It’s been about two weeks since I made the move up to Bowling Green from Murray. The time has been largely uneventful, both the students and the university have been quite nice so far, but still somewhat traumatic. Not since my last year of grad. school have Hannah and I spent so much time apart. We’re working on re-learning how to relate our days over the phone without boring each other to tears. I come home to a very empty apartment. I sleep and take my meals on a yoga mat in the small bedroom, and cook a simple meal for one in the honestly overstocked, but under-utensiled kitchen. I’ve included a few pics I took for Hannah’s reference. Pretty sparse for now, but she has a knack for making a hole in the ground homey, so I’ll be sure to post “after” shots when she does her magic.
Bowling Green is small, but pretty. It seems everything important is on one of two major streets in town, Main or Wooster. There are some decent looking shops and restaurants on downtown Main, and more college-friendly chains and Mexican joints on Wooster. The one troubling bit is the lack of full strength liquor (while we don’t drink much, after 7 years in Louisiana access to alcohol has become one of the major factors when judging the level of civilization an area has). There may be one proper liquor store in town–I haven’t stopped by yet since I can live without it–everywhere else only has “Diluted” whiskys, gins, and rums. Heathens!
I’m typically spending at least 12 hours a day in the shop. Mondays and Wednesdays I teach from 8:30-5, two beginning print classes followed by lithography. It feels like a slow start to the semester, because it took a week to get my contract it’s only within the last few days I have been able to access the university Blackboard etc. As a result I’m a bit behind and students seem to be following my lead. First projects are due next Monday so there’s plenty of time to get folks back on track. I’ve been leading by example, finishing two lithos in the time it’s taken students to draw one, and putting on a pretty effective linocut demo. Priority number one now becomes finishing the screen layer for the print I’m turning in for the Make it Work portfolio (embarrassingly late, but something had to fall through the cracks).
I have an office in the art building I share with a Graphic Design professor, but I have yet to make use of it. Instead, I have been spending hours catching up with correspondence and the news on an iMac in the print studio supply room. From here I have been handling the upcoming MilwauKEY show: finding a new venue, designing a show card, and drafting a synopsis for the SGCI conference guide. Hannah and the others have also done a great job keeping me abreast of the developments with Nashville Print Revival. There’s been a bit of surfing for fun things to do in Detroit and Cleveland too, as well as reserving a room for the Milwaukee conference.
In the evenings I had been watching the same old movies from our collection, but, thank the gods, I finally have access to the school library and have checked out a few films from Ebert’s Great Movies list. The last two nights I’ve watched Laura and La Ceremonie, respectively. Tomorrow I have The Double Life of Veronique queued up. I have a hunch I’ll be checking out all of these again so that Hannah can watch them. Laura was a terrific example of mannered performances making up for a dubious plot with beautiful supporting work by a very flamboyant Clifton Webb and a very young Vincent Price. La Ceremonie is a wonderfully constructed French thriller where animosity builds slowly toward a lethal denoument–it would be inappropriate to call the rather matter of fact violence near the end the climax–due to a seemingly innocuous secret.
I took a road trip up to Toledo today to give platelets at the Red Cross, but was sent away because they needed to gather my records from the other places I’ve donated this year to have an idea of my red blood cell loss etc. An irritation to be sure. The up side is now I can actually have a beer or two when I find a spot to watch the playoff games this afternoon. There are a very few times during the year I miss TV, but this is one of them. It wasn’t so bad eating alone at a bar last weekend, but it will be more fun Super Bowl Sunday when Hannah’s up here with me. Photos, links, and more updates to come–Hannah always needs to walk me through that stuff–stay tuned…
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