Jamie checks in....

Jamie here. As long promised, I'm posting.

I've had my first day of class, and everything seems fine. Last week was a grueling orientation. From what I can tell, orientations are always grueling. You spend you time sitting through lectures that manage to be somehow both redundant and incomplete. I'm not bashing Iowa State's performance by the way. I'd say that there orientation for new TA's is actually rather remarkable. ISU is a very different kind of university from anything I've personally experienced. I've spent a lot of time in the academic world, and all of it has been as small liberal arts universities. A big, technically oriented place like Iowa State is a pretty different place from a Baptist liberal arts University like Mercer. After a week, I feel like I kind of understand the mentality of Iowa State, which speaks to the success of the orientation, but lordy, that was a long week. I'm happy to be WORKING now and not getting information stuffed into my head. That's just the nature of the beast I'm afraid. I'm afraid that was about as painless as it could have reasonably been.

As I reported, class went fine today. I've got 26 very earnest Midwestern kids to deal with now, which should be fun. They seemed to have the right attitude today, so it's up to me to keep 'em busy and focused. Iowa State uses a rhetorically oriented composition program that stresses multi modal communication. When you are in grad school you have to talk like that. This means that they teach composition by asking students to think a lot about genres of writing and speech, and that they stress getting students to be conscious of written, oral, visual, and electronic communication. The class I'm teaching is mostly a composition class, but we will also be talking a bit about communication through things like web pages and graphic design. We want to stress the connections between all types of communication. A presentation or a group discussion is not absolutely different from an essay or a web page. I like the theoretical foundation of the program, although I'll miss hearing students deal with the difficult reading assignments I used to like to throw at 'em. The ISU approach will be lot less work than what I was doing at Georgia College, which is good because I'll be busy as hell trying to earn a P.H.D. so somebody might someday give me an adult level job someday. Such is academia.

I'm excited about one of the classes I'm taking. It's about gender theory and the "post-human" world. From what I can tell it's about postmodern gender issues. If biology and culture no longer define sex, what does? I figure I'll have some kind of answer by Christmas. I'll let you know. I saw the word "dildo" used in several of the textbooks, which seems perfectly reasonable if you think about it.

What else am I responsible for posting about here.....oh yeah, the fair....it's a big ole damn fair, I tell ya. They got gourmet quality pork chops on sticks and very decent beer for sale (that big cultural difference again....they don't sell beer at "family events" like fairs in Georgia), and apparently Garrison Keillor was wandering around there at some point. (He did a show from there on the last night, which we neither saw nor hear on the radio, although I read an essay on salon.com that he wrote about being there.) Good stuff. Like the Georgia National Fair but bigger and with better food and more of a street party atmosphere. There was lots of live music also, and I'm pretty sure we saw a few minutes of a performance by a guy my brother knows. Country singers get around these days, eh?

What else, what else.....I'm feeling more at home here now that I've got stuff to do. Being a part of a community means having stuff to do that connects you to the community. Being on an extended vacation in a community where you don't know anybody with gets depressing after a while. It's nice to be busy.

Job Hunting

Heather: I have been pounding the pavement all week looking for a job. There are a lot of jobs available but they all start no sooner than two to six months or are close to 10 hours per week, minimum wage, seasonal, blah blah blah. We may just have to live on dry beans until I can find something substantial. I am quite excited about the possibility of working for Wheatsfield. Wheatsfield is a small grocery store co-op that specializes in local produce, organic produce and other products, and imported goodies. They are in the process of expanding which includes building a bigger store for more products. So in January, they will be hiring more staff. I feel like I made a good enough impression on the managment when dropping off my resume that I am confident I only have to hold a 10-hour-minimum-wage job until then and I will be hired. One of these 10-hr-min-wg-ers that I am talking abou is a movie theater in college town that I interviewed for. The manager was very nice. The atmosphere seems relaxed and friendly. I hear from him on Saturday.

Jamie started school Monday. Maybe I can convince him to post something about that.... More updates coming soon!

Iowa State Fair

I am going to make Jamie write an entry for this one. It was really fun. They had pork chops on a stick. Also, "rolled nuts." more coming soon...

Nero and the Chipmunk

Heather: Nero has a long history with chipmunks. He terrorized all the little cute woodland creatures in Macon and he is back at it here in Iowa. Yesterday I let him and Xerxes out by themselves for the first time and within a couple of hours, Nero carried proudly his first Iowan chipmunk victory right into the living room. It was cute and feisty and not very damaged so I had to try to save it. 30 minutes later, after chasing the cat around the house with a chipmunk in his mouth, interspersed with cat-chasing-lost-chipmunk periods (the Chipmunk who I've named Herbert would wriggle out of Nero's grasp, dash around my feet, find something to get behind and chirp really loudly in protest), I finally got Herbert to run into the mop bucket. I carried him outside imagining that I would find a lush bush or leafy terrain to gracefully release this wild animal whose life I had just extended. There was no time for that, because almost before I was out of the house Herbert jumped onto the rim of the bucket and made a daring leap onto the concrete driveway. He ran across the driveway and onto the fence and turned around chirping angrily. I swear I saw him shake his fist at me. Then he darted away.

By the way, I had to save him again today although it was much easier. He needs to move! I hope I won't have to save him again tomorrow. I hope that in the middle of the night when Nero is locked inside, he will gather the wife and kids and find a new house to live under.

Jamie: Having had some violence in their lives the cats seem to sleep better.
Heather: Torture and maiming: a cat's ultimate vitamin supplement.

History in Iowa

Heather: This week we had one of our favorite Georgians visit us here in Iowa - Jamie's mom came to see us! We had a great time. We went to the zoo, antiquing, saw Wall-E, and we went to the Living History Farms, a typical Iowan town in 1875. We really had a great time.

The weather here is quite humid. It is also quite warm - it gets up to the mid-90s during the day. It's not as bad as being in Georgia around this time of year, but this week it has come close. Just wait until it starts snowing - then these southern bones will have something to complain about. Next week is forecast to be rainy, cloudy, and high in the mid eighties - nice.