• Madelyn and Amelia turned 5 and 2. Busy and busier–you pick. Both are avid readers; both would be on the computer eight ours a day if allowed.
• Lots of travel. We visited family in Florida (January) and Alabama (March). Our longest trip was a fantastic tour of parks in Utah and Arizona. In late September, the girls and I enjoyed a one-night camping excursion in a local park. I predict even more travel in 2011.
• My essay “Beyond Star Flashes” appeared in Computers & Composition 27.1, and From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup was published.
• Sick, I struggled through ATTW and part of CCCC, and finally gave up and left early. WPA went a lot better.
• Jeff, Thomas, and I met in Portland to drink local brews, eat good food. And I started brewing beer again. That’s continued with no major hiccups, except two broken carboys (augh).
• All of us got bike upgrades. As the girls get older, we’ll be using them a lot more.
• We said good-bye to Lumper, our girl cat.
• Erin and I painted the back and front porches, and got a new driveway. Other than that, not very many big house projects this year–a lot of small stuff.
• My sabbatical is going well. It’s a little more than half over, and I’m pleased with the retooling, reading, and writing I’ve accomplished to date.

Happy new year, everyone.

About a month ago, Tim Carnahan finished our new driveway. So far, things look pretty good. The first crack has appeared, which is to be expected. (Even so, I wince when I see it.) And there’s one low spot near a downspout; water flows toward the house for a little bit before draining off the slab. But it’s still way better than the old driveway. Last week, we got a little snow, and shoveling it took about half the time it used to–with no jarring THUNK! moments as my scoop ricocheted off busted up driveway. Once Spring comes, I’ll ask Tim to do something about that low spot, and I’ll seal up all the control joints with polyurethane caulk.

As part of the “make the front of the house look better” project, Erin and I removed the gnarly juniper, bayberry, and boxwoods below the front porch, and knocked down the weeds and euonymus growing near the house. Right now, everything looks a little shabby, though the light coat of snow we got the other day helps. In the spring, we’ll get things fixed up, starting with some grading work to ensure the best drainage off the driveway. We’ll re-establish the landscaping, at least in part, by transplanting native plants and grasses we’ve got all over the yard already. More flowers! And maybe even a strawberry patch. (It’s time we moved ours.)

More urgently, I need to replace our front steps. We had a little masonry work done after Thanksgiving–some tuckpointing and crack repair, addressing some water damage on the southwest corner of the house. (The new driveway should fix the long term problem.) Sure, that required some drying time, but I’m at least a week past getting that work done. I’ll admit to being a little cautious. Steps aren’t the easiest thing in the world to build. The space I’m building into is out of square in two directions, and the masonry wall onto which I’ll be hanging the stringers creates an offset. Anyway, I think I’ve got it figured out. This stair calculator was a tremendous help. Hopefully, I’ll have some pictures to share next weekend.

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.

Now if the rain to the west would blow through so I could get another coat of paint on the front porch floor…

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!

• Jan: the Gators win their second football championship in three years, largely due to Percy Harvin and Tim Tebow.
• Feb: we celebrate, realizing Amelia’s sleeping isn’t a fluke. (And we are celebrating still!)
• Mar: we travel to Florida to see family; I enjoy a very productive CCCC.
• Apr: a quick trip to southern Illinois; my brother and his wife meet us for hiking with the girls. Rainy but fun.
• May: we travel to Florida again, seeing different family this time, and friends in Gainesville too.
• June: I get tenure and a raise, and present at MEA with Jeff and Thomas.
• July: we get a new roof and gutters. I present at WPA.
• July: the girls and I spend a long week in Michigan, enjoying beaches from Grand Haven to Traverse City.
• August: We finish our kitchen upgrades.
• September: I ran a personal best in the Quad Cities half-marathon: 1:49:17.
• October: Madelyn and Amelia turn four and one.
• November: WIU approves my request for AY2010-11 sabbatical, not long after my summer stipend is funded as well.
• December: Amelia starts walking! And I finish 2009 with travel to Philadelphia to present at MLA. (More on that soon.)

Once again, a great year, and 2010 looks even better.

I’ve been sitting on some odds and ends blogging for a few weeks now. Time to catch up.

We stayed in Macomb for Thanksgiving this year. My parents visited Monday through Friday. They arrived late Monday and left early Friday, which means we only saw them three days. I wish they would stay longer. But we are happy to see them. Madelyn and Amelia got along great with Grammy and Grampy, and didn’t terrorize their dog Scooter too much. Tuesday we hung out; Wednesday we took a daytrip to Galesburg for the childrens museum and lunch at Landmark; Thursday we cooked and ate. The whole time (and all break week) Madelyn resisted naps like crazy, which means my parents got to see her in full-on spaz mode. More than once, my mom looked at me as if to say, “Um, you were a little hyper, but this girl takes the cake.” Yes she does.

What did we eat for Thanksgiving? I cooked a pair of chickens in our (salvaged from the trash) electric smoker. Erin roasted potatoes, onions, and brussels sprouts, and made whole wheat buttermilk rolls–a day after she made a cheese and butternut squash strata. So. much. bread. But I loved it. For dessert, Erin made apple-cranberry pie, pumpkin pie (using pumpkins from our yard, though not the tree pumpkins), and I made vanilla ice cream. Yum, yum. Since then, I’ve been trying to put in some extra miles–and not by making trips to the refrigerator.

After my parents left, I spent Thanksgiving weekend grading (web projects and essays), watching football, and doing laundry, with some break time to take care of the girls.

And speaking of football, it is championship Saturday. Big East (de facto), Conference USA, SEC, and then the Big 12/ACC double bill. Obviously, I’ll be watching the SEC championship attentively. For me, neither Florida nor Alabama have distinguished themselves in the manner they did last year, and the game could go either way. Poo on Carlos Dunlap for getting loaded and kicked out of this one. But last year, Florida beat Alabama without Percy Harvin. They can beat Alabama without Dunlap. And I hope they do.

Winter seems to have arrived, so we probably aren’t going to finish the back porch painting this year. We’re really close, though–just some touchups after the second coat. I’m sure our neighbors are much happier to be looking at the back of our house now. Right now I’ve got a few dilapidated storm windows in the basement for a quick couple coats of paint. Just hoping to get another year out of them.

I am still not brewing. Feh. I’ve had some conversations with some friends about a group brew. Maybe that’ll kick me in the butt and I’ll get something going.

Edit 12/5: Alabama 32, Florida 13. I was wrong about Dunlap not being missed. Alabama played extremely well and Florida played miserably. The Tide were better in all phases of the game.

Here are a couple pictures which show what the kitchen used to look like: green walls, wood trim painted white, leaky tile counters, and an ugly, ugly, ugly linoleum floor.

Now, it looks like this:

Though we don’t like the cabinets that much, Erin and I decided the new-cabinets-granite-counters-means-second-mortgage route wasn’t a good idea. Regardless, I’m very happy with our updates: stripping the trim and reconditioning the wood (Erin did that last spring), lots of new plaster and drywall, a fresh coat of paint which isn’t deathly green, under-counter lighting, new windows, new countertops, a new sink, and most of all a tile floor. We hired Hank Chipman to set the tile when were in Michigan recently. It’s sooooo much better: beautiful, much more solid, and it feels and looks clean. No matter how much we scrubbed that old linoleum, it just looked and felt awful. Not anymore!

Erin and I cleaned the heck out of the fridge, too, since we had to take the door off to get it in and out of the kitchen. After all that, time for a glass of the Duchesse.

More photos &c. after the jump.

Stripping the window and door frames. We had the door dipped at a local restoration house.

Older colors visible on this door; we didn’t have to put up with the neon green, just the light green. Soon this door gets dipped and moved to the girls’ side of the house.

Last summer, when we had the new counters installed, I replaced the porcelain-coated double sink with a simple stainless single bowl. Much better; scratches &c. just don’t matter.

I also replumbed under the sink, fixing a few major problems.

New fan and new windows. I think I’m done installing fans and otherwise futzing around in the attic. I hope so. The windows are Pellas, like the other replacement windows we installed.

Like our kitchen in Gainesville, this one is out of square, which meant I had to measure everything in multiple ways. This baseboard is 34 inches long and more than 1/2″ out of square, as the quarter-round shows.

A new microwave. The old one (which died) was better. This one is cheaply made. Ah well.

There was some track lighting with its switch on the cord. I replaced that with an in-outlet switch. I also rewired the over-counter outlets so all are GFCI-protected.

I ripped out the linoleum to make Hank’s job easier. At first, I wanted to try to restore the hardwood. But it soon became apparent how far gone it was; water damage was everywhere. Hank had to cut out and replace quite a bit.

Here’s a good look at the new tile, Hank’s excellent work. Note also the brown kick plate which replaces the ugly black I tore out.

Behind the stove, major plaster cracking issues because of an outlet installed carelessly long ago: the lath was broken and cracks abounded. I cut out the worst of it and patched up the rest.

I also custom-made a lot of baseboards, quarter round, and other trim to replace some which was heavily damaged. (Can’t buy 1935 sizes at Ace!) The stain colors I used aren’t a perfect match, but close enough.

All this work took a lot of tools.

A new roof and gutters for us, thanks to Dick Marcot and Prairie Home Construction. I’m complementing that work with some badly needed exterior painting.

The weather is cooperating beautifully: it’s been in the 60s and 70s. My hands hurt like hell. But things are looking good. See a set of photos on Flickr.

Tile in the kitchen is next. And then… we’ll see.

I recently installed an under-counter microwave in our kitchen. That’s a photo of the 30″ template I was supposed to use for placing screws, drilling holes, etc. Yes, that “thirty inch” template is about 3/8″ too wide. (It was too deep as well.) Good thing (1) I’ve seen enough bad press work to know printed measurements sometimes lie; (2) I measured that sucka before I tried to install the microwave.