When the Brewers returned from the all-star break, I noted that Corey Hart must have visited his family. Josh wondered why I thought that, and I told him it was because Corey had recently shaved and had a haircut--sure signs in my mind that he had been around his mother.

Last weekend, after a day off, the Brewers were in San Francisco, and Josh noted that Corey's family lives in California and he must have been to see them. "Yeah, what makes you think that?" "Well," Josh said, "he shaved and got a haircut." True. The first since the all-star break.

I tried to find good pictures of Corey at his hairiest, but this was the best I could do for now:

Corey	Corey after he's been to see his mother.	Click.A slightly better picture of how Corey lets his blond, straw-like hair grow.	Click.My brother, who also lets his blond, straw-like hair grow until his mother (see photo) makes him cut it.	Click.A picture of Rickie Weeks and Bill Hall that I found while looking for Corey Hart pictures--just because they're cute. Rickie especially; he frequently looks sad and serious, here he just looks happy.

Being a teacher is like being a comedian or a major league pitcher. You prepare ahead of time, but no matter how well you prepare, once you stand on that mound or at that mike, you're either "on" and you nail it or "off" and people wonder who the hell thought you could tell jokes/pitch. Every lecture is a live performance. It's exhausting.

It's also part of what I like about being a teacher. I always thought I'd be a good actor, but acting is about pretty, and my gift is intelligence. So instead of trotting around on stage displaying my pretty, I trot around the front of the classroom displaying my intelligence.

The analogy between acting and teaching was strengthened when the college added my name and (gasp) picture to the LED marquees on either side of campus. Because my gift is not pretty, I've always had issues with getting my picture taken, but somewhere around the development of my 17th chin, I began to really abhor it. So to see myself, in all my many-chinned glory, on display for the whole community was a bit disturbing. But, it's as close as I'll ever get to being a rock star, so I guess I'll try to enjoy it while it lasts.

and students are beginning to drift by my office. Presumably they're my class. My first class of my new job, which begins in 10 minutes. I think I'm going to throw up.

The faculty and staff at BSC have been very welcoming to me. Everybody is very friendly, and some of the faculty have made a point of stopping by daily to see how I'm doing. Which is mostly okay.

Despite my earlier post about churches, I'm still surprised by the religious attitude. Oftentimes schools of higher education are beacons of secularity, but that doesn't seem to be so here. One faculty member introduced her self, and the second sentence out of her mouth was, "Have you found a church yet?" How do I respond to that? If I simply say "no," I get to hear about the pros and cons of all 213 congregations in the area, probably heavily weighted toward the speaker's own house of worship. If I am more direct and say that I'm not Christian (or Muslim, or anything else for that matter) I get classified as a heathen to be saved.

I was having a conversation with another staff member and she wanted to know if there was anything about living in Bluefield that she could help me with. I said that we hadn't really met anybody yet, and didn't know how we were going to, quickly appending that "we're not really church people." Her response was that that was too bad, because she was going to invite us to her church, because that was how she and her husband had met their friends.

Even as I was cleaning out the desk of the man I'm replacing, I was finding pamphlets and bulletins from a local presbyterian church. Not that I've never met religious physicists before, but it is fairly rare, and in my experience, most of them are Catholic (but I guess that could just be because I went to grad school at Notre Dame).

...is gone. Today I officially start work at Bluefield State College. Today is a faculty inservice day. I hope it helps me get my feet under me. Classes start Monday, which is good and bad: good because I have until Monday to prepare, bad because I have ONLY until Monday to prepare. I was hoping that moving here a month before classes started would give me plenty of time for preparation--and it did, in theory. It's just one of those things where there is always tomorrow, until there isn't. Well, wish me luck.

My grandmother has requested pictures of the new house. She wants something tangible, but it got me thinking that I should probably post some photos here.

The house sits atop a very steep incline. Or what this flatlander thinks of as very steep. I don't think the picture quite shows the steepness of the driveway. It's so steep that we often (less so now, but it in the beginning all the time) scrape underside of the car trying to get up the slope. The first thing I did at the house, even before the movers came with our stuff (that's another story) was do some gardening. There's a beautiful Rose of Sharon at the base of the drive that was just going into bloom. In the front of the house, there were some pink gladiolus in full bloom, but they were accompanied by a bug-eaten hosta (I hate hostas) and a bunch of weeds. There was also an abandoned side garden.

So I dug in (rather, Josh did), getting rid of the hosta and replacing it with some asian lilies, mexican heather, and rudbeckia. I put a sunset-yellow coneflower and some lavender and yellow-orange mums in the side garden. I converted the mailbox that was on the side of the house to a planter with some yellow mums, put some orange and purple dahlias and celosia in a long deck planter on the patio, and put a beautiful salmon hibiscus in an old concrete urn planter on the front landing.

The mailbox became a planter because 1) it's nicely decorative and 2) it was useless as a mailbox. Sometime in the last hundred years the mailman stopped coming up the drive to deliver mail. However, nobody had ever put a mailbox in at the bottom of the drive, where the mailman will deliver mail. So putting in a new mailbox was one of Josh's first projects. Around here, you dig about 3 inches and hit solid rock, so the mailbox isn't set particularly deep, and it's a bit wobbly, but the mailman will put mail in it (hint, hint) so we're happy.


The house itself was built in--I don't know, the stone age? In addition to the living room and kitchen, it has three bedrooms and "two" baths. The bath situation is a little weird. There's one main bath, fully functional, with a shower-tub. Then in the largest of the bedrooms, there's the pink bathroom. Outfitted completely in pink tiles and fixtures, it's a little closet bathroom with a small tub. The tub, however, is connected only to the hot water supply, so it's not particularly useful.

The basement "bathroom" is little more than a toilet and a sink in the corner. It is in a little room, but that room has no door, so privacy is an issue. Here again, it seems that only the hot water is connected (well, I haven't checked the water in the toilet, but the sink only runs hot).

There are three bedrooms: two smaller ones and a larger one. We selected one of the smaller ones to be our bedroom, and the other small one is set up as an office. The large one is a storage/work/guest room. It has a small closet that we have designated the tool closet, and a very large walk-in where I am keeping all of my crafty crap. Typically the room will be set up with a work table so I can do my sewing or whatever, but right now we've got it set up as a guest room with our elevated air mattress as the bed.

In addition to all this space, we have a tuck-under garage and a basement. The garage is a 1-seater, but that's okay as we've reduced our ownership to one car. The basement has 2 large rooms and some smaller ones, but most of it is filled with student desks from the college. Josh and I estimate that there are about 300 of them. So our usable room has been minimized. We did, however find enough space for a washer and dryer, and have some additional storage.

Overall, we're happy with the place. The decor is a little iffy, but things are pretty functional. We had hoped to spend less than a year here, so we could buy a place and I could have a garden, but it seems that I'll have enough garden space here to "take the edge off," and it's ridiculously cheap, so we might stay a few years.

That's the ratio of churches to bars in the local phone book.

That's a lot of churches, though not as wildly disproportionate to what I'm used to as I first thought. Where I grew up, there are 6 churches serving a population of about 2300. That's just over 380 people/church. Now if you take all the people in Mercer County, and add in the population of Bluefield, VA (I did this because the phone book includes nearby cities), then divide by the number of churches in the phone book, you get about 320. Alternately, I can limit myself to churches in Bluefield, WV and use that population, in which case I get about 160 people/church. So the difference between here and where I grew up, in number of churches per capita, is at most a factor of 2 or so.

Where the real difference lies is in the ratio of churches to bars. In my hometown, there are 3 bars in the same area as the 6 churches, giving a nice even ratio of 2:1. Here in Bluefield, that ratio is 36:1, meaning there are disproportionately fewer bars here than what I'm used to.

Why is this a big deal to me? I haven't barhopped in years.

First, a dearth of bars means an extreme dearth of sports bars, so where am I going to go to watch the Vikings?

Second, it points toward the fact that many of the people around here do their socializing through church. And while I'm sure I'd meet a lot of good, well-souled people at a church, I just really don't care to socialize with the religiously-motivated. So the tough job of meeting people and making friends in this new life of ours becomes all the more difficult.

A season-ending injury for Tony Graffanino meant that the Brewers were allowed to bring Rickie Weeks back up from the minors, even though he hadn't spent the mandatory 10 days off the roster. I was hoping that his trip down to the minors to work on his hitting (and work on it he did, hitting .500 for the week) would rid him of the habit of wiggling his bat that he picked up while on the DL earlier this season. The story of the wiggle is that Rickie's bat is so fast, it somehow caused the wrist injury that required surgery last year and was inflamed enough this year to send him to the DL. So in order to protect his wrist, he needed to slow down his bat, and he did this by adding the wiggle. Now, in the time between coming off the DL and his trip to AAA, his batting average was miserable. So miserable, in fact, that it earned him the trip to the minors. I was hoping this meant someone decided that the wiggle wasn't working. Definitely not. In Rickie's return last night against the Astros, he still had the wiggle. And not only did he still have the wiggle, but Prince was wiggling too! I didn't notice it when Prince hit his 446-foot home run, but later in the game, it was definitely there. Not what I wanted to see. At all.

In addition to purchasing air conditioning, Josh and I have purchased our first major appliances--a washer and dryer set. There's nothing like buying appliances to make you realize you're an adult, except maybe for calling repairmen to fix those appliances. Our dryer went belly-up before it finished its first load, so we had the repairman out to look at it. The problem turned out to be with the not-so-smart wiring of this house, but that's not the point. The point is that even though I'm approaching my mid-thirties and married, even though I just sold the first home I owned, even though I've been on my own for approaching 15 years, sometimes I'm struck by the fact that I'm an adult. Let me rephrase--I'm struck by the fact that I'm a grown-up. Grown-ups are different from adults in that an adult is someone who can vote and drink, even though he may live with his parents, or share a run-down apartment with three of his friends and subsist on pizza and sugary cereals. A grown-up is someone kids look at and put in the same class as their parents. He's a person with responsibilities, a person who eats vegetables even though his mother isn't looking and gets to bed at a reasonable hour. Adulthood comes with age, grownup-hood comes with knowledge. Perhaps I can best illustrate what I mean by recounting my very first "crap, I'm a grown-up" moment. It happened better than a decade ago already, while I was in college. I was living off-campus in a house with three other women--I was already very much an adult. One stormy day the tornado siren blew, and I was left wondering what to do. I had always been told to go to the basement during tornadoes, and we had a basement. But was it a real tornado, or just a warning? How serious of a situation was it? Up until that moment, I had always had a grown-up to tell me what to do. Many were the nights that Mom and Dad hauled us out of bed and into the basement to wait out a storm. In the dorms there was always an RA to tell us whether we should worry or if it was okay to ignore it. How did those people know what to do? In my mind, these are the situations that separate the grown-ups from the adults. It's like the old saying, anyone can be a father, but it takes a man to be a dad. Anyone can be an adult, but it takes something else to be a grown-up.

You may remember from earlier posts (June 2005, June 2006) that I've developed very maternal feelings for two of the Brewers' infielders, Ricky Weeks (who has, sadly, been having so much trouble at the plate that he was sent back to AAA) and Prince Fielder. Prince is the son of Cecil Fielder, and so he grew up in baseball. He also apparently grew up on TV. Josh (or more likely, one of his online baseball buddies) discovered an old McDonald's commercial on YouTube. The video is grainy, and in the section where Prince looks most like his current self, half his face is obliterated, but it was still fun to watch (numerous times).

I've broken down and bought an air conditioner. This probably seems like a weird place for me to start after a good three months of not blogging, a new job and a move to what is practically a new country. I need to start someplace, and if I don't start simple, I won't start at all. So Bluefield, WV is heavily advertised as "nature's air-conditioned city." Because of this, man has introduced very little of his own air conditioning. That's fine, until you get a couple of weeks of 90-degree weather, and even the coolest cats begin to wilt a bit. For someone like me, who hits "wilt" at about 75° and is well beyond "melt" when it hits 90°, it has been a distinct challenge. I had been doing my best to keep cool the way I learned as a child--open up the house at night, close it down in the morning--but when the forecast came up with lows in the mid-seventies for the next week, I broke down. The solution was fairly easy, and not too expensive. I wish I could do similarly for my work office. It's on the third floor of a non-A/C building, and has no windows or air vents. Literally, the only opportunity for ventilation is the door, which opens up into a very warm hallway. The office manager told me that in an attempt to keep down the temp, a lot of faculty bring in a desk lamp so they don't have to turn on the over head lights. Fantastic.