Kids Part 2: DLF

I have a brother, RLF, who I envied as a child because he was best friends with Pete Maravich.  Our dad was a basketball coach and would open up the gym at the old [new, RLF says]BDHS to let basketball players practice who were visiting and needed donde.  Pistol Pete came to town and at least RLF got to shoot hoops with him (I'm not sure about LEF) [RLF called with corrections: he says that our brother also shot baskets.]  Although this particular brother couldn't have been older than 6 (he will correct me, I'm sure--yes; he says he was in junior high), he somehow got so intimate with Maravich that he took to calling him "Pete," as if he'd known him forever.  This ability to form bonds with the rich and famous has apparently carried throughout his adult years, as RLF just sent a photo from his Blackberry documenting that he became best friends with Jeff Gordon during a business-related junket to Las Vegas.  RLF is on this trip with his second oldest son, DLF, who is along for the trip not only because he works for RLF (or vice versa...long story), but to visit people he knew when he went to college in Nevada and was a most excellent special teams kicker for U Nevada-Reno.  So now he's a most excellent  worker at his family legacy business, and also engaged in various training exercises that will serve him should the economy lighten up and allow a fire station to hire him.  He's good at what he does now, but he'd rather be doing this.  Besides--he looks pretty good in the uniform:

RECIPE: Banana Double Chocolate Chip Cupcake Muffins

Put oven at 350 degrees.  Find some over the hill bananas.

Load a muffin tin with 12 cupcake paper or foil thingies

Put into a bowl and blend until smooth:
3 ripe bananas
1/3 cup vegetable oil
l/2 cup granulated sugar

Add:
 1 egg.  Blend a little more

Add:
1 tsp baking soda
l/2 tsp salt
l/4 tsp baking powder
l/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
-- blend a little

Add:
l and  l/2 cups flour.  Blend until wet.

Final addition:  l cup chocolate chips.

Spoon into muffin pan.  Bake about 23 minutes. 

I have made this recipe so often that it's one of the few I have memorized.  It originally came from Donna Brocken, Kingfisher, Oklahoma, and was published on page 102 in Taste of Home Annual Recipes 1998. Cathy Pohl, Executive Editor.  Greendale WI:  Reiman Publications.

Further disclosure:  I ate the one missing from the photo...

ACHOO! I Love You!

BD is plowing snow with "Rick's Jeep," our 1972 Toyota Landcruiser fixed with a blade.  I finished baking a couple of things for this evening's posole party, a very small event organized so that my administrator friend can come and chill out following a hairy budget meeting that is going on right now at the college.  Ugh.  We still should shovel snow from the shed roofs so that an unpleasant incident won't occur that would result in flattening all the equipment, bikes, etc. squirreled inside the old wooden structures.  I was up there the other day when BD was teaching and realized that if I fell (highly likely, considering the giant boots sliding like bear paws) I had no cell phone on my person to call the medics.  Hmn.  So instead of climbing up there now I should just clean a pit of a house if the guests are going to have a place to sit down. My mom was supposed to go on a little tour of New York City this week, but it was cancelled due to snow.  Bummer, because she would have definitely bought me something good.  LBSF is a pretty impressive woman, and not just because she's my mother (and not just because she's one of 3 people reading this blog...).  We'll get to her life story later when I track down some photos.  In the meantime, just know that she's one of those people who you know loves you although she doesn't say it every five seconds.  This topic--saying "I love you," or "love you," Turrette's fashion when closing every single conversation--came up in yesterday's history of anthropology class discussion as we mused over what a Durkheimeo-Maussian "social fact" might be.  One student suggested that saying "bless you" after someone sneezes is not just a Tylorian "survival" but an actual superorganic social fact that is somehow connected to the idea of "the gift."  I said I didn't know about that, but that it reminded me of how saying "I love you" has been expanded (and reduced) to a sort of a "gesundheit" that one is increasingly expected to utter before hanging up.  Wonder what the girls think about this...we'll find out this afternoon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8hk9pUtVwA

Road trip to Cortez

I don't teach on Tuesdays, but there are always a million things to do.  Today I drove to the Cortez Cultural Center to talk about the Four Corners Lecture Series.  It's kind of cool to spend time with people who know next to nothing about the college and who are long-time employees of Mesa Verde National Park, the BLM, and Crow Canyon. I brought banana/chocolate chip muffins and added my 2 cents where I could.  For the past two years I've chosen a student to make the poster, but the college being broke and all, we're paying a guy with a delightful Jersey accent and an excellent sense of style to do the job. 

After we'd done all we could do and I handed out more muffins ("I'm late, but I baked" was my opener, as I always miscalculate how long it takes to drive over there, especially when I stop at Upper East Side for a bagel on the way and the barista is a trainee who takes some time to get my drink...).  I left wondering, "Hmn.  Where should I shop and what should I eat now," so I headed to Notah Dineh to roam around, buy some sweet grass braids and brass bells to take to Ecuador, and looked at all the stuff I can't afford.  I had made everyone at the table in the Cortez Center laugh when I asked where the Target, Macy's, and Bloomingdale's was located.  Someone said, "I think the Navajo for Bloomingdale's is 'Notah Dineh," which gave me the idea to go there.

kids, part 1: RWF

In HBO's "Big Love" last night Nikki has an outburst about babies: "Babies babies babies, I'm sick of hearing about babies!"  Her reasons are linked to her position as one of three wives who has reproduced less often than have the others.  I used to feel like her, but when I add up all the kids in my life I come up with quite a list, each of them extremely interesting and friend-worthy, even if they weren't my "relatives."  I will go into detail regarding all of them sometime in the course of this blogging experiment, but I'll start with R Dub right now, with whom I talked at length the other day from his less-than-groovy position in Camp Kick Our Ass in A Bunch of Damn Palms, California.  He was a little down that day, as his request to deploy to Afghanistan with some of his brothers had been turned down so that he might do something else for the Marines for the next three years outside of (shudder) Pensacola.  He has a wife and a new puppy and a Harley and lives in San Diego, which is almost paradise.  Now he has to move to (shudder) Florida.  The family is relieved that he isn't being sent to more dangerous climes, but I understand his moving and separation angst.  He's learning a lot of really valuable (and employ-able) skills now, and college is in his consciousness.  Babies, babies, babies: Why do they send babies to war, is what I would like to know.

Last Friday it snowed and snowed some more.  The college's Board of Trustees met at 8:30 a.m.  I got there early for a good seat and a mug of coffee.  The first order of business after approving minutes was to ask for public comment.  TJ, a Tlingit/Athapaskan student stepped to the podium, introduced herself in Tlingit, and read a document prepared by the Buffalo Council, a new student organization.  The document asked that the Board of Trustees put even more effort than it has into securing trustee rights over the Old Fort Lewis property, which is currently held by the Colorado Land Board and is threatened with division and access by private interests.  She and two of her fellow Council members spoke impressively to the Board, not backing down, and asking for follow up confirmation to their points.  When this ended, and after I heard representatives of the Faculty Advocacy Committee speak about their concerns regarding the way faculty are paid 83% of the national average while the administration receives 106%, I walked through the snow to the new biology building to take part in its blessing by a Navajo singer.

I have my first followers!!

You might know they (you) would be my BFF KLC and my LB LEF.  (I'm not into revealing identities yet--perhaps never).  BD is shoveling while I do this, so I do feel guilty.  In the meantime, my NDC (next door colleague) and I have come up with a review sheet for student papers that allows us to comment on nonexistent English mastery but not be tempted to serve as students' private editors.  I need to post a picture to thank my new followers for slogging through this blog which may last only this day....

Hydroponic rocoto peppers

My BP (best pal) JPL gave me one of them there hydroponic grower thingies for the holidays.  My BP JSI gave me some Peruvian rocoto pepper seeds last time BD and I visited J&J in Chimayo.  The seeds are now growing hydroponically, but for how long?  The hydroponic info says whole plants with fruits etc. can grow, but I find that hard to fathom.  I'll let this go on for awhile longer before I take it apart and put the peppers into pots for placement in the cantina.

Why can't/won't students learn to write?

While I am worrying about writing content, I realize that I am procrastinating actually reading my students' work for some reason. Now I know the reason, which was "reminded to me" a moment ago by a colleague who would tear his hair out if he could over the extremely poor grasp his students have of the English language. It is getting worse, or maybe we're just sicker of it, but college students rarely know how to write. This says to me that they don't do much reading, either. He wants to know if we should make the second tier of Composition a prerequisite for all junior- and senior-level classes. I know, however, that even that won't work, as they don't seem to teach to grammar and syntax any longer anywhere. We'd likely be out of business, as even more students would head for classes that have no COMP requirements. Is this the decline of civilization, or is this the way English has always rolled with the punches?

RECIPE Oven-Puffed Pancake

I think this was from the March 2001 Cooking Light, but as I tore out the recipe I'm not positive what cooking journal it was from.  It is really yummy and easy.  Fresh-squeezed juice and bacon make it perfect.

TURN ON OVEN FIRST: 425 degrees (the oven needs to be ready to go as the rest of this takes no time at all)

Mix until wet:

1/2 cup flour (lightly filled....)
2 Tbsp sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup nonfat milk (probably any kind would work)
1 egg
1 egg white

Melt in cast-iron skillet:

1 Tbsp butter

Add batter.  Cook on med-low 1 minute.  DO NOT STIR.

Put skillet into oven for about 18 minutes.

Serve with butter, confectioner's sugar, fruit, syrup, whatever...

living in a glacier

I wasn't exaggerating about the snow. Seriously, I need to get out there with a shovel. But this looks a lot like how things feel these days. The college is drowning under anxiety and anger. Excesses of empathy accompany a shocking surfeit of empathy. Members of the faculty who have never bothered to learn anything about administration look silly, while the administrators who have amnesia regarding their former faculty lives look bloated. Nothing has happened yet that warrants the expressions of sympathy that are sure to sound insincere. No one has been fired. No one has had anything happen at all. There is a sickening calm about things. Searches for new faculty members proceed as if it's business as usual. The silence is deafening. The snow keeps falling, burying light.

writing against writing against culture

There is a lot of work to do. I love the work to do, but there is a lot of it. I am sent papers from journals I have never heard of for critical review. Most of them, oddly enough, relate to issues of repatriation and cultural property and archaeology. After all these years, what I do in Ecuador takes an appropriate back seat to this other work. Currently awaiting my attention: a book ms. about the Incas for Pluto Press, an article on Australian repatriation for the J of Material Culture, a book on dance in Mexico City for Choice, and an article on physical anthropology and cultural affiliation for the review of political and legal anthropology. A student waits for a recommendation for graduate school, while a roomful of students wait for me to read their essays (a total of 60, they each wrote two). In one of my classes we have been talking about anthropologists and their writing and their audiences. Writing against writing (the old ways); writing against culture (the old idea). For whom do I write now? I have piles of blank journals gifted to me by others and my fountain pens of all colors roll around their ink bottles and plastic refills on a table. It was the dreams that woke me up, saying 'the pen and paper is not enough.' Perhaps death is a factor in this, another visitor to the dreams. Here comes the snow again...

eagle

Eagles and hawks patrol the river. I mostly live indoors with the books and papers and piles, but when I go out I see the raptors seeing me. I'm hoping for some inspiration from them, but they have better things to do. I sent the picture around, which got my brother to evoke the kitty's name and DB to ask for the white feathers should I get within wrassling range. I wonder where he is today, the guy in the tree.

Ponderosa snow

It started last night with the dreams. I would bet that's how many blogs begin. Piles that need sorting, describing, holding on to so as to let go. It was also the snowfall. Moments ago I saw it coming through the ponderosa pines on the river, falling to the chokecherry bushes below. Then the sliding sound off the roof, and the only snow to be seen is climbing up the window in piles, pushing into the room. The dreams were about DA--sand through the fingers. Projects written and started and finished, moving across worlds--Andes, Gaza. Here comes the sound again--heavy snow sliding down the propanel, looking for a place to land. The room is darker now. A shovel.