Plan for today -- new babysitter Adriana comes today. She seems so young (22, I think), that it makes me a bit nervous leaving the kids with her. But she apparently did just fine watching them while I was at the conference yesterday. Hopefully today will go well too. She'll be here from 8-12, and my plan for the morning is to intersperse a bunch of computer-related work (some design stuff for house, some publicity / events planning for ASAM) with cleaning up and running errands, like going to the winter farmer's market at St. Giles church (1025 Columbian, 9-1), and checking out how the tree removal process is going at the house.
There's been some drama already with the tree removal, but I'm going to save that for a separate entry.
The conference was good yesterday, especially two brilliant talks by my colleague Helen Jun ("Neoliberalism and Asian American Racialization") -- I'm really looking forward to her upcoming book now -- and by Anwen Tormey from U of C ("The Jurisprudence of Doubt: Left Legalism, Abject Subjects, and the Depoliticization of Asylum in Ireland"). Helen's talk convinced me that I HAVE to see the film Better Luck Tomorrow sometime soon (when I do, I will tell you all about it). And as someone with relatives who have gone through the asylum process (in Canada, bless you Canadians), I was fascinated to hear how it's playing out in post-colonial Ireland. (The answer: not good, in a variety of unsettling ways. Although of course, still way, way better than in the U.S. Sigh.) Anwen and I made plans to meet up sometime soon, and I'm really looking forward to it. We have books to loan each other -- and here's the hilarious thing: at one point, I tried to learn Gaelic (failed, but I bought the tapes and made a serious effort). And she actually did learn Tamil! How cool is that?
Now I'm going to go pump some air into my bike tires. Sometime today -- bike ride! Light rain supposed to show up around late morning, so I'm just going to wait for it to warm up a little bit and then head out. (This is why even stay-at-home parents need some childcare at times; I could toss Kavi in the seat on the back of the bike (if I were more confident in my bicycling skills, anyway), but I couldn't manage Anand too.)