Jen Russum

I am thrilled/intimidated to announce that I will be presenting my mommy blog paper at an academic conference in the fall. I just found out today that my project has been accepted to the Internet Research 12.0 conference in Seattle in October. I am so excited about this, but also very nervous to stand up and present my work to experienced internet researchers when I just learned what reddit is like three months ago... I am an internet dunce. However, it will be a great learning experience for me and I am excited for a trip in the fall that will include seeing friends and family in Seattle.

When I told Micah the news he was very excited, and then he stopped and said "I thought you were going to apply to conferences that are in sunny places. Why would we want to go to Seattle in October?" True. Next mission is to get accepted to a conference in Hawaii...

But for now I feel blessed and excited and eager to continue working on this project. In celebration, allow me to post pictures of the top mamas of all mom bloggers...

Since moving to Arizona, Micah and I have been blessed by living in our community. And I mean really living IN our community. Being friends with people who live in our neighborhood. Working within five miles of our house. Going to church within two miles of house. It's been amazing.

Let me just paint a picture for you briefly. Last year Micah lived in Lake Stevens with a friend. I lived in Seattle with four awesome girls whom I love with all my heart. I had a thirty minute drive to school down a road with a 40 MPH speed limit and forty stoplights. I was always late to work. We were engaged. We used to meet at the Everett Mall food court on Wednesday nights to plan our wedding. They had a very limited restaurant selection. We usually ended up splitting a piece of Sbarro pizza. It was greasy and gross. After three weeks of that, we gave up planning our wedding together. Somehow it got planned and it was awesome. I took care of the details and consulted Micah on the big stuff. We also started attending Mars Hill Church, which was amazing, but a horribly long commute from Lake Stevens on a Sunday night. Sometimes I would stay in Lake Stevens for the whole weekend to hang out with Micah (because Lake Stevens to Seattle is practically a long distance relationship), and Micah and I would drive down to church together. Then drive back. Then I would drive BACK down to Seattle in my own car at 9pm at night. Sometimes we would drive to church separately. Either way, it sucked. We also joined a community group that met in Mill Creek, which was kind of a halfway meeting point for us. However, we both had a 25 minute drive home alone after our weekly Tuesday meetings and then all our friends from our community group (who are awesome!) lived in Mill Creek, 25 minutes away from each of us. We spent a year not really living in our community at all. We were always driving. Always needing to be somewhere else that was at least a half an hour away from where we were.

So when we moved to Arizona, we REALLY wanted to live, work and play in our actual community. We didn't want long commutes to work and we especially wanted to live close to our church. However, when we moved here we had no idea where we were going, what it would be like, or where we should live. All we knew was the address of Micah's work and the location of ASU. We looked on Google maps and marked the spot right in the middle of these two locations, and decided that as long as it wasn't the absolute, fear-for-your-life ghetto, we would live as close to this midpoint as possible. Thankfully the midpoint was South Scottsdale and we LOVE our lives. I won't even tell you all the things we live close to. Okay, maybe I'll tell you a few... In ten minutes or less, I can be at ASU, Micah's (now old) workplace, Target, Sprinkles, Scottsdale Fashionsquare (complete with Anthro, Banana, Urban, Nordstrom, Crate and Barrel etc. etc.), In and Out, SMASHBURGER (okay, Smash is more like 15 minutes, but I HAD to add it to the list), the historic Old Town district, museums, galleries, multiple movie theaters, and a greenbelt (with 14 miles of running trails, sand volleyball, basketball, frisbee golf, etc. etc.). But most importantly we live seven minutes away from our church and about the same distance from our pastor's house where we meet for Missional Community every Wednesday. We could not be more abundantly blessed.

So now our life is vastly different than last year. It looks more like this...

Now I can drive to our Missional Community with Micah's partially eaten cake in my lap. I decided that although he could eat the whole cake himself (and has in the past), he probably shouldn't. So I took it to our Missional Community to share. There is no way I would have been able to straddle a cake dome for my whole 25 minute ride up to Mill Creek last year. But two miles? I can handle it...


I can also pack my dinner in my purse if I don't have time to eat before Missional Community. I know it will still be warm when I get there, because it's only a five minute drive! And Lisa, my pastor's lovely wife, will gladly lend me a fork. (And, yes, this dinner is Hamburger Helper, and, yes, I did get it for 88 cents on sale, and, no, I am not ashamed. It was actually a pleasant little flashback to childhood dinners in 1989. But I might wait a year until I eat it again... Don't want to overdo it!)

I present on my mommy blog project tomorrow. The paper won't actually be finished for another two weeks, but I am going to present all my research to my classmates and teacher tomorrow and get feedback from them.

Soo.... I would love to hear your answers to one or both of the following questions (and you don't have to be a mom or a mommy blogger):

1) Why do you blog? (What do you get out of it? What do you hope to accomplish by it? Etc. Etc.)

2) Why do you spend your time reading blogs? (Why do you follow the blogs that you do? How is it beneficial to you? Etc. Etc.)

I might use some of these answers in my presentation, so please leave lots of comments below!

This week was the first time I felt like I might be getting the hang of this whole grad school thing. Sure, my table still looks like this....

This is actually updated from the last picture, and I'm pretty sure it's gotten worse!

And my house in general is a little messier than I like it to be. And I haven't tried any new recipes since my mom left town a couple of weeks ago. And I did only get three hours of sleep the night before my first grad school presentation on Wednesday.

But I left that presentation feeling hopeful. My presentation went well. I got great feedback. My teacher told me I got an A on it. And my professor and I had a great conversation about my research interests after class. In preparing for the presentation, I had to dig up an old paper from undergrad that I used for my writing sample for my grad school applications. I can't believe I even got accepted to any grad school!!! I mean how gracious that they would accept me based on my measly writing sample. For example, I have learned over the past six months that a typical bibliography for a standard 10-20 page research paper should be one to two pages long. That means you would read anywhere from 10-20 books and articles to gain background for your paper. My writing sample had like five sources on its bibliography and one of them was something I grabbed off the internet simply to add a quote to my introduction. Pitiful.

I have also learned about the word "stakes" since starting grad school... meaning what are the "stakes" of this project? Or basically what is the point of writing this paper? While many would point out that the stakes are never really that important when you are writing a paper about literature (it's not going to change the world - although the literature itself when it was written back in the day might have actually changed the world or at least affected a certain city, state, or culture), there still has to be a reason you are writing what you are writing. How does it add to current research in your field and how is it new and different than what other people have already written? I feel like I nailed that part of my presentation this week and it felt good!

So slowly but surely I am feeling more at home at grad school and where God has called me and feeling more excited about this five to six year endeavor that I began back in July. And it wasn't really until yesterday when I felt like things were going well that I realized how aloof I have been feeling for the past eight months. Not knowing many other students in my program well. Not knowing what to say during my grad classes but feeling pressured to say something. Not knowing how to go about researching for and writing my papers. Not really sure of I want to research and devote my whole teaching/writing career to. But yesterday, I felt those things changing slowly. I feel like I am making friends in my program and my office. I am really enjoying knowing students and teachers well on both the literature and rhetoric/composition side of things. I like the things I am studying and feel like the work I am doing has some kind of value.

AND did you notice I even blogged five times this week?!?! In the words of the Kruse siblings and all my friends in Texas, BOOYAH GRANDMA!!! And in the words of my dear friend, Anne Warner. BAM!!! Have a great weekend everyone!

Sometimes your husband decides to make a cake (from a box) at 11 o'clock at night, and he leaves the cupboard where the baking pans are kept looking like this...

You forgive him and frost his cake for him while he is at work the next day...


But you leave a note on the counter that says this (but you also leave one of his favorite candies next to it to remind him you love him, in case the cake didn't say it clearly enough)...


When you're done frosting the cake, you get into your car to go to class and realize that even though you get cranky (almost) every morning when your husband's alarm clock goes off (no, I am not providing a picture of my 6:30am crabbiness), he still comes home from work and takes your car without you knowing and washes and vacuums it out for you for no reason at all. And now your floor mats look all pretty like this...


And this is married life. A little give and take. A lot of grace. *I apologize for the use of the indefinite "you" in this posting, but if you're married you probably know what I am talking about and could substitute other funny pictures for the ones above.

He can skate and carry milk. Best husband award.

 In the words of Avril Lavigne, I think I've married a "S8ter Boi" (does she know you probably don't need that "t" in S8er, since "eight" ends with "t"? ...whatever... here ends my analysis of Avril Lavigne lyrics...)

So Micah has taken up skating. As in he came home from running errands on a Saturday a month or two ago, and one of those errands happened to be to the skate shop, where he bought a custom-made skateboard. Yes, he did.

Now, he is quickly becoming an accomplished skater at the age of 29. He says he wants to be able to skateboard with his son someday... love him!

So now Micah hangs out at the skatepark. With 19 year olds. And he probably shows them up....or at least he will be able to soon.

Here is the thing about Micah. He is the most athletic person I know. If I ever meet Michael Jordan in person, Micah will be the second most athletic person I know. But since I have yet to meet MJ, Micah still wins in my book. Micah and all his siblings are annoyingly athletic. They jump high, throw far, run fast. His older sister Kayla has a life-goal to run a full marathon in every state. I think she's done four or five so far. It makes me want to puke. Anyway, Micah is athletically gifted and I have a two inch vertical. We make a great couple. I mean I can do a few athletic activities at a satisfactory level. I can play tennis (but it often looks very pitiful, especially compared to my high school days), I can take 2nd place in a 5K (if there are only four other women competing in my age bracket), and I can tread water like mad. Seriously. I can tread water for a LONG time. Oh, and I can still shoot a basketball decently well, but I have lost all ability to dribble, play defense, create an open shot, etc. Just give me the ball at the free throw line with no one guarding me and I can still make it more than 50% of the time on a good day. Here ends my list of athletic feats. I'm not particularly fast, strong, or coordinated. Whatevs. I write papers for a living. When God knit me together in my mother's womb, he was not creating athletes that day. I'm okay with it.

My point is that Micah is quickly developing as a skater. He can do little jumps and such already. Sometimes he will hang out at the skate park until 10:30 at night while I do homework, despite the fact that I tell him we really should go to bed earlier now that he wakes up earlier for his new job. See my morning situation here.

Skating makes sense though. I mean Micah likes all the traditional sports such as football, basketball, running etc. But he also likes more alternative things such as snowboarding and wakeboarding. Since there is a serious lack of snow and water in Phoenix, but plenty of sunny days, skateboarding makes sense. There are tons of skateboarders and longboarders in Arizona. In fact, there must be at least 10,000 of them that practically run me over on the ASU campus every day.

So Micah is quickly becoming a seasoned skater. And the good Lord blessed him last week when he found a lone skateboard sitting in the middle of the road on his way to work. Why was there a skateboard sitting in the middle of the road in Mesa, Arizona at 7:30am? Who knows. But now it sits right next to Micah's other skateboard in our house. I always wanted twins....

I'll admit it. I'm obsessed. With a hamburger joint. Smashburger is my new home. My new love. My newest indulgence. Okay, Jesus is my first love. Micah is my second. But if I weren't already married, Smashburger, I would marry you!

I've heard raves about Smashburger for about a year now since one opened up in Fort Worth, Texas where many of my dearest friends live. Sometime during the fall semester, I noticed there was a Smashburger right across the street from ASU, but my crazy on-campus-for-only-an-hour-each-day schedule didn't really warrant a burger stop.

But now I have seen the light! This semester I am often on campus for 4-8 hours a day, which usually necessitates a lunch break. I try to bring my lunch from home as often as possible (and married life has helped me to become very good about making dinner consistently and using leftovers for lunch), but every once in awhile I find myself lunch-less... and SMASHBURGER always saves the day!

It's just soooo good! That juicy, savory burger on a potato bun! I am not really a huge fast food fan. I like a great burger occasionally, but it's rare to see me eat one more than once or twice a month (at the most). In fact, one time I went a whole year without eating fast food (somehow, I made certain restaurants such as Rosa's fit into a not-fast-food category, but it was still a pretty significant achievement). I also went without candy once for a year. I have a thing for year long challenges. But don't ever ask me to go without Smashburger for a year. I will not survive!

If you haven't tried Smashburger, I encourage you to do so immediately. If you have one within a 30 mile vicinity of your house - go! Go now! It's calling your name. If you don't have one in your city/state, I suggest you book a much needed vacation in your near future and get yourself to a sunny city that has a Smashburger. If you can't think of anywhere else to go, you can always visit me. I would love to introduce you to the delights of the Smash. And if you aren't a huge meat eater (although I don't really support your meat-less eating habits), they also have amazing looking salads on their menu. I desperately want to try one, but that would involve NOT getting a burger, and I don't know if I'm ready to make that sacrifice yet.

While I actually think Smash's fries are only okay (although they do have sweet potato fries for something different), they also have an excellent drink fountain. (For those of you who don't know me well, I have an obsession for a drink I call "The Mix" - mostly Diet Coke with about an inch of Dr. Pepper on top to take away the diet-y taste. It's amazing, which is why its name has become a proper noun and deserves its capitalization without a doubt. The Mix is sweeping the nation. You should try it today!) Anyway, the quality of fountain drinks at an establishment is very important to me, and Smashburger's fountain is right up there with the best (Chili's, Red Robin, McDonald's - Disclaimer: I do NOT eat at McDonald's. I only get their $1 fountain drinks occasionally). I sometimes find myself stopping in at Smashburger to get a Mix only, which is not budget savvy, since a fountain drink costs $1.86 after tax, but I make the sacrifice because Smash is a three minute walk from the English building on campus and I like Smash's fountain even better than QT's. Whoa.

However, I will tell you what IS budget savvy. The Smashburger kid's meal! For only $2.50 more than my fountain drink, I can get a burger and fries and drink. It's an amazing deal for only $4.36 after tax! Often, in a small attempt to be health-conscious, I order the kid's meal, ask them to skip the fries, and just give me a large drink instead of a kid's size, which they have never once refused to do. Sometimes they even insist on giving me fries AND a large drink. And the thing about a kid's burger is that it's just as delicious, but it's only a 1/4 pound of beef instead of a 1/3 or 1/2 pound like their adult options, so it's way fewer calories and costs way less than a grown-up burger. Kid's meal for life!

Anyway, you are probably thinking (regardless of the reduced calories) that this is a sick, unhealthy habit I have gotten myself into, but let me just tell you one thing. Every time I get a blood test, I have been told emphatically by various doctors that I have VERY low cholesterol. Like extremely low. I don't know why. I don't know how. I just do. I mean I do exercise very consistently and we do eat mostly poultry and fish at home, so I figure I have some room to work with here. If my doctors say it's okay, let me live in my Smash-burger obsessed state a little longer....

And it's really not quite as bad as I make it out to be. I'll admit last week I had Smashburger twice, but only because they made me sit through three straight hours of meetings on my Friday afternoon, and I didn't know if I could survive without a little Smashburger for sustenance. Usually, I only eat Smashburger on Tuesdays before my night class. It's become my happy little tradition to walk over to Smash before class and get a kid's meal before I sit in a windowless, basement classroom for three hours. In fact, it's Tuesday today! I cannot wait to celebrate #smashburgertuesday tonight!!!

Have I ever mentioned that being a grad student is CRAZY?! I'm not talking about the taking a couple of night classes or online classes to get your Masters in fill-in-the-blank type of grad school. Not that it's bad to get your Masters this way.... this week I approve of the night/online method more than ever. I am talking about full-time, ruin-your-life grad school. The kind of grad school where you can't really work another job or clean your house or have friends. The type of grad school where they kill you with reading and writing assignments then tell you what a horrible writer you are at the end of the semester, even though they thought you were a good enough writer to accept you into their program in the first place. I am talking about the grad school where they accept straight-A students and then refuse to give them As anymore, even though they are working way harder at school than they ever have before in their life. I am talking about the kind of grad school where it takes at least five or six years to get your degree, while they tell you the whole time that you will never find a job after you graduate. That's the kind of grad school I'm talking about. No wonder my own professor said this week to "NEVER go into academia." Touché.

But I digress. This is turning into a bigger rant than my last post, and it wasn't intended to be a rant. I love grad school. I am thankful to be in grad school. But grad school is hard, and the final weeks of the semester are incredibly overwhelming and intense. I happen to be in those hellish weeks right now. Let me sum it up briefly. In the next three and half weeks, I will:

1) Present an 8-10 page work in progress paper to my Rensaissance Sexuality class on Elizabeth I's chastity as represented in The Faeire Queene
2) Give a work-in-progress visual presentation to my digital literacies class on my mommy blogs research
3) Finish and submit 20 page Renaissance paper on chastity by May 6th
4) Finish and submit 20 page mommy blog paper by May 10th
5) Grade TWO more rounds of my own student's essays (aka 35 essays times two = grading 70 essays in the next three and half weeks!)

So this is the last time you might hear from me for awhile, but I promise that when mid-May rolls around I will be a consistent blogger once again. I will leave you with this picture of what my kitchen table looks like right now as well as a picture of my to-do list for the day, and ask for your sympathies during my absence! Farewell friends! Pray for me!!!

As promised, I would like to share a couple of things I dislike about living in Arizona. And a "couple" is not an understatement. After nine months of living in the desert, there are only TWO thing that significantly bother me here. And, no, it's not the fact that it is going to be over 100 degrees for the next five months. I think I'm okay with that. Hot summer days = a good tan. Also, hot summer days = warm summer nights. And warm summer nights = wearing a dress in the evening without needing a jacket or sweater. Also, warm summer nights = that amazing feeling when you are sitting in an air-conditioned building (restaurant, movie theater, etc) and you feel cold until you walk outside and feel that warm, 80 degree night air hit your chilly skin. MMMmmm..


Okay, but let's move on, because this is my chance for a short rant. The two things that bother me about Arizona:

1) The smokers. Did someone forget to send the memo to Arizona that smoking is going out of style? It's not cool anymore. The original Marlboro man went on an anti-smoking campaign before he died of lung cancer in his 50s. It's not "green" to smoke. It's not trendy to smoke (unless you are Phoenix hipster). It's not economically savvy to smoke. Even Europe is cutting back. And if the Europeans are quitting smoking WHY aren't the people of Phoenix?! Now granted I hail from Seattle where smoking is one of the biggest faux pas around. The health conscious people of Seattle do not smoke. It's not even really legal anywhere in the city, because as of 2005, you can't smoke in any public building OR within 25 feet of any public doors, windows or vents. And in a city it's pretty hard to find yourself 25 feet away from any doors or windows... It's a glorious law. But Phoenix is behind the times as far as the anti-smoking movement is concerned. Everywhere I go, there is smoke. Smoke in my face. All over ASU's campus. When I walk down city streets. Coming in through the vent in our apartment's laundry closet. I've had enough. Smoking is illegal in most public buildings in the city, but there are very few restrictions on where you can smoke outside. In fact, many places, including the ASU Library, provide ashtrays in outside seating areas for smoking convenience. Gross. I'm fine with the 100 degree weather, but I'm not okay with the cancerous smoke floating through this desert valley of ours.



2) Speed bumps. Now I don't know if there are any kind of regulations on the lawful height of speed bumps, but if there are, they must be on a state by state or city by city basis... and Phoenix, Arizona must rank #1 for highest speed bumps in the country. You think you are in a valley until your car gets hoisted up by one of these cement monsters and suddenly you are looking over the mountains and peering into New Mexico. They are ridiculous. Since when does Arizona have the right to ruin my car? I haven't gotten out a tape measure to measure these horrible humps, but I think many of them might between close to twelve inches above the surface of the road and they are EVERYWHERE. Arizona has a speed bump obsession. They are in parking lots, the driveway into our apartment complex, on residential streets. There is no escaping them. My car is crying out in pain. I am crying out in pain. Honestly, sometimes my back jars a bit as I cross over the highest ones. And it's not only that they are too high, but that some of them are so abrupt. They aren't the kind that are wide, which can be rolled over gently. And it doesn't matter how sloooooowly you go over them. They might as well put a pile of 4x4 lumber out in the road. My car might appreciate a small collision more than the drive out of our apartment complex each day (okay, I don't really want to get in an accident, but you have to exaggerate in a rant, right?). My students are currently writing practical proposals to fix lcoal problems around the city. I should have begged some students to write about regulating speed bump height in the city and then sent their papers to local officials. Maybe this will be a topic choice for next year. Here are some pictures of these beasts...

This post has been a long time coming. Ever since we moved to Arizona and I started this blog, I've been thinking about how I just want to write a rave post about why I love living in the southwest! It's so great!

However, the reason I am finally getting around to writing this post NOW is because I've begun taking pictures for my rant post highlighting the few things I HATE about Arizona. My complaints are not many, but I feel they need to be addressed. But I figured that it would not be fair to rant before I rave, because the positives about this desert life far outweigh the negatives. So here we go...

WHY I LOVE LIVING IN THE SOUTHWEST:

1) The southwest really is just that - a mix of the south and the west. Now for someone who grew up on the west coast, but spent a lovely six years living in Texas, living in the southwest means that my favorite things about both my worlds collide in one place. Here are some examples: I get all my favorite establishments from both places. From the west, we have Red Robin, In-n-Out Burger, Safeway, etc. From the south, we have Hobby Lobby, Quik Trip, and Chic-Fil-A among others. I could not be happier. Yes, my happiness is based, in part, on cheeseburger consumption.

2) Secondly, Arizona is more politically conservative than Washington (but then again, what state isn't?) and I just like being around conservatives instead of crazy liberals (Seattle's "self-righteous recyclers" as our friend Mike Finley calls them... sorry, Seattle friends, but you know it's kinda true...). Not that I am against recycling by any means. I think it's a very practical, simple way to be good stewards of what God has given us. And that leads me to one thing I hate about Arizona, which is the lack of recycling, but I'm not allowed to rant here, so I'll save it for another post...

3) However, even my love of conservatives has a breaking point. For example, I think people should be allowed to carry guns, but if everyone around me was packing heat, I would honestly feel a bit nervous. Thankfully, in the SOUTHWEST we get a healthy balance of conservatives and liberals. For every tried and true gun-in-his-holster Republican down here, there is a mowhawked, long-boarding transplant from California. We keep it balanced, and I like it.

4) Who can really complain about 310 days of sun a year? I know there are people out there who say  "But I love the rain..." (liars!), but we all know you just tell yourself that because you live in Seattle or some other equally horrible climate and it's the only way to console yourself ten months out of the year. Can you really wake up in October, November, December, January, February, and March and see the sun smiling down on you and feel the sixty degree breeze on your face as you walk under brilliant blue skies and say, "I hate this." Please... And for those of you, my sweet friends, who live in sunny climes such as Texas, and claim you love Seattle-like weather and hate the Texas summer, I double-dog dare you to live in Seattle for a full year. Then get back to me on your feelings about the rain. But then again, who can afford to live in Seattle???

5) Which leads me to my next rave. The economy, all things considered, is pretty great down here compared to many other places in the country. Our gas prices were reasonable (until the insanity of the past month worldwide), and our rent is CHEEEEAP. If you remember one of my recent posts, I actually can't disclose our rent on this blog so my Seattle readers don't get depressed. Let's just say we are going to be house-hunting soon, and we won't rule out properties below $100,000. The only thing, as far as I can tell, that is significantly overpriced in Arizona is cereal. I don't know why it consistently costs $5-6 a box here (unless you go to Target), but I'm not allowed to talk about my irks right now...

This doesn't even cover all the reasons I love Arizona. There are others, such as being halfway between WA and TX (flights are shorter and more reasonably priced). We are six hours from LA and San Diego (aka the ocean) by car. And we will be traveling there very soon. All major sporting events take place here... hello BCS championship, spring training, PGA golf tours and MLB All-Star game, as well as regular Pac-10, NBA, MLB, and NFL games. And mostly, I cannot wait for the return of warm summer nights, where you can walk around in a dress or shorts without having to put a jacket on after 7pm. In Washington, I used to wear a North Face in June. Blech!

I will leave you with this. One Saturday in February I was sitting on my couch reading, and this is what it looked like outside my window. True love. Did I mention I fold my laundry out on the patio while wearing my bikini? Yes, I do.



 

There is big news around Phoenix... Micah got a promotion! Okay, so maybe it's a big deal at our apartment, but still. We've been here for only eight months and Micah has rocked it at his job, and I am so proud of him for earning his new position. He has stepped out of retail banking and is now a relationship manager. Woo hoo!!! The crazy thing about his job is that he works from Arizona, but his region is Washington state, so he will actually be working with bankers (and perhaps even businesses) with whom he is already familiar.

There is one small, teensy, tiny downfall to this promotion though. We have now become a pre-7am-wake-up couple. I know, I know. I should get over it. Most adults have to wake up before 7am, but I just don't like doing it. We had gotten into this lovely routine as a married couple of going to bed at 11ish and waking up around 7:15 in the morning. Yes, count it. EIGHT hours of sleep every night!!! It's been the most amazing eight months of my life. I even made up a slogan for it... "Sleeping 11 to 7 since 7/11..." (That's our anniversary in case you were confused). Now why would I make up such a stupid slogan you may ask? Well I'll tell you. Because I've been sleep deprived since 9th grade and sleeping for eight hours a night is certainly a reason for slogan-making. Seriously. I'm a night owl like my dad and have lived off an average six hours of sleep a night since the beginning of high school. This summer marks our ten year reunion. I've gone a long time on little sleep. All through college. All through my years teaching high school. Until now. But things are a-changin'... Micah will now be waking up between 6 and 6:30am and my days of the blissful 7:15am wake up are long gone.

Here's the thing. When I have to wake up earlier than Micah, I shut off my alarm as quickly as possible. Tip toe to the bathroom. Get dressed with the lights out. Shut doors quietly. I go to all measures not to wake him up, and I'd say I'm sucsessful at least 75% of the time. Now when Micah has to get up before me, it's a different story. He snoozes about five times and I have to ask him to turn his loud, static-y radio off repeatedly. When he finally gets up, he walks out of our room, leaving the door open, so I can hear him getting his cereal prepared in the kitchen. He usually comes back in about ten minutes later, leaving both bathroom doors open (yes, we have two doors for increased sound wave flow) as he shaves and showers. If he hasn't tried to have a direct conversation with me by this point, despite the fact that I am still trying to sleep, he cannot avoid the temptation of post-shower dialogue. Either he will tackle me (literally) when he finally emerges from the bathroom, which is his version of a morning hug I guess, or he will ask me to help him pick out a tie. I don't even know why I bother to still be in bed at this point. I should have learned my lesson months ago.

I share this with you only to explain that Micah's new wake-up time of 6am will also be my new wake-up time. I'm not going to try to fight it. Not having to wake up before dawn was one of the perks of being a college teacher instead of a high school teacher (that and the enormous stipend they give me...), but I can kiss that perk goodbye. Oh the joys of sharing a bedroom with a boy!!!

*In all honesty though, I am so proud of Micah and will gladly wake up with him at a much too early hour. I am already thinking of new ways I can use my extra time in the morning before I have to go to school. I might even go back to morning workouts. Whoa now.

Well despite my last post, I am now giving myself the "bad blogger award." I suck at this. Seriously, where have I been?

Sometimes I think, well all these moms have time to blog because they stay at home. I am never at home, so it's no wonder I can't find time for this. But wait... these moms have KIDS. Hence the title "mom." I have no kids, so I have no excuse. Okay, well maybe the fact that I am in school, teaching two college classes and working a tiny bit on the side does make me a little busy. Perhaps reading literary theory on the Renaissance, trying to figure out how to conduct qualitative research for my digital literacies class, teaching three days a week, grading 37 essays a month, trying to keep my house clean and making coffee for impatient snowbirds in Scottsdale is the equivalent of a baby or two? I hope so. That's my excuse. Mental note: cut back on schedule before procreating...

It also doesn't help that our internet does not work well at our house. I mean, why should it? We don't pay for it. We have always picked up an open signal since moving in, so we never bothered to actually pay for our internet. Is that stealing? Using some waves floating around in the air? I don't think so. I think another reason we never really got around to buying our internet is because we also don't have a TV and it seemed pointless to go to the effort to buy an internet package without a cable package. Anyway, our internet is free, but it is also very low quality. Sometimes it won't work for days at a time. Usually, I am at school anyway, so I have little need for the internet at home, but still it's still a bit inconvenient. This week we are having internet problems again, but not just because our weak signal is having trouble floating over from four doors down. Our most generous, anonymous internet provider has forgotten to pay his or her bill! Our signal is actually better than ever, but when you open the browser a window pops up that says "Hello friend, due to a missed payment your internet service has been temporarily disconnected. It will be reconnected when you pay your outstanding balance and a reinstillation fee. Please call ... with any questions." Yesterday, I was seriously tempted to call the number to see if we could afford to pay their bill, because I was needing the web! But a reinstallation fee for reactivating your service? Mental note #2: When we finally get around to purchasing real internet service, remember that Cox Internet is out to get you with fees...

So here's the deal... I will be back soon. Hopefully in the next week or two. My mom is coming to visit me this week and I am taking a little time off from the coffee shop to hang out with her. After she leaves, I am continuing my time off until the end of the semester so I can get two massive research papers written. Hopefully, this time off will allow me to get my school work done and leave a little extra time to blog (since I am supposed to be blogging for school anyway...). But in five short weeks, summer will be here! And hopefully in the summer I will have time to blog like mad and lose this "bad blogger" reputation of mine...