Add that to Lumper’s death and other family matters, and that’s why I wrote on Facebook: Dear September, I see you out there on the horizon. Please be less intense than August. Thanks! With that in mind, let’s shift to the many things in my life which, like my girls, are pleasantly intense:

• I am getting into a good rhythm for sabbatical leave. Each day last week, I did some research and writing, worked on the house, did a little busy work (like sorting old files), and enjoyed some family time. Yes.
• Being on sabbatical and still on campus is a little weird. The usual busy-ness is just a backdrop, not a force pushing me forward. I am not participant, only observer.
• Amelia’s first week of day care went extremely well. She’ll be in Horrabin thre days a week. When I dropped her off Wednesday, one of the student workers laughed, “Here comes the party!”
• Not surprisingly, Madelyn also had a fantastic week, though we had to hold her out Thursday because of pinkeye. She’s over that now (and hopefully I am too). This fall Madelyn will be in four days a week.
• Yesterday I ran 4.25 miles, alternating quarter-miles walking and half-miles running. This morning, none of the foot pain I was dealing with since mid-April. I still have two splinters in my right foot, and those spots hurt a little. But nothing else. My GP should take care of those in a week or so. Hopefully I will be able to continue to add miles and get back to regular running. I have missed it terribly. I’ll be keeping it slow and short for quite a while. No speed work until November, at the earliest.
• Our annual August home repair push, focused on our front and back porches, is almost complete. The front porch is finished, and we’ve got one finish coat left to do on the back porch. I’ll keep investing time in housework every week, but don’t plan any of the 12-hour days I booked in early August any time soon.
• Erin and I ate at Shiloh’s on Saturday, the restaurant which replaced Il Spazio. There were a few more glitches than we’d hoped for, but the food was quite good: I had blackened fish, and it was fresh, well-seasoned, and nicely presented. I hope they make it, given that Macomb continues to be restaurant-challenged.

And now back to that reading and writing.

A week ago Thursday, we finished the first trip of my sabbatical, our annual “School’s out, hit the road” adventure. The girls and I traveled to southern Utah, which I’ve been wanting to visit for years, visiting all the major parks: Zion, Bryce, Arches, Canyonlands, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. We flew to Vegas, rented a minivan, and drove our loop from there. Our trip was thirteen days, with a day of travel on each end, staying in hotels and rented apartments. Everything went well: no airline foolishness, the girls traveled well, we enjoyed hiking and sight-seeing, and most of the places to stay Erin picked were great. Bunches of pictures on Erin’s flickr, and bunches more to come.

What’s next? Not sure. I have a conference in July, and then a beer trip with Jeff and Thomas. The girls are going to Michigan with my in-laws while I’m gone. We have a short camping trip planned in early August; maybe we’ll tack a week or so on Lake Superior to the end of that.

Around the house, I’ve been doing a lot of miscellaneous work lately, much unplanned. Last week Erin spilled a half-gallon of milk in our Subaru. D’oh. I vacuumed out as much as possible with our wet-dry vac, then rented a carpet cleaner to do the rest. At least the spill was confined, for the most part, to the front seat. I decided to make the best of it and clean the whole car top to bottom, taking out the kids’ car seats and giving those a good scrubbing too. So far, so good: the car doesn’t smell bad at all, and nobody’s spilled anything in yet, either. More recent housework: find out what was jamming our disposer. The answer: a dime. I had to yank the disposer, but I got the dime out, and the disposer still works.

I also rounded up a bunch of electronics for disposal at our local recycling facility. This included a bunch of old hard drives. I formatted most of them with Darik’s Boot and Nuke. A couple more I couldn’t get to work required other means. That’s part of a larger, “must clean the basement” project which will surely continue.

Lots of rain here lately. Our strawberries fared poorly this year, with many rotting on the vine, but we still got a few good bowlfuls out. Not enough to make jam, though. The weeds in the garden are pretty crazy, as it hasn’t stopped raining long enough for us to do anything about them. Heck, I tried to mow on Saturday, and only got half the lawn done before rain started. Maybe I’ll get the rest done today. No tomatoes yet… plenty of greens, though, and surprisingly our lettuces are still tasty. We brought a bunch to a dinner party last night and were pleasantly surprised to find they weren’t bitter at all.

Now to continue reading and catching up on parenting and other things!

The sun set just after I arrived. Kelly (and Aiden) got there just before I did, and we walked around the garden together, munching and harvesting.

John always plants a few rows in curves. I love the contrast of the dried-out, dead crops with the crisp greens wandering along.

We can never get enough baby greens, especially when they’re this lovely.

So begins the garden’s sleep.

We have two pumpkins growing in a tree! (Closeup here.) About four vines volunteered from the compost pile, this year, and we let them grow. We got a volunteer butternut squash, a gourd, and several pumpkin vines. I hope they are sweet pumpkins: we have a bunch ripe and more green. On the other hand, our tomatoes are pretty much done–a little earlier than we expected–though our chard and kale are humming along nicely. It was a strange year for kitchen gardening.

Yesterday morning Erin and I ran the Tevar 5K, a benefit for a local breast cancer charity. I pushed the girls in the double stroller. Erin wanted to run under 10:00 pace; we got done in 30:45, or 9:54/mi. It was nice to run as a family. I was very pleased by the turnout. A few years ago, I ran the race and almost nobody was there. It was much better organized this time. About 150 runners and some walkers and bikers too.

After the race, we walked across the square to the farmers’ market. The growing season is winding down, but the Amish vendor we really like had beautiful stuff, as usual: sweet potatoes, carrots, peppers, green beans, and pumpkins. And the local meat vendor is selling pork now. Last night was the potluck at our CSA. Amazing food there, too, and fall greens are in full swing. We’ll keep eating veggies like crazy the next month or so.

Yesterday: rainy, breezy, cold. Today: sunny, cool, crisp. Yep, it’s fall.

Amelia really wants to stand up and walk. She’s pulling herself up on everything that will allow it: furniture, my legs, toys, the refrigerator, her sister (much to Madelyn’s chagrin). Even though she didn’t crawl until a few months after Madelyn, I won’t be surprised to see Amelia walking at about the same time (one year). And she’s really trying to talk, too, babbling like crazy and gesturing a lot too.

This summer I made the decision to avoid over-preparing for Fall courses. I’m afraid I overdid this, and ended up under-preparing. (Over not over is under. Right?) While I’m not behind, and things are going well in my classes, I’m not as far ahead of the game as I like to be. And my book order went in even later than usual. So this week, when book order information landed in my mailbox, I set aside some time to get Spring class preparation off the ground. I completed book orders for all three classes. And I plan to recycle heavily from previous preps.

I finished my application for sabbatical leave Friday: I’m asking for leave all of AY2010-11. The word is most, if not all, requests for one year leave are approved. I hope so. Erin and I have been saving diligently, and we’re starting to firm up our travel plans. On the research front, I plan to keep working on my current projects: (1) standards for improvement of English studies web sites, boosting my programming skills and knowledge of metadata as needed; and (2) converting some conference presentations into articles. I also hope to (3) return to the ease book project.

Today: grading, hanging out with the girls, reading. And it’s a good day to make a pot of soup.

• Jan 5: Madelyn starts the Big Girl sleep plan. I’m happy to say this continues; the Bee is pretty easy to put to bed now.
• Feb 21: I get an awful flu bug, missing classes and losing eight pounds in less than a week.
• Mar 10: A misstep down the stairs, and I sprain my Achilles, putting a serious kink in my running. In the long term, this is a good thing; since then I’ve been swimming and biking pretty regularly and my fitness is much better balanced.
• Apr 28: Our new graduate curriculum is approved. Bye-bye to periodic literature courses; hello to writing studies, theses or exams for everyone, and individual programs of study.
• May 15-25: Erin, Madelyn and I enjoy a great vacation in Wisconsin and Michigan.
• Jun 5: Strawberries! Our yard is full of ‘em. We enjoy ice cream, jam, and strawberry pie.
• Jul 22: The awful ugly counters come out of our kitchen.
• Aug 20: My release time technology work ends. I don’t miss this one bit.
• Oct 3: Jeff and I get the contracts for From A to <A>. (Essays are due tomorrow, 1/1/09. One step closer.)
• Oct 27: Amelia is born.
• Dec 19: Our power is knocked out by an ice storm. We spend a night at a friends’ house; the following day I spend 18 hours making up for lost grading time.

All in all, a fine year. Thanks, 2008; more like you, please.

Strawberries! The big patch which Erin planted three years ago is producing berries like mad. Erin took two containers to some friends last night. For the next week or so, we’ll be harvesting them on a regular basis. Madelyn is very pleased and enthusiastic. Maybe too much so. Any berry with even a little pink is fair game. We’ll have to work on that.

Summer is also time for cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. First our garage. Surprisingly little to throw out. I think there’s more of that in the basement, which will be one of my next conquests. At my office, I’ve piled up a nice stack of things for the recycling bin, and I’ve got a ways to go.

I drank the Unibroue Seigneuriale last Friday. The first sip I thought, “Gueze!” It had a bit of tartness. But that mellowed after a while. It’s got the snap of a good Belgian ale, though I didn’t get the apricot mentioned on the site. Last night I had a Dark Horse Double IPA. Man is that beer strong. Alcohol almost beats out hops in the nose. But it is very, very good.

The official word came yesterday: I got the administrative internship, so my web accessibility project will move forward next year. I’ll be teaching a 2/1 and working on web accessibility the other half of my time. Updates here, of course, as things happen.

On the writing front, I’m about halfway through a textbook review requested by a publisher, and I’m thinking about a CPTSC presentation as well. I’m trying not to think much about the other writing projects I need to tackle: focus, focus, and I have the luxury of distant deadlines.

I turned an ankle yesterday going down the stairs at school. Ow, and it’s still bugging me today. That may kill my plan to run a 5K this weekend. For now, I’m gonna stretch the leg a bit with some housework. Back to that cluttered garage.

Accessibility: the WCAG Samurai (Joe Clark &c.) have published the draft of their errata to WCAG 1.0. Also recently, the Illinois web accessibility bill passed the house unanimously; a signature from Blagojevich is all that’s needed to make it law. I’ve also been asked to review the plan for an accessibility workshop being delivered here on campus. More on both of those soon.

Family: twelve years ago last Sunday, with Hurricane Allison providing a damp background, Erin and I got married. And this year, I forgot. Doh. Well, that pretty much summarizes the last year for me. Now I have to figure out how to un-forget…

Beer: nothing brewing now, and won’t be for a while. Prioritizing.

Weather: I spent a lot of last night and early this AM laying in bed listening for the tornado siren; there were some reports not far from here, and it was a pretty stormy night. Madelyn kept waking up, too. Nothing to report, thankfully; just some lost sleep.

Running: not bad lately. Better, even. Yesterday (6/7) I got in 12.2 miles, which is the most in forever. Not very pretty; I forgot to eat breakfast, it was windy as hell, and 85°+. I had to stop and walk the last mile and a half, since I was getting dizzy and a bit loose form-wise. Some more runs to report. But my GPS died, so I don’t have access to records. Boo.

Garden: Erin has great stuff all over the place: spinach is in, she’s started a second crop of lettuce, the blackberries are almost ready, herbs are huge, and everything else looks great too. With my father in law, I removed the big yew tree which dominated our backyard. Shortly after the stump is ground, Madelyn will have a nice play area.

Research: this too, deserves its own post.

Too long since one of these catch-alls…

Madelyn: our girl has extended her mobility into the Z dimension; she’s climbing like mad now. Footstools lead to tables lead to trouble. The Bee now pushes chairs around the house to grab stuff which Mama and Daddy thought was “safe.” So, more reasons to keep everything dangerous in the basement…

Also, today we went to an easter egg hunt! Even though it was cold, it was a lot of fun; Madelyn did a great job finding eggs, and she got to hang out with the Easter Bunny and her friend Claire too. As a bonus, we got some nifty books from the library as well.

Weather: winter returned this week, which stinks because our daffodils, tulips, and other assorted plants were in full blossom. Actually it’s supposed to get even colder; we may see the high teens tonight. Poo. The bright side is lovely cut flowers all over the house.

Garden: despite the Great Flower Massacre, things look pretty good; some of last year’s chard and sorrel came back, and a ton of cilantro reseeded itself. Erin has already put in a bunch of greens. I am really looking forward to the first real salad. And tomatoes are less than two months away…

Teaching: So. Much. Grading. Three nearly full classes (68 students) makes for a very busy boy.

Beer: I am starting a yeast culture tonight so I can make beer for the upcoming Draft Silliness 2007. I’m cutting it close timewise, but I think if I keg and force carbonate things will be just fine.

Research: I think I have finally stopped wrestling with my essay on the logic of the default, and figured out how to make it work. I’m not done, but at least my relationship with it doesn’t involve choke holds. After that, I have to finish my “Tabling the Grid” piece, and the decks will be pretty clear…

Nerdliness: Got Ubuntu running on my work computer, which should have happened long ago. No Handspring yet, but I think that’s as much a problem with the device as with Linux; the poor thing is acting up on the Windows side as well. It may be time for a new PDA; I need to find out what works with Zimbra, since that’s on the horizon for WIU.

Last year we had a few mild frosts in October, but most of the garden made it into mid-November. If we see high 20s tonight and tomorrow, that’ll be the end of the tomatoes and peppers that are still cranking out fruit at an amazing rate. Too bad.

If Erin doesn’t beat me to it, I’ll cover up what I can after class tonight, and see if I can rig some sort of light-bulb fired contraption to save the currant tomatoes or some of the more prolific peppers.