German Houses Redux

Trying to move long distance is not a lot of fun. I'm expecting Politica home from a house-hunting trip any minute now. I haven't gotten the full scoop yet, but so far we have learned that I'm drawn to green spaces and she's drawn to more of a city neighborhood feel. That's OK: I rather like the city neighborhood she likes, too. Too bad we can't seem to find the right house. (Note to Universe: you could send a house anytime now. We'd be very grateful.)

At the moment, the options seem to be:

• move to small suburb, which is very small, and very homogenous, both in terms of income and race, and have a short commute on a not-so-interesting road. The upside? A neighborhood full of kids, with reasonably spacious houses that are new enough to have modern conveniences like large closets and family rooms but old enough to be reasonably well constructed. Reasonable size backyards.
  
• move to Germany (the pseudonymous one, which really needs a new pseudonym, but it so cracks me up to hear CG still making this confusion that I'm having trouble coming up with a better one), which is pretty diverse in terms of income, not so much in terms of race. The downside? so far, very hard to find a house we like.
• rent, but finding a rental actually doesn't seem easier (although I've not yet tried very hard).

So far, Politica has seen two houses she's enthusiastic about: The One That Turned Out Not To Be For Sale, and The One That's Listed for $119,000 more than We Hoped To Spend. Then there's the bad floor plan on the busy road, the OK house right next to a crisis pregnancy center/transisional housing/rehab center, the perfectly functional and modern house in the suburbs, The Hobbit House in the suburb's little center....this is very frustrating, and I beg your pardon and indulgence for whining about it here. It's a mysterious housing market--the neighborhood we really want to move to seems to be FSBO central in which houses get snapped up almost immediately, and houses are for sale without really being listed (Politica saw two or three houses that she just heard about from someone while she was visiting around). Sigh. This too shall pass, right? People do manage long-distance moves all the time. But still, sigh.

What Politica is Missing (besides us, of course)

• 62 performance reviews
• countless pieces of paper scattered on the floor as an illustration of how mad Curious Girl got today. Look how mad I am, Mama! she screeched.
  
• 9 days away from the office (well, I did go in to change my "I'm away for the week" sign to the "I have limited office hours this week" sign. Does that count?)
  
• 7 flight segments for me and Curious Girl within a month
• 3 loaves of bread (one to Mississippi Friend, one to Historian Friend, one for us)
  
• 2 days of no! school! for Curious Girl (great for her teachers, not so great for us working parents)
• 2 major tantrums in! one! day!
  
• 1 wiggly tooth (so we may find out soon whether the Tooth Fairy really does leave baby sisters, as CG maintains she does. I remain skeptically amused.)
  

Germany

So here's what I haven't been blogging about for the past few months: we're moving. New jobs, new house, new part of the country. A couple of my colleagues read this sometimes, so I didn't want to spill the beans here before things went public at work.

We're moving.

I'm still trying to get my head around this, despite the fact that I've known since June that things were likely going to shape up this way. June is a funny time for an academic interview, but for a variety of reasons I can't explain on a (presumably) pseudonymous blog, we ended up with some off-cycle interviews, and amazingly, have managed, again, to end up with a pair of tenure-line job offers. A pair of tenured job offers, in fact.

So, we're moving, and I'm a lame-duck department chair, which is an interesting role. Last year at this time, I was going through my first round of performance reviews with my large (60+) department, and it felt like the first in a long series. I approached the reviews with the sense that I was going to be the chair who'd shepherd the assistant professors through tenure, who'd (hopefully) coach a few associate professors through their second promotion. Now, we all know I"m leaving, so that throws my role into some confusion.

I get reviewed by the other full professors in the department. One of them asked me last week, Why do we review you? If you view performance reviews as supervision, it doesn't make sense. But if you view performance reviews as a way of gauging how individual work helps add up to the department's collective work, it does make sense. This is the most cat-herding part of the year, because some people welcome the performance review, some are constitutionally opposed to them, and some just don't give a fig either way. So I write my reviews partly with an eye on the colleague's attitude toward it all, partly with an eye on their career trajectory. I'll still meet with everyone to talk about their reviews--after all, their career paths don't stop for a year just because the department chair is changing.

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Why Germany in the title of the post? I need to think of a pseudonym for New Hometown, but for today, it's Germany. We visited Germany--the real Germany--last summer, and one of the cities we saw in Germany has a name that, if you are a small child and transpose sounds and then change a few sounds and rhyme them, sounds a little like New Hometown. It took me several months to figure this out, as it explains Curious Girl's questions like "Do they speak English in New Hometown?" "What if I go to school and I can't understand the people?"

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We're downsizing. It's likely we'll end up in a smaller house than the one we have now, and I figure that's only a problem if you try to have stuff that exceeds the function of the smaller house. So I'm sorting through things. I just found library bookmarks from my hometown library that I probably got in 7th grade. I cleaned out a jewelry box and found the gold honors medal I got for graduating 8th grade. Actually, I didn't get it at my 8th grade graduation. I had the top grades in my class, as I recall, and thus qualified for a $300 scholarship for high school. But because I had won a scholarship from another source, the school didn't give me the $300 scholarship. They gave it to the next kid down. I didn't mind that so much, but I did mind that I left graduation without so much as a card or certificate or little medal that went with the award. I stewed about that for months, and finally my parents said, "Well, write to the principal." So I did, and she came to the house after dinner one night, apologized, and gave me this little medal. I didn't throw out the medal, but I think I might. I can't figure out a good decision rule about memorabilia. I don't want to erase my past, but I'm not sure the 8th grade medals need to come to Germany. (That said, another thing I have to decide about is the box of little medals and pins that my favorite uncle--now deceased--did save from his high school and college. I'm not sure what to do about those.)

But I was rather pleased to unearth my "Books, like friends, should be well-chosen" bookmark. I loved my hometown library.

Wish me decluttering strength, please.

WWID?

I'm trying to declutter, for various reasons. Heeding Tenured Radical's most excellent (and previously-linked-to) advice about moving (specifically, her injunction not to let any trash day pass by without attention to all the stuff of moving, which also applies to anyone trying to declutter), I have just endured hordes of mosquitos in order to carry out two bags of trash from the basement (various videotapes of TV episodes, various unlabeled videos that had been in the basement for several months, and old medical documents from 2000 that had gotten moldy in a box in a corner of the basement). I have discovered it is very easy to start pitching things if you start by looking for boxes that have been lurking in the basement for at least three years. Things I've not looked at for so long just don't seem quite so precious.

But......I have to admit, I can see where Curious Girl gets her "But this is so SPECIAL to me!" from when I look at certain kinds of things. Like the small wall hanging from Gujarat that one of my former students brought back for me seven years ago. I've lost touch with him, and I'd been wondering where the hanging--which I don't think ever actually got hung up--went. I found it tonight. I'm not sure I have a place here for it, but I'm not sure what to do with it. So I'm asking myself, "What would Ianqui do?" She frequently writes about environmental issues, and really models a very attainable approach to lifestyle changes: there are more radical environmental blogs out there, but Ianqui's simple emphasis on, well, simplicity and avoidance of overconsumption has really been a good companion for me in the past year as I've worked to think about consumption with a growing child. I had the chance to meet her last spring, and I hope she doesn't mind that I've created an alter-ego of her blog persona who lives in my head and is the imaginary recipient of my thinking about decluttering. My WWID conversations have stepped up quite a bit of late b/c of this decluttering project, helped along by the fact that Curious Girl's stuff has been exploding around the house. Curious Girl, not so interested in not consuming: she's a bundle of desire, always wanting more, more, more. Which is charming in its buoyancy, but which must be managed. (Fortunately, her desires come and go, and the fact that she loves to play pretend more than anything means that she doesn't need much. Much of what she wants seems to be a knee jerk reaction to seeing anything. She sees it, she wants it, in the moment. Not all those desires last. But we talk a lot about why I don't want to bring new stuff into the house if I can avoid it.)

In doing my ten-by-ten series (see sidebar), one of the things I noted about myself is that I sometimes value things too much because I don't trust in my relationships. I think if I keep things, it will make relationships meaningful. This is flawed reasoning: relationships are, and whether I keep mementos or old gifts or cards or whatnot doesn't change what the relationship is (or was). I got rid of the too-small-for-me-sweatshirt from my first girlfriend's college that she had given to me sometime in 1985. I'd kept the sweatshirt for years as a sweet reminder of a sweet time. But really, that sweetness is in my heart and my memories, and the unraveling and too-small sweatshirt in the back of my closet was only getting dusty. So off it went. But this hanging from my student? Harder to give away. But why keep it to have it in a box? Argh. WWID?

Another sort of thing I'm having trouble simply pitching are craft supplies. I don't want to throw away my large bag of yarn because, you know, I might use it for something someday. OK, that's probably not going to happen with most of it (although there's a fine skein there that I bought at the yarn shop in my college town sometime in 1982 which has followed me through probably 12 residences in 2 different countries. Maybe that I'll turn into mittens or a hat/scarf for CG this winter). So I won't use it. But someone could. I just don't know who. Ditto with a very large bag of tapisserie yarn in various colours. Or the box of cloth diapers that we mostly never used. I don't want to just give them to Goodwill for fear they won't get the proper use they could have. I don't want to throw them out because they're useful. But I can't quite figure out how to get them into the hands of someone who might use them. Overwhelming.

That said, I'm having good luck simply saying "tonight, I'll fill one bag (with trash, or with donations)" or "I'm going to find 5 things in the closet that can be passed on" or "find five pieces of junk in the basement to put out or 5 things to pass on to someone else"). That's not so bad.