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The house is a mess, my working out has gone out the window, and I eat only when I remember except when I get home at night and then I snack until I fall asleep. The intensive class has begun and I am living, breathing, even dreaming it — last night I was answering emails in my sleep and responding to student questions about the syllabus. It’s going well so far, but I know I won’t be blogging, or writing, or doing much of anything else until the class is through. With 23 students and 23 papers each time they turn them in and wanting to, like everytime I teach, put heart and soul into it, I won’t peek my head up again until after class is over at the end of the month. Then we take our summer vacation over the long weekend and fall begins. Yay fall, I am definitely looking forward to it!

Back into psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics and the meanings of literacy, all of which are incredibly interesting by the way…

So last night I let my landlord’s dog, sweet Bella the pugdog, into my apartment where she met Naima. The thing about pugs is the protruding eyes are dangerous with cats with claws and so I had to hold on to Naima no matter what, afraid to put her down that she might scratch or hurt the dog. I ended up with puncture wounds on both hands — which was really slick, since my students from adolescent lit were coming over for the last class. Chris so kindly bandaged me up but after everyone had left, we took the bandages off to find my left hand swollen to twice its size and my right index finger looking more like a Nathan’s hotdog. After calling my doctor’s afterhours number and hoping beer would be the prescription (it wasn’t — is it ever? dammit!), we ended up late night in the emergency room where I got a tetanus shot and a prescription for antibiotics. The hand and finger are still huge this morning, and Spenser beat the holy hell out of Naima when we got home. Related? Not sure.

Moral of this story? Not sure on this one either. I really would like Naima to be OK with other animals but I guess the moral is that you can’t change someone’s disposition. We were really lucky she and Ed got along as well as they did. And I still love her, although it took both of us a while to sit down together and get the blood out of her fur. (Chris isn’t touching her at this point and I can’t say I blame him).

By the way — all the blogs from class have been added to the links bar on the right. Enjoy!

Apparently underground transformers blew yesterday in downtown Montclair — here’s a link to baristanet’s coverage of the scene — and we were without power for about six hours in what has been the hottest day of the summer yet. Looking like third-world refugees, we went around the corner to find that the closest bar miraculously had power (hmmm, odd but I was happy) and we were able to have our beer and burgers in the air conditioned loveliness. Plus there was a trivia contest going on and while we did quite poorly, fun was had.

It is, however, hot already this morning as I write this at 8 a.m. Hot and still. Spenser and I were reading the NYTimes, though, and came across this article, about former inmates at a halfway house and their first trips to Barnes and Noble as they get used to the world outside the prison walls: Tasting Freedom’s Simple Joys…

I can’t imagine never having been in a bookstore before (especially given my own need to buy books on a regular basis) and I absolutely loved the open response of the manager when she found out this was a group from a halfway house through the prison system. *This* is the idea — not to run the other way, or deem reading and literacy the kind of thing only certain people can do. I won’t forget the image of the well-worn dictionary one man carries any time soon. Good stuff, well written, about good people.