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Freedom’s just another word…

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In the “just another word for nothin’ left to lose” department, take a look at this excellent post by Curmudgeon at BripBlap. Aside from having delivered an awesome piece of writing here, Curmudgeon is dead center on target. You don’t want to lose what matters in the pursuit of money or career.

Some years ago I connected with an old acquaintance. She was an associate professor in the Speech Department when I was in graduate school. Shortly after I finished the degree, she disappeared from the scene. She started a business of her own, catering to large corporations: basically what she did was hire out to teach the subject matter she’d taught in the classroom, only tailored to employee development. Before long she expanded the business to D.C. By the time we touched base again, she had farmed out the Washington office to a partner and moved back to the desert, where she continued to direct the operation. When we met for lunch, she was wearing more on her back than my entire net worth.

Like Curmudgeon, she had undergone a life-threatening medical experience while she was hitting her stride as a young professor, one that forced her to think about whether she really wanted to keep on with her job. When this happened to her, she was tenured and set for a perfectly fine academic career at a time when academic jobs were hard to come by. Her decision? She thought not.

The insight she gained from a dangerous health crisis was much the same as Curmudgeon’s: trading off your health for money—or for a job that makes you unhappy, for whatever reason—isn’t worth it.

Interestingly, after my friend started doing what she wanted to do with her life, she started to mint money. She loved what she was doing, and people paid her well for it.

The money will take care of itself. You have to take care of yourself.

Share your favorite Christmas recipe!

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What’s your all-time favorite holiday dish? It could be an old family recipe or something postmodern, an all-day production or no-muss-no-fuss.

Give a Christmas gift to all your blogging friends: share your all-time favorites for holiday meals. If you’ve posted it on your blog, leave a link in the comments below. If not, either post and link or simply type your recipe into your comment.

If we get enough good ideas, I’ll try to get us into the Make It from Scratch carnival.

My choice? IMHO one of the best parts of Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner is real brown gravy.

Image: Riki7, Wild Turkey. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.

Christmas Recipe: Crockpot scalloped potatoes, hold the canned soup

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On Christmas Eve the choir performs twice, once at the 8:30  p.m. service and then again at the 11:00 service, a full-throttle bells-and-smells Eucharist. In between the two events we entertain ourselves with a  potluck dinner.

Since M’hijito and I are entertaining 15 people at my house on Christmas Day and since SDXB will be spending Christmas Eve here, I cast about for something to take to the potluck that wouldn’t require much work. The crockpot is the likeliest candidate for a work-saving tool here, but I’m not fond of recipes that entail dumping canned mushroom soup (icky!) over chicken and cooking it to death. So I think I’m going to adapt and combine a couple of recipes to create a fresh variation on scalloped potatoes for the crockpot.

See the update of this recipe here.

Check this out:

2 pounds potatoes, sliced
1 large yellow onion, julienned
butter
olive oil
about 2 cups flavorful white sauce (see below)
1 cup shredded gruyère cheese
paprika or New Mexico red pepper flakes (mild)
finely chopped parsley
salt and pepper

To julienne the onion, peel it and slice it vertically, then slice again vertically, at a 90-degree angle to the original slices. Skim a frying pan with olive oil. Carmelize the onions by sautéeing them gently until they’re lovely and brown. Season mildly with salt and pepper to taste.

Grease the inside of the crockpot container generously with butter or olive oil.

Layer the sliced potatoes and the carmelized onions into the pot. Spread the white sauce evenly over the top. Dot generously with butter, then add more pepper and, if desired, salt. Cover the pot and cook the potatoes on low for seven or eight hours or on high for three to four hours. About a half-hour before serving, remove the lid and sprinkle with cheese and a little paprika for color. Replace the lid and allow the potatoes to continue cooking until the cheese is melted in. Finally, sprinkle minced fresh parsley over the top.

To make 2 cups white sauce:
See the comments for a discussion of the sauce!

4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons white flour
2 cups milk, or combination of milk and good chicken or beef stock
dollop of sherry
nutmeg
salt and pepper
paprika (optional)

Melt the butter in a large saucepan. Add flour and stir well to combine. Cook gently over medium-low  heat until the butter and flour foam up. Don’t allow the flour to brown.

Add the stock and stir over medium-high heat until them sauce is hot and thickened. Add nutmeg to taste: 1/8 to 1/4 tsp. Add a couple tablespoons of dry sherry. Add salt and pepper to taste. A little paprika will give the sauce some extra zing.

Mwa ha ha! For the last potluck, someone got to the sign-up sheet before me and claimed the very dish I planned to bring. Last night, though, I managed to grab the sheet first. While this will not be as staggeringly impressive as Cheryl and Doug’s traditional home-smoked salmon, it should at least be reasonably tasty.

Image: Vicente Gil, Adoração dos Magos. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.

w00t! Free flu shots!!

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Dang! I thought the community college was charging $20 for the H1N1 shots they were dispensing today. Barreled in there this afternoon and learned they’re free! Even if you’re not a full-time employee. That’s amazing…GDU never did anything like that.

I had to pay $20 for the regular seasonal flu shot last fall, ’cause Cigna, GDU’s new EPO provider, wouldn’t cover it unless you drove downtown to attend their flu shot clinic. Yeah. Right. My time is worth more than twenty bucks.

Even someone off the street could’ve gotten the shot for free, if they’d known about it…they didn’t ask for ID, and the form you had to fill out was just a disclaimer warning you not to take it if you’re allergic to eggs or have certain ailments.

So that was pretty amazing.

Got another nice deal, though not free, at Safeway yesterday: tough old skirt steaks for $1.77 a pound. Had it ground up into enough hamburger to last Cassie the Corgi for another month or two.

An hour & a half before choir practice: think I’ll grill some of it for myself over some fine mesquite charcoal.

Cheapskate heaven. 🙂

On the first day of freedom…

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The students’ grades posted, the GDU office all but shuttered, and editorial work wound down to one entertaining detective novel to read, the question arises: What next?

So many what nexts: I can think of so much to fill my time I expect to be a great deal busier than I was while trudging in the traces.

• Just e-mailed a friend at the West campus (still there, poor dear!) to see if she’d like to go out to lunch or coffee, since I have to schlep a $500 check from the detective-novel publisher over to the credit union, which is on the campus.

• The community college is dispensing H1N1 flu shots. They even gave me an appointment: 3:00 p.m. this afternoon. Not convinced I need this, since I think I came down with the swine flu last June. However, in the past before I started getting an annual immunization, I invariably came down with the bug in the second semester. So: better safe than etceteraed.

• Gotta prune the roses!

• Gotta tend to the pool, which has been sitting dormant quietly for a while.

• Gotta go outside in the frosty morning and admire the sunrise, which just now is turning the sky brilliant coral.

• Want to spend some time playing with the new computer. Wrapping things up has consumed so much time and energy, I haven’t even had time to look at it.

• Then it’s off to choir practice.

Check out this lovely thing. Not being an all-male choir, we didn’t sound like this when we sang it last week. But we were good. Very, very good.

My RA and my editorial assistant are machinating a proposal to resuscitate our operation, only house it in the President’s or the Provost’s office. They’re going to meet with a faculty member today about this scheme. Since I happen to know, from other sources, that faculty member has been in the President’s office with a couple of colleagues engaged in their own machinations, it’ll be interesting to see how this falls out.

In academe, as (I imagine) in the real world, a well-timed coincidence can create all sorts of little miracles. My own career at GDU was launched when I happened to stumble into the West campus looking to teach a feature-writing course part-time, bearing a Ph.D. and 15 years of magazine journalism experience, at a moment when the American Studies faculty were craving to found a “professional” writing program. Presto-changeo! Not only a full-time job but a program to direct!

So anything’s possible. If they ask the right people at the right time, they just might open a door for themselves.

A friend seemed to feel I should be exercised because there is some indication that my little empire is about to be co-opted, whether by the young people or, more to the point, by my former colleagues who so conspicuously surfaced in the Presidential Presence. Don’t think so.

GDU is so behind me, I just do not care what anyone out there does, or why, or how. If they offered me a job now, I don’t think I’d even consider taking it. And if any of the underlings can revive the office, more power to them. And…good luck to them.

So back to what next. Long-term, I’d like to…

…write one of these detective  novels.
…rewrite the novel I wrote several years ago, changing the gender of one of the main characters and thereby thickening the plot no end.
…take voice lessons.
…learn to read music.
…take painting lessons.
…sign up for yoga classes.
…volunteer at the Desert Botanical Garden.
…volunteer to usher at the Herberger, by way of getting in to the plays for free.
…start hiking in the desert again.
…take the dog to agility training.
…learn XHTML and CSS.
…go back to Santa Fe.

But right this minute I’ve gotta get off my chair and go for the morning walk.

The joy of students

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Students can be such a pain sometimes, you tend to forget how splendid they are, even the ones whose minds your subject escapes.

Early this semester I winced when Disability Resources sent a notice saying a student with Asperger’s Syndrome had signed up for one of my classes. Ungraciously, selfishly I thought, “Argh! More work, less pay!”

We must stop with the ungraciousness and the selfishness.

This extraordinary young man, who does indeed face some daunting challenges, has made himself one of my all-time favorite students. Polite, sweet-natured, attentive, and observant, he is an altogether brillliant young person. He turns in meticulously edited, meticulously organized, yea verily meticulously perfect papers. No, they’re not plagiarized (trust me: I checked). The things are works of art. His final paper almost reaches the professional level in quality; he’s certainly writing on the graduate school level. He wants to be a physicist, or maybe an astronomer. The kid’s a natural: let’s hope he makes it.

Then there’s Joe the Plumber. Yeah: a real plumber. A big, bluff red-necked bruiser in his late 30s or early 40s, this guy realized there had to be a better way to make a living than fixing pipes, so he’s come back to school for a degree or two in business. English will never be his strong suit, but by steady persistence (and a bodacious sense of humor) he’s nailed an A in the class. As yesterday’s final session was wrapping up, he wanted to be sure every item in the online grade sheet was filled in correctly, because, he said, “My mother is not gunna believe this!”

“Why?” I asked.

“I  never got an A in high school.”

🙂 “Well. Tell her you’re a late bloomer.”

And we have Sally Bowles, a pole dancer. Her mother thinks she’s a cocktail waitress in a chain restaurant and highly disapproves of that. Little does she know the girl supports her three-year-old by taking off her clothes in men’s clubs.

You can make a lot of money taking off your clothes in men’s clubs, even without having to perform any extracurricular services. She earns more in a single evening than I do teaching her English course over two weeks. Women we think of as “hard” are surprisingly fragile, though. Her toughness is a façade hiding a dangerous vulnerability.

Men can be vulnerable, too. The ex-Marine planning to re-up in the Army after he finishes at the junior college carries his fierceness as a Roman soldier carried his shield, something to bounce off the arrows, swords, and lances of disappointment and careless humanity.

They’re all like that, one way or another: dodging the slings and arrows. Gotta lov’em!