and then there was Winter

Winter quarter was sadly not much of an improvement over Autumn. I didn't do any theater, so I got out less. Perhaps I was less stressed, but as things ramped up with my thesis, I didn't notice, and was only aware of my ever-narrowing social life. However, I still had my delightful quartet, and only went to the doctor once and the hospital not at all. This was an improvement over my bi-weekly doctor's visits and one ER trip in Autumn. :) I was more or less over the mono, and returned to my daily gym work out, until one fine morning, hives appeared on my arms, and spread and worsened. 'Oh, hullo, hives,' said I, 'and where are you from?' 'Wouldn't you like to know,' they replied coyly. Having rid my apartment of allergens, at least to the best of my ability, I betook myself to the doctor, who said, 'oh, well, it's probably stress.' I felt like this was a bit unfair, not of the doctor, but of life, since the hives had significantly raised my stress level. Sadly, this saga is not completely ended. The bad hives only continued for two weeks, defying a course of antihistamines and the first round of steroids, succumbing eventually to the combined powers of atarax, steroids and calamine lotion applied three times a day. However, they still take any opportunity to reappear, such opportunities including but not limited to: hot showers, scented lotion/sunblock, and heat such as that which is currently afflicting the midwest. :( While I have always had sensitive skin, this is a bit absurd.
But having that be essentially the only health problem for the quarter was still an improvement. My classes were interesting. I continued with ASL (joy!), and took my last Core requirement: math. Actually, I took geometry, and loved it. It was a tiny class, and the professor was engaging and patient, despite being a genius (he had a PhD from Columbia at age 19). He said he had no interest in failing any of us, but in teaching us as much as we could learn in the time allotted. I was also reminded of why I loved geometry (it makes SENSE unlike the rest of math). Since he didn't really fancy giving an exam (well, for finals, there were two midterms), he suggested we write papers. As I was writing enough to be going on with, I didn't like this plan, so instead, he suggested I write a series of proofs, and I did this in the best main lesson book style. Once a steiner student, always a steiner student. I did a cover page and everything. :) I also took my last degree requirement, the one and only American lit course I took in my college career: the poetry of Moore, Bishop, Lowell, and Plath. I enjoyed it more than I expected, again mostly due to the brilliance of the professor, a young PhD candidate, who clearly adores these poets. Her enthusiasm was infectious. Moore was my favorite, with her carefully constructed poems and stunning imagery. I liked Bishop for her emotion, some of Lowell for the crazy, but not much of Plath. Both Lowell and Plath, but especially Plath, occasionally took too much joy in being shocking simply for the sake of it, with no other point than the shock. In fact, if I'm remembering correctly, my favorite poem of Plath's was the one about Ted Hughes (I forget the title), in which she imitates his style. oh well. We read their letters at the same time, because they all knew each other, and were friends, and Plath's letters were delightful, and I enjoyed them much better than her poetry.
At some point, I met with my thesis adviser, and made the mistake of asking for an extension on an intermediate deadline (not the final deadline), as I had been so ill. She said she couldn't do that, and offered these alternative options as comfort: I could not graduate in the Spring, and thus have until July to finish the thesis, or I could give up and not finish it at all, seeing as how it wasn't necessary for the English degree. I didn't think much of either of these suggestions, and in fact, they just increased my stress level, since I felt in them a judgment (almost certainly imagined) of my personal ability to finish this project. In reality, I believe my adviser was trying to give me the options of ways out of my situation.
On the positive side, Winter Quarter did include the Brent House retreat. We went to St. Gregory's abbey in western Michigan, and it was lovely. The monks there do all of the daily offices, starting at 4am, and I made it to several (not all of them this year). The services are comfortingly regular and straightforward, meditative. There was also a lot of snow, and we went sledding, which was loads of fun.
Oh, and I forgot about Winter vacation! I went straight from school directly to visit Kate in Texas, where I got in lots of good riding. A highlight of that was when I was doing a course, probably of five small jumps, and as I was coming up to the last one, the instructor called out that I should add on the roll-top, something I'd never done before. Not having time to panic, I just sailed over it like it was nothing. Ok, so maybe to most riders it *is* nothing, but not to me. And I did it. :D From Texas, I went to California to visit Jayne and see the San Francisco Dickens Fair. I loved it! It was indoors, and quite similar to Renaissance festivals, but the entertainment and costumes were, of course, different. A lot of the vendors overlapped though. My favorite part was Pickwick's Warehouse, where they had dancing. Sometimes, it was groups performing, and sometimes it was open dancing, when you could either dance with the people who were there (and knew what they were doing), or with your friends if you preferred. It was great fun. Caroline joined us for that, looking elegant as ever. Here is a picture of the three of us:
My dress was courtesy of the wonderful Helen Welford.
From there it was home for Christmas, the comforts of home, my family and my cats. :)
And with that happy memory, I will leave you until later, when I will return with the final catch-up post, covering Spring quarter and the first month of the rest of my life, post-graduation.

In which I try once again to catch up

As always, I must apologize for the long delay in posting. My hope is to catch this blog up to the present, so that I can update more frequently, and that without the pressure of months of news, I will be able to tell the more entertaining stories of daily life.
When I left the last post, I had just gotten to the end of the summer, and the Michigan Renaissance Festival. I went straight from there to Chicago and school. During the Festival, I had begun doing reading for my thesis (by begun, I mean, I had a tub with some thirty books, and I read the relevant passages of all of them before school started). Once I got back to school though, the work started in earnest. I was frantically trying to come up with an actual topic, having finally settled on my text, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In addition to work on my thesis, I began studying American Sign Language, which is incredibly fascinating. That class (which I continued through Spring quarter) ended up being one of the best parts of my year. I also took a far less interesting course called Sense, Sensibility and Sexuality on nineteenth century novels. It was rather disappointing, despite the tantalizing title. The third course was the spot filler which I dubbed the 'please research for your thesis' class. Basically, it allowed me (or any student writing a thesis) to only take two classes, and still count as a full time student. Still, I kept busy.
I was, of course, still working at the library. I got promoted, which meant that I got to play with fun tools. I checked books in, and eventually also got to do data entry--actually, this is not sarcastic. Any task which allows me to sit while at work is a thing to be coveted. The best part was the machine that printed out new barcode stickers. It made very futuristic noises. (hey, simple pleasures are the key to happiness).
One of the other pleasures of this year was a quartet that I organized with David Bevington, who plays the viola (when he's not busy being a world-famous Shakespeare scholar, of course). We recruited a couple of violinists, and had a lovely informal group. We met every few weeks, and sight read every time, just enjoying the music, and not expecting great quality. Afterwords, we would sit in David's kitchen and drink tea and chat. It was really lovely. David Bevington is one of the great things at the University of Chicago. He is technically retired, but teaches almost as often as the full-time professors. His lectures are brilliant. But beyond that, he fosters the culture on campus. He plays in the Chamber Orchestra and supports University Theater, as well as always being up for such ventures as my little quartet. For all of these things, he hosts great parties, with good drinks and boundless food, and usually music. During my second year, he hosted a small party, only for musicians, and we all sat down and quaffed, and sight read, and I felt very bohemian in the best sense. When I grow up, I hope to be half as cool as David, and not just for his excellent scholarship.
I costume designed for the play The Shape of Things, by Neil LaBute. It is a version of the Pygmalion story, with the subject's social clout changed through appearance, set in modern times. It is a good, although slightly traumatizing, play, but costumes are absolutely vital, since they tell a big part of the story. Still, this is the show design of which I am most proud, so it was worth the hard work. I built a prosthetic nose for the main character, who had to undergo a nose job in the middle of the show (eventually, the director decided to have the nose job happen on stage...), and friends of the actor even had time recognizing what was different about his face. I'm pretty proud of that. Of course, all of the costume changes, the nose not least, meant that I had to be backstage every night.
This brings me to what made Autumn quarter so stressful. In the midst of all of these responsibilities, I came down with mono. I was quite sick, but didn't have a diagnosis until the week before the show opened. At that point, I felt that I couldn't let everyone down, so I slogged through. It was rather epic, to be honest. I suppose I must not have had the worst case of mono, since I made it out of bed, but it also required huge amounts of will power, and I wonder who could make a quantitative judgment of how bad one person's experience of a disease is. Someone with a worse case of mono could have more strength of will and do more, but by the same token, someone with a milder case could still spend 18 hours in bed. I certainly wanted to, but felt that it wasn't an option. I also had a lot of scares, for lack of a better word, of worse complications. First, a two-week long stomach ache, which the doctor thought might be pancreitis. It cleared up, and the tests were negative: phew, what a relief. I was also having quite a lot of trouble breathing, which, after it had continued for a long time, made the doctor worry about blood clots in the lungs. A blood test showed something that indicated that this might indeed be what was wrong with me, so I trotted off to the ER for a CT scan, and a five hour period of languishing in uncertainty. Luckily, the scan came back clear. The doctors in the ER were rude and dismissive the whole time, and it was a rather miserable experience. I am very glad that these things ended up being empty scares, but I am also glad that the doctor in the Student Care Center took them seriously and investigated them. It was terrifying at the time, not least the periods of waiting for results. Anyways, thank goodness that's all passed!
Amidst all of this, I dated a boy. The best thing to be said about this is that if one has to kiss a lot of frogs before finding one's prince, well, I'm one frog closer.
I started attending Church of the Atonement, in Roger's Park. This church is *very* high church, to say the least. However, they are very liberal, and everyone is incredibly welcoming (N.B. these things do not always go hand in hand, btw!). I am enjoying it there, and look forward to spending more time and getting more involved now that it's not an hour and a half commute via the CTA. :) I love coming home smelling of incense I continued to attend Brent House in the evening, although I did not get as involved as I had in previous years. I preached once a quarter, which was good practice. Does it ever get less nerve wracking? I would also like the writing process to become less fraught. There were some pretty tough spots. I am told that, on the whole, my sermons were quite good, but I don't have an unbiased opinion on that front.
I think this brings us through Autumn Quarter. I will leave Winter and Spring for later posts (hopefully sooner rather than later though), as this is getting quite long.
Dear readers, should any of you still exist, I thank you for your patience and fidelity. Perhaps the content of these posts can present my excuses as to why I have not written sooner. Otherwise, I can only apologize.
God bless!

Happy New Year!

As this year draws to a close, I am painfully aware that I have not maintained my resolution to be more frequent and regular with updates to my blog, nor have I been more faithful in keeping in touch with my distant friends. So, once again, my New Year’s resolution will be to fix both of those problems. Also, I suppose I could resolve to figure out what I’m doing next year, but that’s more of a necessity than a resolution.

Anyways, what has been happening since I posted in the summer? The Renaissance Festival was great, as expected. I survived the ordeal of living in a tent on the edge of a swamp in high mosquito season, mostly because it got too cold for mosquitoes in the last few weeks-dropping down to freezing temperatures at night. Of course, this presented other problems, i.e. how to stay warm enough at night! But cocooned in my down comforter, wool blankets, and warm pajamas, I did just fine. My tent turned out not to be entirely waterproof, at least not under the heavy pelting rains that hit us early on. However, a tarp rigged up in the trees just over my tent roof kept me-or at least my stuff-dry. Food was decent-my bosses have a Sam’s Club membership, and everyone contributed $20 to the weekly shopping trip. That meant that we got much better food than we could have otherwise managed. Most of the time we cooked dinner together (usually a slab of meat grilled, with veg and starch), and had sandwiches for lunch. One time, one of the knights went home to go hunting and brought back a whole lot of dove breasts, which were really quite tasty.

So much for basic living. The work was also highly enjoyable, naturally. On the weekends, I got up fairly early to get into costume, before heading up to the stables. There I show groomed the horses, with the other female squire, Nikki. This meant grooming their coats more carefully than just for a ride, as well as braiding their manes and tails. That sounds like a lot more fun than it is, because you quickly realize that horses have a lot more hair than you think. In other words, it takes an awfully long time to put a horse’s mane into little tiny braids with little tiny rubber bands at the end. Still, it was working with horses, so I didn’t really mind. Then, two knights and two squires had to go to front gate-the knights to accompany the Queen on her entrance into the village, one squire to clean up after the horses, and one squire (either Nikki or I) to ride the Queen’s horse, Baron, to the gate. He was side-saddled, but my boss Kate did not see the point of leading a horse anywhere when there was someone to ride it, so Nikki or I took him down and back in the morning. Then we had free time until noon, when we finished grooming the horses and tacked them (and the knights) up for the first show. The rest of the day was a cycle of doing shows, getting untacked to rest, tacking up again, etc. It was fun, but hard work. During the show, the job of the squires was to hand lances (and anything else needed) to the knights, and to clear the field of dropped or broken lances, helmets, knights or anything else that might get in the way of charging horses. We also had to catch the horses after the knights had fallen off, which wasn’t too hard, as most of them trotted happily to the dais, knowing that they got to rest there. However, everything had to be done at a run, to keep the show running smoothly, and in case one of the horses wasn’t so relaxed. Nothing ever went quite as rehearsed, but nothing went truly, horribly wrong (ie. nobody died during a show). There were only two serious injuries during shows: at one point, two knights improvved in an extra punch, and the fan of the elbow guard of the knight doing the punching ripped the punchee’s cheek. That meant six stitches in the face, a show missed, and his squire had to do all the talking during shows, which was actually hilarious, because it was Nikki who ended up uttering dire threats to the other knights (and doing a damn good job of it too). Unfortunately, the next day, the same knight got his knee guard caught in his reins as he went flying over his horse’s neck, and cut Oscar’s tongue. So, Oscar was out for the last show, but he was already healing up by the end of the day. And those were the only serious injuries during the shows. Cuts, bruises, bumps, near misses and hurt feelings abounded, but those are all soon mended.

We did lose one horse during the run, to Patomic horse fever. Her name was Isabeau, and she was a sweet little thoroughbred, ridden by Troy in the show. We found her the Saturday of Memorial day weekend, looking like she was colicking. Kate, who knows a lot about caring for horses, did what she could and called the vet. I don’t know what all they did, because the terms were all new to me, but I believe they gave her a shot, and posted Nikki (who was Izzy’s squire) to keep her up. Basically, horses’ digestive systems, which are already delicate, don’t work very well when they are lying down; they need the gravity to work. So when a horse is having digestive trouble, you have to keep her standing, while all she wants to do, more than anything, is lie down and roll around to ease the discomfort. Rolling is the worst idea, because the intestines can get tangled. Horses, like babies, colic because they have no forward movement in their digestive systems, no burbing, no barfing. Babies grow out of it as their muscles strengthen, but horses just don’t have that mechanism. Anyways, Nikki kept watch on Izzy, making sure she stayed standing, and making her run around every so often to aide digestion. Izzy showed much improvement by the end of the day, so we assumed it was just colic, and went on with our lives. She didn’t work Sunday, but Monday she was back in the show, seemingly fit as a fiddle. Tuesday afternoon, however, she was lying down and groaning again. Nikki and I took her up to the lawn in front of the house where Kate and Robb were staying, because grass cleans horses’ systems out, and what she needed to do was have a great big poo. Once she got up there, she started trotting around, whinnying for the other horses and farting, which was a good sign, and also a good laugh. So after a few hours, we took her back down again in high hopes. The next morning, however, she was worse. I was eating my breakfast in the tent, when Stephanie, Troy’s girlfriend, came running into camp shouting our names, or for anyone who knew about horses. We all bolted over to the stables and found Izzy lying down and groaning. It was almost impossible to get her to her feet. This time the vet realized that it was patomic horse fever. He put her on an IV, and told us to keep her on her feet at all costs, and change the IV bags every hour. We took turns watching her and changing the bags. It was pretty grim. She was very unhappy. She took to blowing bubbles in her water bucket to express her displeasure, but that was the only funny thing that happened the whole day. By the end, having had 40L of liquid pumped into her, without passing anything at all, we knew her kidneys had failed, and the vet came to put her out of her misery. It was really sad, but the right thing to do. That night we held a royal wake.

On a higher note, I’ll tell you about the weekday events that happen just for the performers and people who live out at the fair. On Mondays, there was Bizarre Bazaar, where anyone who wanted to could set up a booth and sell anything, from massage therapists with their tables, to old clothes from someone’s closet, to a litter of puppies. There was a vegetable booth, and a Thai woman selling food and telling fortunes, alarmingly accurately. Wednesday night was the wine tasting, where everyone brought a bottle, for under $10. The bottles were masked, and everyone expressed their opinions, without any special vintner’s knowledge, with some hilarious result. Then, after everything had been tasted and rated, the rest was consumed, with the absolute losers being saved for when we could no longer taste anything. Then there was the dance party. J On the second to last week, this was a costume party, with this year’s theme being ‘birds of a feather’. Not being able to find anything feathery other than witch hats with feathers on them, Nikki and I went as witches. The best costume (to my mind) was someone who dressed up as Ray, the falconer, and did a remarkable impression of him. But I guess you had to be there.

This summer was an amazing experience, and there are so many more stories to tell, but this is already too long, and I still have three months to write up to bring me to the present. In fact, I am hoping to run off and work for Kate and Robb next year, provided I can find enough work for the year. I would need to buy a car (so if anyone knows of a cheap, but good car, that is on the market or will be between now and June, you would have my undying gratitude), but my parents are being very supportive. It was actually my dad’s idea, originally, something he denies hotly now. In the grander scheme of things, they would rather I get a job with benefits, so that the next time I break something or get really sick (ie. probably next November, seeing as that month seems to be bad for my health), I would be safely provided for. But that dream is definitely along the same lines as wishing Mary would marry a rich business man who would make sure she remembered things, and also provide her with health insurance. Parents can dream, I suppose. J I am incredibly grateful to them for even entertaining this wild idea, which by necessity relies so heavily on their financial (as well as moral) support.

To be continued…