Carson's Week of Conferences

Carson presented at two back to back conferences for a week at the end of May. 

The first one was at University of Texas - Austin. 

He stayed in a dorm for the first time ever!

Ready to go!

The second conference was the North American Patristics Society (actual acronym people use when talking about it - NAPS - this does make me laugh) in Chicago. He stayed with friends from Moody in Wheaton and commuted into the city for the conference.

Professor

Since I don't take pictures of Carson heading off to school on a daily basis, I sort of forget to write updates about him! You won't be surprised to hear that he made all As in his FIVE classes last semester, or that in addition to being a graduate assistant and grading a million papers, as of last semester, he is now assistant editor of a journal on campus, and the regional representative of a society. Carson says "yes" to things and takes on so much each semester, that it's overwhelming to ME. Either he's very good at hiding the stress, or he's just amazing at taking on tons of things at one time. I'm thinking it's the latter. He was on break from mid-December until early January, but he still went in to the office or worked on things daily, often feeling bad for only giving 100% instead of his usual 700%.

Carson returned to school the first Wednesday of the new year, which was sort of a strange day to begin the school year. He is TEACHING this semester for the first time ever, which is really exciting! He's got a class of 48 students for Multicultural Film in the 20th Century. Nope, that's not remotely what he's studying, but his funding this year is from the Humanities department and they have about 12 sections of this class each semester, so there you go. He's having fun so far, and loves teaching and finds his students to be very engaged and interested in the material, which is super encouraging.

Beyond teaching, Carson is in four classes and is studying one language (he explained that this is not an additional class, but I believe it is graded and there is work required, so I'm not clear on the particulars). That language is Ge'ez, which I'm guessing you hadn't heard of either. It's an ancient Ethopic language that was essentially a precursor to contemporary Amharic (but that's how I understand it - so click right here for real information on it). His other classes contain more words and phrases and people groups I've never heard of and cannot remember.

Carson says that this semester is going to "kick his butt", which he has said for every semester since undergrad, and at the end of it, he somehow emerges with an A. I anticipate this semester as being no different. He's certainly busy though. He leaves on the 6:30 bus every morning (free bus fare with student ID!) which gets him to school at around 7:15. He spends his days studying, researching, writing, preparing to teach, teaching, and in classes of his own. He catches the 5:35pm bus home Monday-Wednesday-Friday and is home by around 6-6:30 (his class on Tuesday and Thursday gets out at 5:45 so I pick him up). We eat dinner, watch Jeopardy, and either hang out talking or being lazy in front of the TV in the evenings before we go to bed at about 9:30.

I've probably said this before, but I take off weekends and Carson doesn't study on Saturdays so that we can spend the day together. Sometimes we plan our Saturdays with a trip to Goodwill (the Goodwill stores here are simply amazing and there are a ton of them and they even have bookstores which you know we love) or a walk around a lake. Sometimes we plan to clean our apartment or laze around in sweats, watching movies. The weekends are what we look forward to now, a chance to sleep, connect and explore.

Carson's week and his studies impress me. Without complaining, he takes on so much. In a way, he does do it to himself by biting off a lot more than many people could chew, but unlike some (okay, ME), he doesn't complain about over committing. He'll comment on it sometimes and wonder if he'll survive the semester, but he keeps his head down and plows through. Still, we're looking forward to May, when things get slightly less busy, even if only slightly.  

Stream of Consciousness: Life

January and February feel very long to me. I think it's the endless cold and snow and the fact that few events happen in our lives in these two months. We have a few things with friends and Superbowl plans but other than that it's life and nothing else, which isn't bad at all.

It was so refreshing to have Carson around over Christmas break that now feels bittersweet having him back to the grind. For awhile there he was dropping me off at work (and I was enjoying having my own personal chauffeur and windshield scraper) and picking me up and that was nice because even though he'd hit the books or take the car to his office to study, it was nice to see each other several times during the day. We've spent lots of time apart in our relationship and since Carson's been in grad school it feels normal to have just one night a week together. One thing that is new is that we are having a consistent night together for date night, which has never happened. We have Community Group on Mondays, Carson has class till 9:30pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and then he works at night on Friday, Saturday and sometimes Sunday. Guess how often I make dinner? That's right, not often.

I have Poison Oak again, which is just very strange and mysterious. My time outside has been limited to hurrying from the car to the house to work to Target or the grocery store. I haven't been pulling weeds or so much as touching a tool outside. I wore the Tshirt I wore when I first got Poison Oak in September, but I've washed and worn it probably five or six times since with no problems. And the weirdest part to me is that the Poison Oak is on my ribcage, which is not usually a place that gets such things unless you're doing yard work in a sports bra, which I wasn't. So that's been the most exciting thing lately. It was a flare up and has been healing really fast (about a week and a half in and it's mostly faded, while last time it took over two months to finally go away) with the application of calamine and super hot showers.

Because it's been cold, and so cold that our heater is overworking itself and still won't get past 63 degrees (which feels downright cold in our poor drafty house), I've been spending 90% of my time huddled under or on top of the electric blanket on our bed. Once again, that thing is the best thing that ever happened to a cold weather hater like me.

I've been trying to keep myself busy on these chilly days, so I've organized the upstairs landing (aka my craft area), moved the DVDs up there and done a load of laundry a day to give myself something to actually do. It's far to cold to think about running (my lungs feel like they'll explode when it's cold) so I've been running up and down our stairs and doing exercise DVDs. Carson on the other hand ran home the other night wearing shorts in NEGATIVE FOUR DEGREE weather.

I went through my old backup CDs from high school last week and found some serious blackmail... mostly blackmail for myself, since my braces days were long and unattractive. But it was fun to relive memories and to see how my friends and I dressed and even to look through the pictures and realize that there is a lot that I don't remember, which is saying a lot if you know me.

One thing I've been doing this year and hope I'll continue doing is to organize birthday cards for the month a few weeks before the month starts and have them addressed and ready to send out ON TIME. There's a post office at John Carroll so I just send them with Carson and he mails them for me. So far my plan is going well and it's January 23rd so that's 23/365 days of success.

The Ivy Leagues

Carson went on a short little trip over to New England to visit some PhD programs recently. He spent around 30 hours driving (he left Sunday afternoon and returned super super late on Tuesday), 14 hours in meetings, and approximately SIX hours sleeping. Terrible. But he made it home alive (at two in the morning!) and greatly enjoyed his visits over there. It was a great time for him to meet people in programs he is interested in and to learn more about what the schools might have to offer.

I didn't go, but I had him take my pocket-sized camera along to document the trip. I was surprised to find that he actually took pictures! You'll notice blue skies and lovely leaves... and you might also notice that he wears the same outfit on both days. When he was a few hours from home he called to say "You'll never believe it... I packed all my other things but I left my clothes in the closet!" So he bought these at Walmart late at night and wore them twice. I just thought that was a funny addition to the trip.

The first school he visited was Yale. Yale is in New Haven, Connecticut. Carson said the area is really cute, very much a college town. He got up extremely early to make it over there (he was staying with his brother in Pennsylvania) and had to drive through New York City, which he says that he surprisingly liked.

He even had people take pictures of him on the campus. I think he's certainly changed since knowing me; for the longest time, he would basically growl when I asked to take a picture. Now HE is taking them.

And the next day, he went to Princeton. Most of you may know this, but Princeton is in New Jersey. Carson says that this campus reminded him of Hogwarts, from Harry Potter.

Again, another picture he had someone take. Carson said that on both campuses, the students were super nice and more than willing to stop what they were doing to take a photo.