I survived the first…

I survived the first parenting day without Kevin, although to be fair, he was here until 2. After he hit the road (a four-hour drive to Indiana), I pretty much did nothing except watch teen dramas (multiple episodes of One Tree Hill, The O.C., and 90210) and take care of Kavi. She's asleep now, clean, fed, and hopefully ready to sleep for at least six solid hours. I put her down almost an hour early because I was just so tired; running around after her and trying to keep her from killing herself or breaking things is a serious challenge. (New household items she discovered today: two tall glass floor vases holding reed-like things, now safely tucked away in a closet; a drawer full of napkin rings, deemed safe enough for playing with and dumping on the floor. Kavi also managed to get one of Ellie's pieces of kibble into her own mouth, when I didn't move fast enough to stop her. I got the piece out again, but it's still a good thing that we buy Ellie the healthy, human-grade, organic dog food. Sigh.)

Tomorrow, babysitting from 8:30 - 4:30, and I'm hoping I can actually finish my lit. syllabus; I made good progress on it yesterday. (It's not writing the syllabus that takes so long; it's re-reading all the books and essays you might want to squeeze into the course. Do I excerpt some of Seth's The Golden Gate? Which Rushdie essays do I want them to read? That kind of thing.) I want to add two more books to the syllabus; hopefully that'll be possible, since we won't be reading them for a few weeks. I think King-kok Cheung's anthology of essays will really help the students understand some of the issues around Asian-American literature. And although I waffled for a while, I think Bulosan's America is in the Heart is worth spending a week of the course on. Ten weeks! Tell me again how I can cover all of Asian-American literature in ten weeks??? (I'm of course not actually supposed to cover the field -- just introduce them to it. Breathe, Mary Anne, breathe...)

On the website front, I did convert some of the fiction pages as well as some poetry today. It's going to take an awfully long time to convert the whole site, at least if I do each file manually. It might be faster to do some kind of search and replace, but I'm actually finding it valuable looking at the pages; I keep finding things that are badly out of date (my Greektown address on one page, for example) or that could use editing/updating, either for content or tone. So, slow but steady. Also, Jed suggested a possible code fix for the column color problem; I didn't quite understand it, but maybe my brain will work better tomorrow. I did go ahead and make the main page live; it seemed a bit silly to have sub pages with the new design but not the top page. Exciting! (I did save the old main page, just in case.) Please feel free to start poking around and let me know if you run into any problems.

Going to bed now. I've locked all the doors and checked them twice. Not having Kevin here makes me feel a bit paranoid. I've lived alone before, and although I occasionally got scared then, it's somehow worse with Kavi in the house, since I don't just have to escape any bad guys, but have to find a way to protect her too. Much as I love Ellie, I don't think she'd be much help. Anyway, I'm being ridiculous, I know -- they'd have to get through the secure front door of the building and past several other apartments before any hypothetical bad guys even got to our locked doors. Still, I'm leaving the hallway light on. Just in case.

2 thoughts on “I survived the first…”

  1. I think everyone who grows up around dogs or cats ends up eating some of their food as a little kid, out of curiosity, and I’ve never heard of it being a problem. (I grew up with both dogs and cats, sampled both kinds of kibbles as a toddler, and remember thinking the cat food tasted better – which explains why dogs always try so hard to get at the cat food!)

  2. Wow! BIG changes 🙂

    Love the white space. Don’t like the green and blue–they’re too synthetic looking. Esp.in conjunction with the photos of you in color.

    The picture of you and Kavi is very aesthetically pleasing (and so sweet!!)–perhaps you could hire a professional shoot pictures of you for the banner? Or why not use the book covers for a banner? (mix up the photographic and sketch pictorials though…)

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