And What Jenni Found There

End of semester madness! Projects, papers, deadlines, CFPs, and so on. I’m working hard but not stressing out too much, which is nice. Lately, I’ve been trying to adopt the mentality that my work will never be done (there will always be a paper to read, to write, to correct, to react to …), and it has really helped me be more balanced about how I approach my workload. I still have my moments of “oh my god, how will this all get done?” but in general, I think the shifted perspective helps me stay a bit more grounded.

We had a nice time in Mendocino over spring break (I love it there – there is absolutely nothing to do but enjoy the natural beauty and eat good food), and the aforementioned stitches are out. I may or may not have unceremoniously snipped the thread with scissors. Just a lavender scar left for street cred. Right.

Wow! I started this post weeks ago (spring break was at the end of March) and now it’s April 29. Whoa. The first part of this post still holds true, though, so I’ll just move right along …

The only thing between me and the end of coursework for this semester is a 30-page study write-up, which is not so terrible. I’ve been burning the midnight oil trying to get everything done sooner rather than later so that I can focus my attention on those two book chapters. One has a deadline of May 1, which my professor is merrily ignoring (I guess this is a perk of being a giant in your field: you can say “eff off” to junior academics who try to colonize you with manuscript deadlines. Truly inspiring.), and the other has a draft deadline at the end of the summer. This also strikes me as highly improbable, as we must crank out 150 manuscript pages (it’s more of a book/monograph than a chapter). Who the heck knows. I get the feeling that this is just sort of the way things roll in the big bad Academy. Situated learning at its finest! In all seriousness, though, I feel like this year has been all about productive apprenticeship modeling, and I appreciate it so much.

Although life is still very busy, I do feel like things are getting checked off the “to do” list, which means that I might FINALLY be able to organize those damned trip pictures!! I still can’t believe I haven’t finished with those and it’s already over three months after our trip. I swear, if it kills me, I will wade through that sea of gajillion photos and wrangle them into albums.

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I need to knock on wood before I say the following (knock on wood): I rarely get injured. I’ve never had a broken bone. I’ve been thrown from horses with nary a scratch. I rolled my ankle plenty of times in cross-country, lacrosse, and fencing, but the worst result was a little tenderness. The worst physical injury I experienced was when I was rock climbing on a NOLS trip and I looked down (never look down!), got startled, and swung out clumsily and hit the rock face with my hand (yick — the persistent hand scars tell the tale).

So you can imagine how startled I was today when I was trying to put some glasses on the table, one slipped and smashed, and a shard bit deeply into the side of my hand. Blood! A lot! While Dan swept up the gajillion pieces, I stood at the sink and washed out the cut and put pressure on it. It wasn’t wide across but it was deep, so we drove to the Tang Center’s Urgent Care department, where I got two neat little stitches. Very surreal experience to have your skin numbed and then watch a needle and thread being forced into your skin. Everything is fine, of course, just some sensory numbness on the side of the hand near the cut (the doc said it will probably take several weeks for sensation to return normally). Just very weird and unexpected!

Other than this, all goes well. It’s been raining buckets and quite cold — so much for that 70-degree weather last week! I’ve been asked to co-author another book chapter, so that’s exciting. Google calendar will take care of me (or not).

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So instead of doing reading, this is what I did for 5 hours today. Whew, laminated dough pastries (I know – I thought about plastic, too, but that’s what bakers call this type of layered, buttery dough) are even trickier than I initially suspected!! I don’t know how often I will (or should, given the fact that I now know exactly how much butter goes into one of these suckers) make croissant, pain au chocolat, and danishes, but learning something that did not involve text was a nice brain massage!

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Whoa, second semester has really hit the fan! Since my brain is too tired to produce a narrative, I’ll give a little rundown/update using my favorite no-brainer genre, the list.

1. Classes. Interesting and relevant but demanding. I’m developing an iBook for struggling readers, and the process of designing a thoughtful, user-friendly, middle school-appropriate e-textbook has made me REALLY appreciate designers and developers. Damn, this is tough.
2. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but two of my friends and I have advanced to the final round of the CITRIS Big Ideas context. It’s a UC-wide competition, and there is a good chunk of start-up prize money at stake. I can’t go into tons of detail here, but we’re developing a literacy toy. Market research is hard (surveys, interviewing experts) and writing a business proposal is hard, time-consuming work! The final draft is due March 5, which is a bit more than a week away!
3. Beginning to really get into the writing phase of the book chapter. This is fun but also time-consuming and rigorous. I have a brain ache after each meeting.
4. Supervising student teachers is still really enjoyable, even though I have to commute a bit to get to the school sites (in East Oakland and Hayward). It’s been really cool getting to know Bay area public schools, teachers, and students.
5. Writing a conference proposal for LRA (San Diego this year – woohoo!). A friend (who just got hired at Penn, yay!) and I got hooked up with a well-known multimodality researcher who is doing research on iPads and first graders. One of our professors is going to chair it, and we’re asking another digital literacies professor to act as discussant. What does this all mean? Basically the best symposium ever. I’m excited.
6. Research site coordinator for my professor’s project. It’s a job that really lets my Type A-ness shine through, for better or for worse.
7. Korean language class with Dan! We go to the Cultural Center in San Francisco each Thursday night, and even though it’s sort of crazy that I’m going to a volitional 3.5 hour class when I should be swilling celebratory wine because it’s the start of the weekend and I’ve survived another week, the time spent is totally worth it. It’s a fun, genuinely educational language and culture class, we’ve met some really nice people (Korean and non-Korean), and it’s fun to spend more time in SF.
8. Three research projects in the works. These are my own projects, which means I need to get cracking on the Human Subjects Research paperwork.
9. Still devoted to vinyasa yoga and spin classes. I’m pretty sure I would have gone totally bonkers by now without them. Endorphines, take me away!
10. Sloooooowly sorting the thousands of photos from this most recent vacation. I’m hoping I can use part of spring break to finish organizing (spring break: only 1 month away!). It’s been really fun looking over the pics, though, and I’ve had many “Oh my god! I can’t believe I was there!” moments.

So that’s what’s up. A lot of cool, interesting stuff, but my Monday through Friday life is basically run by the tyrannical Google Calendar and its obnoxious reminders. D and I have managed to have some fun exploring, trying new eateries, and generally enjoying some of the many things this area offers, but I think nose-to-grindstone will be my MO until … who the heck knows? (bah, who needs to think in ellipses anyway)

I’ll end on two happy notes before I scamper off to continue this “technology developer” charade: 1) I think spring has finally arrived — it was 75 the other day! and 2) I will be teaching 6th graders for the same six-week summer program come June!

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Art! We purchased these pieces by Mark Petersen, a Berkeley artist, this past weekend and LOVE them!



Haven’t touched the photos. I’m starting to think those will be a spring break project … boohoo.

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Happy Lunar New Year! It’s the Year of the Dragon — specifically, the black water dragon (so cool!). Power, strength, and good luck — sounds like an excellent combination to me! I’ll need generous doses of all three to get through this semester successfully. (Actually, I’ll need them just to get through organizing the 2400+ photos from our trip that remain AFTER the first deletion cut. I am optimistic about starting to organize this upcoming weekend, though, so hopefully I’ll be able to share album links here before too much more time goes by.) The book chapter is in full swing and is fun and overwhelming at the same time. As I mentioned, the final draft of the 100 pages isn’t due until 2013, but that doesn’t sound too far away, to be honest. I’m still serving as a student teacher supervisor for Cal this semester, and I’ll also be heading a research team for one of my professor’s multi-site projects starting next month. My three classes look really promising and exactly what I need to be taking for my second-to-last semester of classes: New Media Theory (the reading list has many “old friends” from lit theory and frankly makes my head hurt a little), Designing Learning Technologies (I have to create a working prototype of a learning technology — omg!!! I really wonder how I get myself into these things sometimes), and Creativity, Learning, and New Media Technologies (no deliverable, but lots of application of theory). So, it’s a pretty sweet trinity of theory, application, and creation, but I’m pretty sure there will be some hair-raising and hair-tearing moments along the way. I know it.

Have to dash off to class, but more soon.

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4 countries (India, Nepal, Thailand, and South Korea) and 40 pounds of dirty laundry later, we’re back home and doing a reasonable job of fighting jet lag. I have untold numbers of photos to organize and sort, which I’m hoping to do sooner rather than later. Classes kick off on January 17 and I’ve got two meetings to prepare for before then, so I’ll have to kick it into high gear as soon as I am more with it. Since coming back home a few days ago, we have vanquished the laundry, done some grocery shopping, seen a movie (Sherlock Holmes 2 — couldn’t resist), and frequently commented on how weird and good it is to be back at home. We took some great Thai cooking courses while we were in Chiang Mai and are looking forward to reproducing the recipes we made (real, delicious pad thai, spring rolls, hand-pounded curry, etc.), but since our fantastic lunch in Seoul (long layover in Incheon meant that we had time for some exploring and eating in the city of my birth!), I have been having a violent craving for more Korean food. Although I love and newly appreciate Indian food (while I liked Indian food just fine prior to this trip, we were discovered some *seriously* good food in India), and of course I love Thai food, having Indian and Thai food for five weeks straight has fatigued my taste buds a bit. So that has to be handled pronto (I’m thinking of cooking galbijjim, braised short ribs in a sweet/savory sauce, and bindatteok, fried mung bean pancakes, since I haven’t had a chance to make any Korean new year food yet).

Some people have asked me what the best part of the trip was, and I really can’t say that one part/moment stood above all others. In my mind, the five weeks comprise a mosaic of sounds, smells, tastes, sights, of travel via train, plane, automobile, elephant, ox cart, rickshaw, bamboo raft, longboat, and tuk tuk. India was beautiful, overwhelming, disgusting, amazing, and heart-stopping. Seeing the Taj Mahal for the first time was certainly one heart-stopping moment, but our insane rickshaw bicycle rides through the holy city of Varanasi were certainly 30-minute heart-stopping moments as well (as fun as they were terrifying). Nepal was a strange and startling mixture of rural beauty, amazing buildings (stupas and durbars galore), and polluted, clogged city streets. And after the awesome madness of India and Nepal, Thailand felt like a haven. It was our third trip to Thailand in four years, and we were very comfortable navigating Bangkok and really happy to explore a fun new city, Chiang Mai, in the north. We spent each of our 35 days “doing things,” and this non-stop flurry of activity has left us exhausted and sort of limp, but happy as well.

Enough rambling for now but more soon (isn’t that a scintillating promise?). I wish all of you a happy, healthy, and successful 2012!

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Ok, folks. The past two weeks were insane. Three papers were knocked out. A 40-minute presentation was done. A position paper was turned in. We had ribs for Thanksgiving. I glazed some pretty neat stuff at the ceramics studio. We’re packed for our 5 weeks in India, Nepal, and Thailand in two manageable suitcases. And I am SO READY TO SLEEP ON THE PLANE.

I doubt I’ll be posting here while we’re away (only bringing iPad for minimal connectivity, photo uploading, and e-reading), but I will no doubt have a lot of things to share when we return!

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This is one of our favorite shots from our wedding anniversary shoot at the Presidio, taken a few weeks ago by the very talented Jennifer Michelson of A Girl and A Camera Photography. Our shoot was scheduled at 6pm for the nice golden lighting, but dusk meant TONS of mosquitoes! Glad you can’t tell in the pictures, but I was freaking out! I escaped with one bite, which is pretty amazing considering the swarms present. Yick.

Anyhoo, this is what (almost) 11 years of marriage looks like in our household! I can’t say that I will encourage our kids to elope at age 21 (and I’ll probably wait to tell them the story that begins with, “Well, I had about two Long Island Iced Teas in me and one in my hand when I met your dad at Dino’s …”), but it’s been a pretty amazing decade and change, and I wouldn’t alter a thing.

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It went from being 80 degrees last week to 55 and rainy. Hmm. I guess the Bay area rainy season is upon us. It’s actually a nice change; the cooler temps remind me that it is, in fact, fall.

Life is good but crazy busy (what else is new). Research for the book chapter is coming along, I’m gearing up for final-paper-writing mode (starting this weekend, actually — sigh), and it is just awesome to have Dan home! Our bookcases and other Bahrain-acquired things arrived this past Monday, and we FINALLY got everything set up in our office. There are a few odds and ends that need tending to still, but I’ll post pictures as soon as I can. We got rid of the guest bed, the gnarly IKEA office furniture, and the collapsible bookshelves (yay, Craigslist!), and we moved some things from the living room to the office and got a big, awesome desk that allows us to work on opposite sides at the same time. It’s nice to be clicking away companionably together.

Our India visas came in yesterday, and we are leaving in less than a month! Crazy. So much to do before then, which is a little distressing, but I have to keep telling myself that it will all get done. Since the next several weekends before we leave will be crazy, we celebrated my birthday a little early by going up to Mendocino last weekend. Hiking on the coast + brewery goodness + sea glass hunting + good grub = pretty awesome weekend. We stayed at MacCullum House Inn, a terrific bed and breakfast on the cute little main drag. The MacCullum House Restaurant is well reviewed, and we decided to try the five-course tasting menu, which has gotten high praise. I’m glad we tried it, because it was pretty much to die for.

1) Grilled flatbread, caramelized onions, Camembert, Fuji apples, toasted walnuts
2) Pan seared day boat scallops crab; corn fritter, Dungeness crab bisque sauce
3) Pan seared Liberty Farm duck breast, duck confit; fromage blanc bread pudding, frisee, wild mushroom brandy sauce
Intermezzo: Muscat poached pear sorbet
4) Grilled Niman Ranch filet mignon encrusted in cacao nibs & black pepper, Yukon Gold potato & leek gratin, bacon, Dijon mustard sherry sauce
5) Chocolate budino with chipotle creme anglaise, candied hazelnut chocolate truffle chocolate; Cabernet cherry swirl ice cream

Yeah. To die for.

Here are my Mendocino pics from my Facebook album, if you’re curious.

Also, as a belated Happy Halloween gesture, here’s this terrific little video that makes me laugh and feel guilty as the same time. The two little guys at the end are especially awesome. I kind of hope we have a smart aleck kid. I think.

I Ate All Your Halloween Candy

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