the visit more precisely. Lots of email involved in that.
  • Registered for FemRhet and have continued to shepherd along a process of registering the 10+ graduate students who will be on a roundtable about intersectionality at that conference in November. Submitted a proposal to RSA in Portland next May. I wrote a proposal for a possible lecture at Bland Correctional Facility, though I still don’t quite know if that will be scheduled for fall. And I’m needing very soon to generate a title and blurb for a talk at U Findlay happening in late October. I think it will be a talk drawn from the shadows of the article draft a few bullets back (though the framing is a tad cynical, dissolutionist, endist, accelerationist, fretting with a very particular precariat).
  • Work on Corridors has centimetered along, too, and I’ve just about finished preparation for the talk I’ll share at that event on September 21. It’s something of a follow-up and extension to the argument for visualizing DFWI, grappling with matters of disability, visible, invisible, and otherwise undisclosed.
  • I was elected (unopposed) Treasurer of the Writing Across Virginia Affiliate, what will soon be proposed as a Virginia-specific WPA affiliate chapter.
  • I have a external tenure review due at month’s end; that’s been a letter written by chipping away. Shouldn’t be any problem at all honoring that deadline.
  • If there is more, I can’t think of it.

I’ll begin teaching a section of ENGL5454: Studies in Theory, what’s a temporary placeholder name for the composition theory and practice class. We have nineteen new GTAs who need to take it, and so we’ve split the section into two, doing what all we can (and should) to honor its functioning more like a graduate seminar than an undergraduate class.

And the week-long August Workshop takes motion next week, though at the moment it has wobbled a bit for miscoordination of dates. Whatever of it, it’s nothing a panic will resolve, so we’re trying other problem-solving tactics. It will all happen, and then it will be fall.

Don’t Panic

/ Derek Mueller

Used to blog so hard and so often in my thirties. Hobby of that decade, 2004-2013. Like shooting baskets in my twenties, 1994-2003, fiddling around in my teens, 1987-1993, listening to cassette tapes on any Walkman in my preteens, 1984-1986, eating peanut butter Twix in my aughts, 1979-1983. I don’t think I had any Twix before I turned five to be clear. I sit with uncertainty about whether peanut butter should be Capitalized. Capitalize it Optional (proper noun and/or adjectival), but damn sure capitalize it Delicious, too.

Now it’s the end of the first full year of a new job at a new university in a new state and I was awake in the night the other night whatever day that was because sometimes now that I’m in my middle forties, 2017-present, I experience biphasic sleep and also polyphasic sleep and sometimes during the day I close the Shanks 315 office door and unfurl a nap roll I keep in the bottom drawer of a big black file cabinet with only just a few files in it and where on the floor the thin roll lays flat, that’s where I have a nap. A power nap, which means I keep it to what maybe twenty minutes. Biphasia or polyphasia, I’ve learned not to even be perturbed by these, not even at 3 a.m. or 4.

This was going to be a few lines about the decade that was this year, long-times feeling extra long for constant-inconstant spatiotemporal reorientation. Not even complaining. Just thinking about the difference between a time traveller’s dilemma and a regular traveller’s dilemma, orienting to When Am I?, and seeing that question continuously interrupted as if through a kaleidoscope. Nice to look at-through, though, because it’s constantly colorful and doesn’t ever disappoint like some things if you know what I mean.

Our contracts run from August 10 through May 9 every year. Nine months before the fata morgana of summertime clearings and oases and poolside sun-bathed splash panacea. A few bullets about what I’ve been doing, what I’ve been up to this year, AY 2018-2019.

  • Oh ffs taken to court over a condominium by-laws situation in Ypsilanti and then it was dismissed and then I was sued civilly, and that’s still working itself out very gradually.
  • I became a grandpa on February 23. It’s wonderful and humbling and now I wear rubber overshoes when it is rainy outside on my walk to and from campus and I give far fewer centimeters-height of shrug about what I wear. I like it, too, grandparenthood, as an equanimity refrain. Some ish is going down and I’m gonna just think for a while about this awe-inspiring granddaughter over there in Michigan.
  • In the Composition Program I direct, we revised the outcomes, adopted a new custom textbook, wrote substantially a couple of the chapters for the book, met and met again to negotiate the price to something just exactly right (well, reasonable), put together hokieswrite.com and filled the pages with all variety of in-progress resources, wrote an application for an $18,600 grant that then was awarded so as to assure more formidable uptake of program-wide assessment, funds enough to incentivize really a couple of workshops and to build forms digital and analog as simple collectors for competency ratings, above, below, and middling, an inherited design with several known limitations for writing. And then this afternoon generated 53 letters for disbursing the grant.
  • I’ve not said no! to any committee yet, which puts me on personnel, professional and technical writing ad hoc subcommittee, the rhetoric and writing committee, the composition committee (chair), the department executive committee, also the graduate admissions selection committee for the PhD program and the Carolyn Rude Award committee for graduate student article writing, though these last two met just once.
  • I also said yes! to eight doctoral committees so far, but I’m not chairing any of them. This work will accelerate next fall when six of them take exams and hold exam defenses in October. Last October I had just one exam defense.
  • I met new colleagues for eight social lunches in AY 2018-2019. Two were at a barbecue place whose name I forget but know has to do with under the stairs or downstairs or beneath the stairs, one at Gillie’s, two at The Cellar, one at Blacksburg Tavern, one at Green’s, and one at Blacksburg Taphouse. Twice I went by myself for a waffle lunch at Waffle House. I had Jimmie Johns delivered to my office three times.
  • I participated as a mock interviewer for two mock interviews, attended a book group meeting on Cathy Davidson’s The New Education, completed online IRB certification, gained online teaching certification by taking a class especially banal and platitude-filled, sat and talked for an hour with a delegation from Shadong University one day, and sat and talked for two hours as part of an invited Open Access Week panel focused on open access publishing.
  • I was nominated for the CWPA ExecBoard, accepted a place on the ballot, blurb and photo, and was elected to a post for the next three years.
  • I put on the two assessment workshops, each two hours long (mostly a re-run, the second iteration) and prepped and delivered four program-wide teaching talks. Sometimes 30 people attended and other times 55 people attended. The lunch was provided by the program at these talks and mostly everyone expressed gratitude for its being free and for there being two six foot long Sub Station II sandwiches, several feet as vegetable sub and several more feet as meat sub, plus a large bowl of pickles each time.
  • I put in a request for new office flooring because the low pile industrial grade carpet in my office was so very well trafficked that I thought my nap roll was being introduced to the who knows what it could even be from other people’s shoes having walked through Shanks 315 however long ago that happened. And so it was in April a tall stack of plastic bins from facilities arriving and everything was loaded and moved, glue down imitation wood laminate flooring set in place and everything moved back again, only about a week or so without an office around Easter Weekend and the best parts are that the new flooring makes the space a lot nicer to spend so many hours in and that I finally impressed a semi-dull boredom of order on the books and journals shelved about.
  • █ █████ ███ ████████ ██ ███ █████ ███████ █ ██ █ ███. ██████ █ ██ █████ ███ ██ ████████ ███ ████ █ ██ █ ███. █ █████ ███ ██ ██ ████ █████ ███ ████████ ██ ███ █████ ███████ █ ██ █ ███. ██████ ████████████ █ ███ █████ ███████ █ ██ █ ███!
  • I drove to Michigan and back, approximately 500 miles each way, seven times but never more than once in any month. I also drove to Louisville and Pittsburgh for conferences. This was the first AY year I did not fly for a conference nor for any other trip. In mid-June I’ll fly to Albuquerque for Native Vision.
  • I attended six presentations in the department, besides the department head finalists: S.C., C.G. A.V., Z.S., L.F., and A.K. And I had dinner with C.G., A.V., Z.S., and L.F., as these were guests from afar. Six talks, four meals.
  • Unsuccessful DH search this winter was another three talks, three meals, various meetings, too. Combined with the previous bullet, that adds up to nine talks and seven meals.
  • I lead the Composition Program orientation meeting in August, took lead on coordinating an in-progress CWPA evaluator-consultant visit, self-study, planning, and so on, won a research impact award for Network Sense, signed a textbook contract, taught an online section of technical writing in the three week winter term mostly to learn who takes the class and how it is designed, etc.
  • I hiked eight hikes: Pandapas Pond x5, Cascades x2, and Dragon’s Tooth x1.
  • I had what I would count as thirteen outreach-ish meetings: Pathways/Gen Ed x2, integrity office (about Turnitin.com; didn’t go well), library, bookstore x2, publisher x4, LCI x3.
  • I co-edited and also contributed to a DRC blog carnival in fall, wrote a chapter, “Silhouetto of DFWI,” for the Radiant Figures edited collection, and read and wrote review notes for thirteen chapters in that collection that will be in the hands of contributors by month’s end. I presented at Watson (Louisville, October) and Cs (Pittsburgh, March), will present at Computers & Writing (Lansing, June), and I have proposals sent off for Cs (Milwaukee next March), Corridors (Blacksburg, September), an acceptance to FemRhet (Harrisonburg, November), and a draft proposal for RSA (Portland next May).
  • I will participate in two graduation ceremonies next week: the first in plain clothes as an usher (“disability escort #2”) at the undergraduate commencement and the second in regalia at the English Department commencement. I inherited a robe, bought from Syracuse’s bookstore a hood of my own, bright orange blue-edged.
  • At last count, as of maybe two weeks ago, I sent 2,144 emails and received 4,387 emails at my vt.edu account. Sometimes I send one email that reaches more than 100 people. Sometimes there are flurries of short emails volleyed in succession with one person. I placed five phone calls using my office telephone. I received one real-time phone call in my office and five voice messages. Two of the voice messages were from bots who didn’t even know I hadn’t answered.

I left some stuff out of this quantified self rundown. Nothing much about how much running or yoga or how many times I strained my right calf or how many times I felt straining in my right calf but didn’t completely wreck it. Nothing about Chicken Hill. Or about television. Nothing about fermentations, batches of kombucha, pickled eggs for lunch. Nothing about how many times I stopped for gasoline in West Virginia. Or how many times I used the fireplace. Or how much La Croix I drank. Or how many homemade pizzas I made and then ate. How many sporting events I watched at colleagues’ houses or at VT sporting facilities. Nothing about being more or less strictly off caffeine from November 1 until May 3. There are holes in this account and gaps. Aren’t there always.

Too Far Flung

/ Derek Mueller

Is. practiced hopscotch in the late-day shadows Sunday afternoon. Here the stone skips off the court. No problem. My entire weekend has amounted to a stone skipped off the court, three days of nonchalantly trailing after of the last wisps of summertime: happy hour with new EMU faculty, an NFL fantasy draft meeting Saturday afternoon, the EMU-Army football game, a stroll in the park, a pot of potato-leek soup, a brief errand into the Canton Target earlier today. Minimal exercise. Minimal television. Fall classes commence Wednesday, so there have been a few minutes of reading, revising class documents, imagining as possible the perfect first class session. But mostly, breathing, recharging, and easing summer properly to its conclusion.

Power Adjuncting

/ Derek Mueller / 2 Comments

The Chronicle published a piece this week by Douglas W. Texter,
"No Tenure? No
Problem." Part-timers, it goes, can now make a pile of money (in the
neighborhood of $100k annually) by stacking teaching gigs at a couple of
different institutions. Texter offers ten principles useful for adjusting
one’s thinking while taking the plunge into the pot of gold that is
"entrepreneurial adjuncting." Among the guiding tenets: care, assume a
mercenary attitude, change what you read, change the company you keep, watch
Risky Business, and so on.

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