Natural Born Rhetor

She has a lot to say.

A few things about my kid

Yes, this blog has evolved into one of those “mommy” blogs. Deal with it.

Here are some interesting factoids about my daughter that you might care to know.

1. She loves hummus (aka hommus, hummous). If she refuses to eat anything else, she will always eat hummus with olive oil straight from the spoon.

2. She refuses to hold her own bottle. Won’t do it. Not at all. Nope, not one little bit. She also refuses to drink out of a sippy cup.

3.  She says “hat” and “cheese” very well.

4. She loves throwing food on the floor. Loves it.

5. She wants you to carry her. Right now. Now! Pick her up right now, or else!!

6. She begins dancing the second she hears music. This includes the five-second NPR theme on Morning Edition.

7. She knows I’m a pushover.  

On being a 50/70% Localvore

Eating “local” has become somewhat of a bobo cliche these days, but it’s one that I think is totally worth pursuing. I really have found myself thinking about carbon footprints, the three Rs of green living, and all that jazz. Being green is hard on the habit-muscles sometimes. It is so much easier to throw away, buy new, drive through. But one thing we are conscious of in this house is buying local, especially food. We say no to chain restaurants, and we instead spend our few nights out at locally-owned joints. Our bread is made locally. Any meat we buy is from local farmers.

Much of this is made possible thanks to the Columbia Farmer’s Market. It’s awesome. We are regulars every Saturday morning. But we also buy some local stuff at Clover’s (a smallish hippy market) and even a local/healthy/hippy section at Hy-Vee. I keep forgetting to stop by The Root Cellar. Shame on me.

Anyway, I wanted to map the meal we ate this evening. It’s my way of forcing myself to become more conscious of where my food is coming from. Ideally, it would all come from right outside my own door. But that’s not how most of us live now. No sense in pretending. At the same time, it isn’t impossible to set a percentage goal for a 100-mile radius during any given meal. In fact, I would like to do that. But how would I know a “good” percentage to set as a goal? What’s realistic vs. idealistic? What is realistic in a house with two working people and a toddler?

Furthermore, is buying local the same as buying local?

Take tonight’s dinner. Pasta with a zucchini and goat cheese sauce. Salad with tuna, carrots, and black olives. The ingredients consisted of:

• Pasta (not local. not purchased from a locally-owned store) - 0% local
• Zucchini (grown locally, purchased from a farmer) - 100% local
• Goat cheese (local, purchased from a locally-owned place) - 100% local
• Milk (local, purchased from a locally-owned place) - 100% local
• Salad mix and spinach (grown locally, purchased from a farmer) - 100% local
• Carrots (not local, not purchased from a locally-owned store) - 0% local
• Olives (made?? purchased from a locally-owned store) - 50% local
• Tuna (Not local. Bought from a local store) - 50% local
• Olive oil. (Not local. Bought from a local store) - 50% local
• Maple Syrup. (Not local. Bought from a local store) - 50% local
• Vinegar (not local, not purchased from a locally-owned store) - 0% local
• Wine (not local. bought from a local store–Top Ten Wines) - 50% local

Total: 9 out of 11 ingredients were grown and/or purchased locally. 4 out of 9 ingredients were grown locally. We could have probably found local carrots *or* substituted something else. We could have bought locally-made pasta (or made out own). Not much you can do about tuna when you live in Missouri. Same goes for maple syrup.

So, that’s about 44% grown local and 81% purchased local. I think it’s possible to bump up the locally-grown number to 50% per meal, as long as we’re willing to make some changes with the season. And 80% purchased locally is maybe artificially high. Sometimes I just need canned tomatoes from Hy-Vee. But 70% as a goal seems quite manageable to me. This means that any given meal should consist of ingredients that have mostly (but not exclusively) been purchased at an independent, locally-owned store.

Being a 50/70% localvore is probably a lofty goal. My daughter tends to eat things in a very unpredictable pattern. Her dinner consisted of an Amy’s frozen pizza. Not locally grown. But I did buy it from a locally-owned store. On the flip side, she’s drinking milk that came from a local farmer. Yet we bought it at Hy-Vee. So, in a sense, I guess we’re technically on the 50% target right there. However, it’s not always easy to choose local over easy—especially for a teething child.

We can certainly try, though.

Road trip to Columbia, MO to Lafayette, IN: DINERS, DRIVE-INS, AND DIVES (or some version of that)

In a few weeks, we’ll be taking a road trip from Columbia, MO to Lafayette, IN. We’d like to hit some quirky diners or just plain good roadside stops along the way. We’re wiling to venture off-highway for a good bite. Any ideas?

One of those days

I gotta tell ya: this was one of those days. I put the wrong key into the ignition, and it is now stuck. As in real stuck. A guy came out from the dealership, performing the same “pull pull pull” maneuvers that I had tried an hour earlier. No dice. Now they’ve towed the car to the service shop.

Come on. Seriously?

Breaking them down

Boxes, that is. I keep breaking down boxes. Make ‘em flat and carry ‘em out to the garage, where they await some other fate that doesn’t involve me or my stuff.

Meanwhile, we have a problem. We got used to our rental house’s many built-in bookshelves, and now we’re bookshelf poor in our own space. The problem is that bookshelves are either a.) crazy expensive or b.) super-cheap looking. Is there no solid wood bookshelf available for under $350? Come on. I hate the word “veneer.” Is it just me, or does the phrase “genuine oak veneer” seem like a paradox?

At what point do I get to have those wall-to-wall bookshelves that movie professors always seem to have?  Does any normal academic have a sweet bookshelf setup? Isn’t that one thing we should splurge on? But, of course, we cannot. Something like this would cost mondo bucks, which we tend not to have.

That’s why I suggest that every English grad student be required to take a 2-hour course in woodworking. This could would teach how to construct shelving of all kinds. Shelves and only shelves. Week 1: “How to Use a Tablesaw.” Week 2:  “Adjustable Slats” Week 3: “To Stain or not to Stain?” Think of it as another kinds of methods course.

Moving, Day 1

Maybe I have finally moved so often that I no longer think about it. My body goes into a kind of autopilot. It knows all the routines, and it even knows the pains. I don’t complain—–don’t even feel like it. The lack of complaint isn’t because I like moving. I really don’t. But I also don’t hate it. I also don’t feel indifferent to it.

Maybe the feeling is more like a habit. It’s like rubbing my feet together as I fall asleep. That’s a ritual I’ve done since I was a kid. There’s nothing that feels “good” about it; it’s just what my body does as I fall asleep. It’s a habit. And now moving is a large-muscle habit. My concentration zones out, allowing my body to do the walking (or lifting, as it happens to be).

Anyway, tomorrow is a hard day. Sunday will be even harder. I don’t dread it, for some reason. It is what it is. I’ll just zone out and think about what a cutie that new Rickert kid is.

Don’t start

Home. We’re home. Or, better said: we are back in the house that serves as home for one more week. Then we’ll be in our real home, the one we are buying on Thursday. The washer and dryer are upstairs, and I am thrilled about that feature. Maybe now I will avoid huge piles of laundry that cause me to constantly wonder if it’s still “not okay” to wash my clothes in the shower with me.

Delta cancelled our flight, but then agreed to put us on a later one. Then they lost our luggage. And then they delivered it. I came home to find some rather disappointing strings of emails. Perhaps the best one was from my chair, who told me that there was a word misspelled on my departmental website. (I’ll let you in on a secret here: there are probably shitloads of words misspelled on that site.) That–well, that combined with a one sentence email informing me that my research leave proposal had been shot down–made me feel a little stupid. Then I got two Linkin requests, and I really started to feel like I was somebody again.

All in all, RSA still remains one of my favorite conferences. The papers and people at RSA have a range of intellect and depth that you’ll never find at the similarly timed C&W. (Comment? Go ahead, make my day.) On the heals of a great interdisciplinary rhetoric conference whose topics spanned and pushed against traditional disciplnary boundaries, it did feel strange to find this message from a CRTNET reader:

The last issue of QJS (May, 2008) contained a total of 116 pages (aside from 8 pages of front and back matter). Of these, 68 were devoted to articles and 47 to book reviews. Further, of the twelve books reviewed only three (25 percent) were written by NCA members (at least according to the online members list). [Btw, I here make the partially untrue assumption that NCA = “our field”]. This observation is not to fault the journal editor or the book review editor, but to raise a few questions. First, why is one of the most important journals in our field devoting so much space to book reviews? Again, this is not to fault the book authors or the book reviewers but simply to ask why this is the case. Second, why is so much book review space devoted to books written by people in other fields (and I do recognize the need for synergy) and so little space to books written by NCA members? Third, why aren’t more research articles by people in our field being published in QJS?

I’m one of those QJS reviewers in the May issue. You’d prefer a quieter table, perhaps?

Liveblogging RSA - a few fragments.

Friday morning. Handshakes, some hugs. The questions begin: “How’s Missouri?” “How are you guys liking Missouri?” “And now you are at . . . (quick look at nametag) Missouri, right?” “Are you all settled in at your new job?” “What’s the weather like there? Is it hot in summer?”

Yesterday afternoon, our panel went off nicely. People talked to each other and we had 60% less boredom than a typical panel presentation.

Hallway chats. Reception chats over some buffet food. Sidewalk chats. You really are just as much of a jackass as I remember.

“Have you seen any good panels?”

“It’s nice to meet you.” We’ve met before. Several times. We did a panel together a couple years ago, remember?

Seattle in a great town. Really, really great.

The conference scene really encourages something I call “The Lookaround.” This is where you’re talking to someone while they are looking around everywhere but at you. They’re scoping the room for other people, while you have to play out the farce of a conversation that neither of you really wants to be having. It usually ends with the Lookarounder saying, “Ooooh, there’s Joe Schmoe! Excuse me for a second, I’m going to go give him a hello.” I’ve done The Lookaround, and I’ve also had The Lookaround done to me. I just wonder if I’m ever in the scopes of another person’s Lookaround.

Did I mention that I like Seattle? Good food. Good beer. Nice atmosphere.

Connections

I’m sitting at the Kansas City airport, enjoying the free WIFI. (KC, you just got a whole bunch cooler.) And I’m chatting on Gmail with my spouse. He happens to be sitting five feet away from me. But we prefer to talk online.

I need a cookie. Suddenly, Starbucks seems 75% less evil.