The View From Kalamazoo

I’m no adjunct, I’m not even that on the food chain, but I thought I should get around to posting a lot of these links I’ve been collecting. I’m still not reading the crystal ball well, and I don’t know what will happen during this period of caring for Bri’s grandmother and after..what will be possible. I neither want to say I’ve given up on it all in the face of Shitty Life Occurences nor admit, I guess, that I would still prefer to look at everything through rose-colored glasses and remain hopeful. Hopeful and stupid, I suppose Brian would say. I’d rather not consider the possibility that my job that drives me nuts, exhausts me no end, and no human can survive for long (yeah, the one with the tremendously crappy State-U-Schlub pay, on top of it all)..that my job is All There Is for me.

I’ll likely set up a list of links on the sidebar at some point:

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

Adjunct Nation

National Coalition of Independent Scholars

Adjuncts.com

Maybe Brian will let me buy a kiln and I can make artsy ceramic tile for those who want to pay for it. Maybe he’ll post the pictures I took of the winter term’s stash, too. 😉

I need to go to the KIA and finish with the majolica glaze on my mosaic tiles. And pick up the stoneware tiles I’ll paint a mural on, if I can find where they put them (they should be out of the kiln). And then buy table bases, plywood, grout, and mastic to finish up the mosaic-top tables – one irises, the other inspired by Mondrian (for my Dad) – once the tiles are finally out of the kiln.

And pack to move next week.

And get the paint for The Boy’s room. And my bedroom – still deciding on particulars, there. Speaking of paint: While not the brand I’m buying (I’m having a uber-washable kid-guard tinted, no flat for my little messmakers), if you go to behr.com and look up the following you can see a rough representation of the kids’ room colors:

Emma: cupid arrow, 100C-1

Life is all pale lavendar and white trim. pale sagey-green accents. How f-ing girlie is that?!? (I sound in at roundly anti-Barbie pink, but I can live with purples. I was hoping she’d agree to the pale green on the walls and purple accents to work with her comforter, but no dice.)

Colin: rapture blue 520C-3

I’m thinking, since this is over panelling, I’ll get it in both satin and semi-gloss and do tone-on-tone vertical stripes, working with the stripes made by the panelling divots. Or that might be too much work. White trim, again – I just bought a mega-gallon of the stuff so I didn’t have to nickel-and-dime a bunch of disperate quarts.

Still not sure how to manage the white aluminum siding and some color. Maybe berries and cream 100D-5 or shale gray 540E-4 combined with witch hazel 780D-6 will help cheer the pale-gray-and-mauve front door and shutter action that presently leaves me cold. Dunno. Should probably do a shutter replace mission at some point, but that’ no where near the top of my to-do list.

A Wish List.. brought to you by an almost-former renter looking forward to gardening, and the letter C:

iris’ (around the front tree)

peonies (not close to the house, obviously)

oriental poppies (again with the tree)

a red bud tree somewhere in the back yard

morning glories and moon flowers climbing across one side of the back yard (currently a bare chain-link fence).

I’m tempted to do a climbing old-fashioned rose on either side of the front door, training them to trail up to cris-cross over the lintel. (lintel? am I thinking of the right term? my head is filled with congested allergy goodness) That may be a little too too, however.

lilacs, probably along the back fence somewhere.

and yes, there will be juniper.

probably hostas to fill in the rest of the raised-planting-bed-around-the-tree in the front yard, too. or something.