Visibility and Women's Work

Since finding out our moving plans, I've had a bit of a blah.  Like emotionally just being relieved to have a direction, but not having the energy to do anything about it.  So we've made booze (basil vodka, steeped for two days--great with strawberry liqueur and a little ginger ale), and I've been thinking about my own position next year and the year after.

 I've never really thought explicitly about myself as someone who was defined by their job, but really, that's a big reason I'm in grad school.  My father is defined by his job and profoundly unhappy because of it; my mother defines herself (I think) much more as someone who paints, cooks, gardens, and mothers, and is happier for it.  Her job is important to her, but she's managed role shifts and job shifts within her career, and not been shaken by them, and that's always much more how I saw myself.

So I find myself a little adrift this summer trying to self-motivate towards research and writing, with the thought of picking up, moving, and self-motivating elsewhere for a year.  I'll teach in the fall, and I definitely don't see myself primarily as a teacher (although that is an important part of why I wanted to be an academic).  But this whole "you're done with coursework, go write a book!" thing with no road map leaves me feeling a little lost.

Changing Gears

Thank goodness my carefully curated interior design will not be disturbed.

The left hand finally figured out what the right hand is doing.  The granting organization which thought it wouldn't let us know until July has, with some gentle nudging from my department chair, director of graduate studies, and advisor, realized that they need to respect university deadlines, and let me know today that I got the grant.  Which is good!  It's only one day before the deadline for a lot of stuff, and about three months late for notifying my landlady about whether we're renewing our lease, so it means a lot of scrambling, but it also means that I came in with five years to finish my dissertation, and now I have six.  Considering I'll start Year Four this fall, that's good news.  And it lets us stay to finish our CSA and our garden.

When we thought that we wouldn't know until July, J and I started to make plans like we would both be moving at the end of his current contract in September.  We made plans about what to sell when (most of the furniture, mostly in August).  We started looking at the apartment markets in cities we're likely to move to.  So we've got all these plans in motion which need to be put off six months.  J's job in theater is mostly on an academic year schedule.  There's summer theater, and there's winter theater, and they more or less line up with the academic calendar neatly, which is great for us long term (It just worked out that way.  I had just gotten into grad school and he had just declared his theater major when we started dating, so we hadn't really thought about the long-term compatibility of our career choices).  There is no theater in Overcast during the winter, and jobs elsewhere start in September, so he's moving in September no matter when I move.  We did two years of long distance already; I'm not looking forward to another semester of it.

But.  Getting this grant puts me off the academic year calendar.  Our current lease is on the academic calendar, which makes dealing with the move in December or January pretty complicated.

ETA: There was originally a lot more whining about our lease situation and how terrible life is generally, etc, but after a. a trip to the farm to pick up our CSA share b. talking with a good friend on the way there and c. talking with the landlady about renewing our lease for the fall only (until Jan 1), life looks much better.  We're moving Jan 1.  We have a firm date.  J may move before then; we may be long distance between September and December, and we may not know yet where we're moving, but at least we have another six months or so to figure it out.

The questions we ask

I'm starting to think about the questions my dissertation asks, and the problem I see with the existing scholarship in my field is sometimes not that it answers important questions incorrectly, but that it asks the wrong questions.  Like a cat who likes to sit squished between both a window screen and a couch, the scholarship is awfully comfortable and doesn't want to go anywhere.  (Is that too much metaphor to put on one cat?  Sorry.  Had to work in the cat photo somehow).

I've been going round and round in trying to frame my dissertation, because I do find the way that the current scholarship answers the big questions to be wrong, but I also find the questions wrong in a way I couldn't articulate until recently.  Graduate education, or at least my graduate education, has focused on learning to engage with the terms of debate as they stand in the field.  There's nothing wrong with this; I think it's necessary to know how to engage a discussion as it stands in order to recognize your position in it and the limits of that debate's frame.  What it doesn't teach you is how to reframe the debate.  Some of the best scholarship does that, and while it may be overly ambitious for a dissertation project, at least in my subfield, the terms of debate are so broken and retrograde that I'm beginning to feel they're unusable for what I think my evidence is telling me.

Example:

Summer Goals

Monday was Memorial Day in the US; it's officially for reals summer here (90F helps prove it), so it's time to solidify summer research plans and other things.  On the slate for summer blogging plans:  Me Made June, the Summer Book Club, and Notorious/Another Damned Medivalist's Summer Writing Group.  I think I'm going to loosely tie the book club and the writing group together: my reading list (and book club related posting) is going to be heavy on sci fi/fantasy with a feminist angle, along with some more generalized posts on race, feminism, and material culture provoked by my more heavily theoretical reading for my writing project, a first draft of a dissertation chapter.  (omg)   A lot of what interests me about my dissertation topic is the systemic creation of the consumer culture we engage with now and the personal creation of identity through clothing; I hope the intersection of theoretical issues with consumerism and identity making might interest you as well.

In non-theoretical news, J and I spent the hottest day of the year (so far) biking and picnicing at Snooty U's arboretum.  By my conservative estimate, we biked around a thousand million miles, but J says it was more like ten.  Except for a broken shifter on my bike when we were almost home, it was basically one of the most perfect summer days you could ask for: homemade beer, at an empty park, eating fancy cheeses and warm strawberries with a nice boy.  More picnics are also on the summer to do list.  

Beer and Working from Home

Not a full beer post, but here's some pics from the bottling of our most recent beer.  Both me and J's families are full of medical professionals and engineers, so making beer is basically the only time we get to feel like scientists. The above photo is the post-fermentation measurement of the alcohol content: the floating thing is a hydrometer, which floats higher or lower depending on the density of the liquid.  The higher it floats, the denser the liquid, the higher the remaining sugar content.  Floating lower means more of the sugars have converted to alcohol. 

And here's our bottling set up.  The top jug is emptying into the bottom jug to mix the beer with the priming sugar (what gives the beer its carbonation after it's bottled) in a controlled way, but the priming sugar can be added straight to the first jug if you don't have a lot of glass jugs lying around.  (Which we do).  Mixing your beer with your priming sugar this way lets you get less of your dead yeast in your bottles. (See that pale layer in the jug on the chair?  That's about an inch of dead yeast sludge.  High in B vitamins, but gross tasting and looking).  

So why have I not been posting?  (The beer certainly hasn't needed any supervision).  I've made the transition to summer without making the transition to summer schedule.  This is the first summer in grad school that I haven't had a clear direction to point in: the first summer, I had a finite research project to work on, and the second summer I had exams to prep for.  This summer (and, let's be honest, basically since I finished my Master's exams) I've been at loose ends for a direction to go in.  Writing fellowship apps helped, because although I hated them, they were a direction to go.  This limbo (still haven't heard about where or when we're moving) certainly doesn't help, because I can't buy plane tickets for research trips six months from now if I don't know where we'll be 6 months from now.  That really shouldn't keep me from working on near-term goals, like going through photos from research trips I've already done, but that's so boring compared with planning trips to places I've never been.  

Which is all to say: working at home is hard, and snuggly cats don't help.  Pout.

Grading and Moving

The picture is of VERY early iris at the arboretum in Overcast; my iris at the house are up but not even budded (it's still tulip and daffodil season at home).  The arboretum is one of the things which has made me feel grounded in Overcast . . . it has been a place to go to figure out what's native, what's invasive, and what varieties will grow well here, so thinking about moving sometime in the next year, it feels sad to visit it.

This weekend was spent antiquing and plant-buying with my mother, so expect a few catch-up posts on that.  The next few days will be spent in a blur of grading and waiting in anticipation of news.  The deadline on the grant which will tell us the date of our move is this week, but as with all things academic. I'm not holding my breath that this will be done on time.  J is casting a wider geographic net in his job search, which I think makes us both feel better about our prospects for next year.  This week with my mother here has made me want to be back in Snowy State, but also made me realize that a year in Snowy State would mean very little research or writing.  Keep your fingers crossed for us this week . . . a no on the grant will mean a semester of pure research and writing, but a yes on the grant will mean an extra semester of support from my university.  A funny place to be in.

A Self-Stitched Easter

Just a quick note about the weekend.  The RTW muslin is in a place I'm happy with, the fashion fabric is partially cut out, and I had a productive research weekend.  You all have seen the outfit I'm wearing above; the shirt J is wearing is a shirt I finished literally Easter morning.  The construction turned out well, and J loves it, but I HATE the fabric.  It's some kind of poly blend (mystery thrift store fabric) that's got a weird silky hand, but J loves it.  And although I didn't do the MPB Negroni shirt sewalong, I definitely learned the value varying stitch lengths for different areas--I don't love this shirt because of the fabric, but I feel good about my work on it.

I didn't get the editing/writing done that I wanted to, because I ended up chasing about 140 years of footnotes, but I found the source of an annoying scholarly myth that's been bugging me for several years.  It's the sort of thing that doesn't even get cited anymore because everyone accepts it as true--everyone in the 19th century cited primary documents, so we'll cite the 19th century writers, and not examine their evidence.  

However, when you chase down the 19th century citations, all these writers are basing their arguments about both the 17th and 18th centuries on a single document written in 1689.  It's used as the sole source for the price of retail goods sold to Native people in French Canada and New York, and A. it was written in Paris by someone who had never been to North America, and B. the prices it quotes are way off base from the account books I've found for both French Canada and New York for the same period.  

It boggles my mind that no one has examined these numbers, because entire books rely on the assumption that this document is accurate.  I'm rolling around in my head how to write about the problem of relying on this document and why it's wrong without it being horribly boring, but I'm excited about the find.  And with the magic of the interwebs, I can find pretty much everyone who has either cited this document or someone who relies on other scholars who do.  

Have you had an exciting breakthrough lately, in work, sewing or something else?  I didn't accomplish my stated goal for the weekend, but I did accomplish something, and that made the weekend feel pretty productive.

That was quick

I love the pattern for this sweater--I've never really made a sweater for myself (except for one shrug/vest), because they seem like such a huge time commitment, but this went together so much faster than I expected that it gives me confidence to try a larger sweater pattern.  Although I've already started a second project with the same pattern in a different yarn with a different lace pattern, so a big sweater will have to wait.

The first picture is probably more representative of the actual color, but I wanted to show off the back lace detail.  I like this pattern because it has good spaces to play around with lace patterns which don't change the stitch count, and it goes so quick.  It's cast on from the neckline and worked down, with the sleeves worked separately when the underarm is reached.  The other reason I like this pattern so much is that it doesn't require seaming, which I hate.  The pattern as written calls for seaming the sides of the sleeves together, but I picked up a few stitches in the underarm and worked the sleeves in the round--seamless!  

It's a nice feeling to finish something when so much else is in limbo.  Besides the move, I feel kind of adrift in my research right now.  I had a direction before going to New York, both in planning the trip and because I had a colloquium (workshop) deadline to meet, and before that I had the fellowships to work on cranking out.  Part of the problem is summer--my first summer in grad school I had a finite research project to work on, and my second summer I had exams to prep for.  Now I have a master's and I'm supposedly qualified to figure out my own research direction (that masters supposedly qualifies me for a lot of things I don't feel prepared for, but that's another post).  

I've spent the weekend (and really, the last few weeks) kind of bouncing back and forth between transcribing/spreadsheeting what I already have, reading secondary sources, and trying to track down primary sources.  (Part of the problem with trying to write a dissertation which breaks old paradigms with new research and new sources is that you can't just raid old footnotes to find your sources).  My dissertation covers about 300 years, and I haven't got a clear chapter deadline to work towards.  

Knitting, sewing, and garden projects seem so much easier to start right now because they have definite start and end points, and gardening time comes up whether you're ready for it or not.  And the end of grad school (or at least my funding for it) will come up whether I'm ready for it or not, but I have to find some way to break the next few years without teaching or outside deadlines up into manageable chunks, because even right now, at the beginning of the gathering stage, I already feel overwhelmed by my sources.  Organizing my bibliography and primary sources helped make it feel more manageable, but cataloging it all isn't the same as finishing going through it.  Would that research projects could go together quickly and seamlessly.

On the Possibility of Being a Trailing Spouse

What you mean I got to move, two-legs?

All those fellowship rejection letters are rolling in (with a few yes-letters), and they've thrown my comfortable grad school routine of enroll-TA-complain out of order.  I didn't get the big fellowships I applied for, but I have gotten enough small ones to patch together a year of funding not dependant on being a TA.  Which would mean a year of research and writing as my full-time job (which is a thought terrifying by itself).

But Snooty U also requires that if you don't TA, you have to be at least 100 miles away from Overcast during your non-TAing semesters, and now requires a lease or some other proof of this (they didn't used to be so strict about it).  It's like an academic restraining order.  (Not to diminish the importance of real restraining orders).  But what it means is that the one place I cannot be is Overcast.

And since J has had a year of not working in his chosen field (theater) since there is no theater in Overcast, we've decided to look at moving some place that has both a large university and/or archives for me, and a large theater scene for J.  Those places have been narrowed down to Chicago and Brooklyn, but for a while we were looking at basically the entirety of the northern Midwest and the Northeast.  Terrifying.  My advisor Dr. Asiago has voted for Brooklyn, since my dissertation is New York centered and there are more archives there, but somehow the thought of moving out of Overcast not for a tenure-track job didn't occur to me.  Like I knew it was a possibility that I would go somewhere exciting for research like London or Paris (still in the list of possibilities) but the reality of moving somewhere kind of random half way through grad school didn't really sink in for me until all of these funding sources started to fall into place recently.  (I know, what a problem to have, right?)

The lovely Ethel Louise had a post up a while back about frogging graduate school--in a knitting metaphor, to rip out all the foolish things you did and redo it with knowledge of those foolish things.  It's not directly related to the possibility of temporarily being a trailing spouse, but it's been rolling around in my head thinking about where my life is going and whether I'd have made the choices I've made over again.  This moving thing has really given me pause, but I think it's more about the moving than about graduate school causing me to move.  I grew up living outside a town of less than 500, and went to school in a town of less than 5000, so the thought of living in Brooklyn or Chicago gave me a little panic attack when it went from "wouldn't it be cool if" to "the university says you have to be out of town by January 1."

And in a lot of ways, I'm fortunate in ways some trailing spouses aren't: our decision to move is going to be largely shaped by where I can work in archives, and the impetus to move is coming from my job and not J's.  So I guess this is all a long way of saying that the change in my situation has made me appreciate the uncertainty traveling spouses like AB deal with.

I've been kind of sitting on this post for a while because it's been hard to write.  And some of my funding is still uncertain, but as of now, it looks like we'll be in Overcast for the summer and fall, and moving (somewhere) in January.  I can't really bear the thought of deciding what of our stuff to sell and what to move right now, which is silly, but like I said in my post about gardening, this apartment feels like the closest to home right now because of the marks J and I have put on it together, and of course another apartment would have that eventually, but it's hard to think about right now.  Hopefully there will be a post soon about some happily finished knitting and sewing projects to make up for this downer.

On Making and Shopping, Craft and Art

Oh man.  The week in NYC totally defeated me.  Well, not totally, but since J was sick before we left, I got sick as soon as we got there.  Between the head cold and the freezing cold wind that descended on the city two days into our trip, it was just about all we could do to pick out restaurants close to our hotel.  As a sum total, the trip was really productive, and I got everything I went to the archive for and more, but we didn't end up doing as much sight seeing or photo-taking as I would have liked, because we were both so exhausted.

We did get to some touristy things, like the Brooklyn Art Museum, which had this awesome installation in a Beaux-Arts courtyard, in which all of the stately 19th century columns were wrapped with fabric over hoops to distort their classical proportions and lit from inside.  (More photos, including in-process photos and design sketches, at the link).  

We didn't get to the apparently awesome Armory red-and-white quilt show, because J's art major college roommate, who we were staying with, pooh-poohed it as "seizure inducing" and not real art.  Like "femininity isn't feminist" this "craft isn't real art" BS is old and tired, so why does it get dragged out by young and otherwise progressive people?  Friend was trained at the same SLAC as we were, in a radical philosophy but traditional methods art department, which I think points to the problem that craft and craft technique are still largely feminized and therefore undervalued. 

Like the awesome Japanese crocheted playground Hands Occupied (via Freshome) pointed to, installations like these show the potential in working with "craft" and domestic techniques on a monumental scale previously reserved for more high-art techniques.  Not that small-scale or homemade craft items don't stretch the boundaries of "craft" and "art," but I'm excited by these monumental installations because they expose more people to different definitions of high art.  And that's part of why I love and am excited by the craft/sewing/making community, because of the care people put into handmade items and the re-valuation of effort.  

Tiny dino provided for scale.  And yes, our house is full of toys.

Which makes shopping damn hard.  The air plant ball above, along with some art prints and another house plant, are the only things besides food which I bought in NYC, and here's why.  J has a hard time find RTW or thrifted clothes which fit him, because he's tall and lanky, and he doesn't like buying online before trying on in real life, so we did a lot of clothes shopping while we were in the city.  And despite all that shopping, I couldn't find a single thing that I wanted to buy.  Things I'd love to have, and things I'd love to make, but not buy.  I think my ideal vacation would be to take a sketchbook and camera and wander high-end clothing stores for a few days, but store owners might frown on that.  

Part of my own embrace of hand-made has been taking the fearful responsibility to say: "Yes, I made this."  I say fearful, because in making your own clothing, housewares, whatever, you are responsible not just for choosing from a limited selection for sale, but also for the details down to every last choice.  I used to agonize about wearing things I had made because all the flaws stood out to me, and because I feared being judged for having both poor taste and poor construction skills.  But there's a joy in that too.  A lot of my dissertation revolves around the idea that we all make choices about how we wish to position ourselves socially in the clothing we select, and in handmade that's taken so much further.  I find that the more involved I get in making my clothing, J's clothing, and things for our house, the more reluctant I am to buy something that isn't just right.  Part of that comes from being cheap to begin with, but more and more of my purchases are things that I can't make myself: plants, art pieces, raw materials, and consumables.  I don't know if that means moving towards handmade has reduced or just reoriented my commodity desire, but there it is.

Has your relation to handmade changed?  How has it affected your shopping?

Projects under construction

Sewing kitty is hard at work

Let's take a break from my political ranting, and get back to what really matters: sewing, grad school, and pictures of cats.  This week is shaping up to be very busy, in part because our department is bringing newly-admitted but not-yet-committed grad students for a visiting weekend, and I'm hosting one, hosting the department wide party for all of them + all the current grad students, and buying booze for said party.  Plus I've got a lot of my own projects floating around half finished.  

The first gratuitous cat picture up top is the fabric I'd like to use to recover our office chairs; this second one is their unfortunate current state.  Two chairs for a grand thrifted total of twenty bucks isn't bad, since the casters are really smooth and the frames of the chairs are both solid, but the upholstery is just terrible.  The ikat fabric up top is a good upholstery weight, and I don't think it'll pick up too much cat hair.

Speaking of reupholstering things, J and I are gearing up to reupholster our yellow velvet couch,  We've reupholstered armchairs before, including the green one here, but the couch is a much bigger commitment, and it has mock tufting.  The yellow velvet has really grown on me, but it's worn off in big patches all over and there's tears in the velvet where the stuffing is coming out.  I think we could get through it in a weekend, but it would mean being couchless for a weekend, and that's where we live most of the time.  And by we I mean my library books and I.

And I apologize for turning this into a cat blog, but short of J holding on to a struggling ball of unhappiness, there was no way to keep the cat out of the pictures today.  Wherever the camera went, he wanted to be, so that's where he is.  Illustrating the cat hair repellent qualities of the new fabrics or something.

So here's a picture with no cat in it:

Return of the Mannequin

Here's fellowship dress #2.  What's with all the slim skirts?  I don't own any other pencil skirts or slim skirted dresses; I don't know where these last two came from.  I also don't know where I'll ever wear this, since it's too heavy to be a summer dress, too sleeveless to be a fall dress, and too short to be a winter dress.  And I rarely wear anything short sleeved when I teach.  

Anyway, this is from the same pattern as the last fellowship dress, with the princess seams closed and turned into regular waist and bust darts.  I'm not totally happy with the dress, since it's WAY louder than what I usually wear, and it's lined with a bright blue that makes it feel a little cartoony to me.  I'm going to let it sit for a few days while I think about it/do some academic work for a change.  

Right now it's at that stage of the project that I was complaining about a while back with my State Capitol research--most of the way through, but not quite sure if it's going to be worth it on the other end.  I think part of the problem with this dress is that I'm happy it's stash busting (I have an entire dresser + full of fabric) and I like the look as an idea, but I'm not sure I'll wear it.

But maybe I can wear it to an archive or something--I just got my first acceptance letter for one of the fellowships I applied for, at an archive in southern California.  I've never been.  Maybe they wear sleeveless, heavy wool dresses in California?  I'm just so happy to have one that I'll wear whatever they tell me.  Two more of these short term ones and I can put off a semester of my grad school funding; if I get a big one I can take off a year.  That might be too much to hope for, though.

This is how we do

Very well read houseplants

V Day at chez Construction was very chill--work for J, class, microfilm and a workshop on archives note taking for me.  J's presents--two houseplants I've been waaaaanting for a long time--are up on the book shelf that gets the most light.  

Then lots and lots of delivery Thai food (fried tofu and fried bananas in the same meal?  Yes please!) and a good day was had by all.  There may be some Super Mario in the near future as well. 

The archival notes workshop was a lot of repetition of things I've found out myself the hard way, but two professors showed how they file things on their computers to keep track of them, and that's got me thinking about the mess that is my own system.  Which was a system before I started doing a lot of archival work, but is now a smoking pile of ruin and too many photos.  Dr. Asiago wants a detailed primary bibliography of everything I've worked on so far and everything I know about but haven't seen, and it's been a huge pain to put together because I haven't kept a running central list of everything I've looked at.  So I suppose there will soon be posts about shuffling research files around on my computer or something equally boring.

I've also got a meeting with him tomorrow that I'm sort of dreading about the prospectust that won't die--rather than reading the newest draft and OKing it, he "wants to talk about it."  Which means that there's probably another draft in the near future as well.

When is research worth it?

Scholarly cat thinks your research is good enough
to sit on, but that's all.

I'm slowly working my way through the State Capitol research photos to which we sacrificed a car.  They're very boring, individually.  My research looks at the material culture (clothing, houses, food, etc) of a Native American group from the 17th century through the mid 19th century, and what changes in material culture say about how the group views itself through time, since the documentary record is mostly written by white people about what white people thought about Indians.  The 19th century for this group is especially under-studied, and State Capitol Archives have a collection of documents that have literally only been accessed once since they were created in 1857.  Besides archivists, I am only the second person to look at these since they were written and put in boxes.  And there's a ton of them, over 600 individual records, all from the reservations I'm studying.

But they are sooooo boring individually.  They're forms, reporting individual losses of personal clothing and equipment during war service, which makes them perfect for my project and not very useful for anyone else.  They're also interesting in that they report the veteran's date of death and age at death, which is hard to come by in the early 19th century for any Native group, and they have signatures of the veteran or heir when literate, so these records are an interesting index of literacy.  (I also study the intersection of material culture and education).  But they're forms, so except with small variations of place, the individual differences are sometimes just the name and maybe a 50 cent difference in the price of a piece of clothing.

I love me some digital quantitative analysis, so I've been entering all of these forms into a spreadsheet so that I can go through later and click some buttons and find the averages, means, and all those good meaningful patterns.  This has worked out good before: I work with a lot of merchants' account books, which get passed over because they're mostly lists of prices and quantities, but some interesting patterns come out when you can see what type of person is buying what type of thing.  And that's hard to do without a computer to tell you, so I've gone through several hand written account books, written before double-entry bookkeeping (so they're all crazzy with notes about things everywhere), digitized them, and found really interesting things.  One in particular is so good that it's probably going to be a dissertation chapter all by itself.  But the process of entering the info into spreadsheets is soooo booooorrrinnnng.  I work for about five hours today, with some snack/internet/cat breaks, and only got through 150 of these forms.  And there are about 400 left.

So I'm in this place right now where the act of research sucks.  The archival part is fun: I get to discover things that no one has seen forever, and decide if it's important to my project.  The end of the digitizing is fun, because I finally get to see the patterns shake out.  But right now I'm trudging through something that I think (hope?) will end up being significant enough to form the basis of a chapter, but I have no way of knowing.  With humanities departments being shut down, and the humanities job market what it always has been (bad) it's depressing to think of this work as going nowhere fast.

To the archives!

After last night's car drama, J and I bussed to the archive today, and we're back on track for the stress of doing research travel with a spouse.  This involved a brisk walk across a lot of partially plowed imperial plazas and side walks in State Capitol, which was probably the most pleasant part of the day.  

Most of my stress surrounding this trip (pre car drama) was in the planning: I have a lot of flexibility in leaving Overcast City for research travel, because I'm only locked in to teach one day a week.  I'm TAing, so I can miss lecture the rest of the week and it's not too big of a deal.  J, on the other hand, works retail, and has neither regular nor back-to-back days off.  I originally had a four-day research extravaganza planned, because like all good research trips, my last trip to State Archives ended with me stumbling onto an amazing collection of records which no one has worked with before, and which the archivist told me I wouldn't be interested in or find helpful.  They are, in fact, actually what I need for the last chapter of my dissertation, and I found them literally a half hour before leaving the archive last time.

This post is dedicated to

Just a regular evening, "hiding" in the couch.

J, and Kyle, the tow truck driver who rescued us from freezing to death in rural Cloudy State and gave us a scenic tour of State Capitol while driving us to a repair shop.

This post was going to be about the stress of planning for a research trip with partner in tow (no pun intended), but now it's about the stress of having a minor single car accident during a research trip. I am ok, J is ok, we didn't really nearly freeze to death. What we did do is decide to try to leave Cloudy City for State Capitol before Snowmageddon '11 was supposed to start, and spun out into a guard rail on the interstate without hitting any other cars. We broke a headlight, a turn signal, most of the front passenger corner, and probably the radiator. At any rate, when started back up, the engine runs but belches a lot of anti-freeze smelling steam/smoke, makes horrible noises, and spills antifreeze everywhere.

We have AAA, who called a tow truck for us, but because we decided to drive in Snowmageddon '11, there were a lot of other people who needed tow trucks also, and we had to wait for two hours for ours. But at least that gave us time to call J's sister and have her look up the best-reviewed mechanics in State Capitol on the interwebs, for us to call them, and find one that had space to look at the car tomorrow. Right now the plan is to see if they can make it safe to drive so we can be back in Cloudy City by Friday (both J and I are scheduled to work), rent a car to get to the state archive in the mean time, and if it's not, arrange to drive the rental car back to Cloudy City and come back for the broken car later. It may get sold or scrapped once it's repaired-ish. We're not sure about that, it depends on how much the repairs get quoted as.

So far the cost of repairs, towing, etc, is not going to break our budget. I got a very generous research grant to look at collections at this archive, and we've been very frugal with the hotel and other expenses, so my research grant will probably cover the accident and our hotel and rental car, maybe with a little bit out of pocket. Of course, I can't report that the research grant money was spent on the car repair, but it makes me feel better to think about it as replacement of the money spent on the very foolish car accident.

So that's why there's a picture of our cat sitting with his head in our couch. It's a cat blogging kind of day.  At least today will make a good anecdote on the dedications page when my dissertation gets published