The Make-Believe of a Beginning

My new house!

So I have some big news I've never actually written down here: this past February, I was offered (and accepted) a job as a Term Assistant Professor of English and Writing at the University of Tampa. It's a non-tenure track position, on one-year contracts (but indefinitely renewable), teaching-focused: I'll primarily be responsible for delivering courses in UT's required academic writing sequence. At a big research school like UConn, these kind of classes were mostly delivered by graduate students; UT does it mostly through term professors (and adjuncts, of course). So I don't think it's my final job, but it is hopefully a good stepping stone to something later on, and in the meantime, a job that I am perfectly happy to have. It pays well, the writing philosophy of UT is very close to what I'm used to, and it already seems like there's a good set of people here.

A small fraction of my books and Doctor Who CDs.

So, I live in Florida now? It's still weird, it still hasn't entirely sunk in yet. Like, I look out the front window of my new house and I don't yet think of this as my place. I lived in Connecticut for nine years, and Hayley and I lived in the same apartment there for seven, which is one of the longest stretches of my life where I've done essentially one thing. Thankfully, the differing timelines of higher ed and secondary ed meant that after I got my job, Hayley could apply for one herself, and she's teaching biology and earth/space science at an area high school.

Everything we own in three boxes!

We came down in June to scope a place out-- that was the earliest we could down due to Hayley's work obligations-- and that ended up being a little extra stressful, thanks to a last-minute decision to look into buying instead of just renting a home. We looked at both rentals and potential purchases, ended up putting in an offer just before we left (it was rejected), then put in another offer and it was accepted! So then suddenly we not only had to move 1,278 miles, but we had to co-ordinate all the components of buying a home at the same time.

The guy said it was one of the heaviest he'd ever picked up.

Somehow, though we muddled through despite a couple near crises, and, feeling pretty certain we would indeed close on time, loaded up three pods with our stuff and hit the road with two cat carriers, all of Hayley's plants, and a bunch of stuff so unimportant that we forgot to put it in the pods and now had to drag around with us.

(One thing I learned from this whole process is that it's surprisingly hard to get rid of stuff. Like we almost couldn't get rid of our couch, I had to sneak a bunch of stuff into Eastern Connecticut State University's dumpsters, and I had to pay $20 for the privilege of throwing away a twenty-year-old television! I did somehow manage to sell six Doctor Who VHS tapes on eBay, though.)

The trip down was good, if long (twenty-five in-car hours across three days, I think). We stopped in Philadelphia, where my sister lives, and got to experience some of the city's good food, and we stopped in Columbia, South Carolina, where a couple old UConn friends of ours live, where we got to see a minor league ball game and I ate German sausages at a street fair. There were only two pooping incidents in the cat carrier.

Oracle wants more furniture.

The house is nice, but settling in is happening slowly. We have a very large credit card bill to pay off from all the moving expenses, and we should be fine, but we can't exactly rush out and buy furniture to replace the stuff we got rid of. So we will have to wait a little bit to have anywhere to sit. Hopefully not much longer, and hopefully even sooner we will get a washer/dryer because the laundry is piling up!

Hayley's been working a few weeks now, and teaching for exactly two. I had my first pre-semester meeting a week ago Tuesday, beginning six days of meetings: one day of English and Writing Department faculty retreat, three days of new faculty orientation, one day with an Academic Writing instructors meeting, and one day with a College of Arts and Letters faculty meeting. I'm one of three AWR term faculty hired this year (and one of five new professors in the department all together), so I'm part of a nice little cohort of folks also recently uprooted from their lives. So far people in the department seem nice, but I haven't had a whole lot of interactions.

My new office!

The semester starts Monday, but right now it feels like there's too much for me to do for me to be nervous or excited. I'm teaching three sections of AWR 101, the first class in UT's academic writing sequence, and I've taken an old ENGL 1010 syllabus from UConn and adapted it into UT's framework, easing myself into how they do things here.

I don't really feel like I've begun anything yet-- not my house, not my job, not being a Floridan. I worked for years to get a faculty job, and having one thus far is strangely undramatic. But just as I slowly faded out of my UConn life, I suppose I'll fade into my UT one.

(I have taken the opportunity to make a little bit of a new beginning here, with a new design scheme, and some more explicit identification. I decided I was okay with people Googling me and finding a bunch of DC Comics reviews.)