trials of two cities
skookumchick | August 12, 2008As I'm transitioning away from an academic/personal life of long-distance commuting, I thought this would be a good time (or perhaps the last good time?) to share some of my tips for how to help one's marriage/partnership survive two academic careers in two cities.
Of course, I only have this last year as experience with faculty life (although my husband has been a faculty member for 5). But before that, there was 4 years of my commuting as a grad student (a 3.5 hr commute), and 1.5 years of LDR (a plane trip) as an undergrad. But that was a long time ago, and I was a different person then…
skookumchick | August 10, 2008
Photo from 2005, before many paint, gutter, and plant upgrades
I'm sitting at our dining room table in Illinois, and the sunlight is slanting through the windows onto the wall where a favorite print used to live. The moving truck comes tomorrow to move the rest of our furniture to Indiana, and we close on the sale of the house on Thursday. So this is the last night we'll spend in the house that we moved into in 2003 (before we were married, or even engaged!).
I'm a little sad. Not because we're facing the end of the long-distance commuting (on and off for most of the 10 years we've…
skookumchick | May 18, 2008Hahahah, I foolishly thought that, when summer officially started, my life would settle down. Hohoho, so why don't I try to complicate things by, oh, I don't know, how about moving, and putting our house on the market?
So here are some updates that give a somewhat authentic snapshot of what I'm doing right now, a perfect example of how work and "the rest of life" cannot be separated.
As I glibly mentioned a few weeks ago, my husband has decided to go on academic leave. I wasn't sure how to blog about this as he had not yet made his decision public to the world (he had told his department…
skookumchick | February 15, 2008And quick on the heels of my posts on living in two places comes one of those weekends when it is particularly challenging. As you know, I drove home yesterday evening, and in addition to hearing about the NIU shooting (which, at the time, people weren't reporting anything other than the number of people who had been taken to hospital), and some hintings of weather problems on Sunday that the weather people were watching.
Now today, the weather people are saying that freezing rain may start here in Central Illinois Saturday night, turn to rain and sleet Sunday morning, and then snow Sunday…
skookumchick | February 14, 2008Guess who we've been invited to have dinner with on Tuesday night? Think super famous American scientist who the administration tried to muzzle...
The answer below the fold... tee hee!
It's James Hansen! Yeah, that James Hansen, the top scientist at NASA who the Bush II administration tried to silence on global warming, but who then went and called the New York Times instead!! OMG!!!
A snippet from the New York Times article from January of 2006:
The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the…
skookumchick | February 14, 2008We've met, we've gotten educated, we've gotten married, and almost all in two different cities. Now I've quit my job so I can finish my dissertation, and we live together, what a concept.
Okay, year together, blah blah blah. Gardening, working, eating locally, helping each other, all good things. I'm not kidding when I say it was a relief that we still liked each other - I had heard all these horror stories (okay, maybe 2) of academics who lived apart for 25 years, retire and live together and then get divorced because they had never had to live together before.
Anyway, there are no…
skookumchick | February 13, 2008My husband and I will have been "together" for 10 years this July. Of those 10 years, we have lived about 3.5 in the same city. It's a hard gig.
We met when I was an undergrad and Steve was a grad student (scandalous!) over the summer when I was home from college, working in a water chemistry lab. He made goofy jokes about the carbon analyzer and wore Wallace and Gromit t-shirts, and our first date was to go see Mulan (no kidding. We now consider Disney to be bscs=blood-sucking corporate scum, an opinion we recognize we can only hold for now because we don't have kids who love them yet…