Making it Official!

American-flag fruit pizza

St. Patrick's Day is celebrated by college-types around the country with bar hopping. It's also almost Spring Break, when the undergrads (and some of the grads) get out of town for home, or the beach. Some years St. Patrick's Day falls during Spring Break, to the disappointment of the owners of the bars in our town. So a couple years ago they decided to create a new holiday, the sole purpose of which is to make racist jokes about Native Americans and to get sloppy drunk, preferably paying said bar owners for the privilege of drinking beer and throwing it up again on the sidewalk. This "unofficial" St. Patrick's Day has become an annual headache for instructors, the university administration, the local police, and departments who occasionally make the mistake of scheduling recruiting events for the same Friday/weekend when it seems like the entire population of 18-25-year-olds for a 2- or 3-hour radius dons green clothes and descends on Campus Town to drink. It's actually not entirely a laughing matter, as some years there have been deaths from traffic accidents.

Anyway, you needed that backstory to understand the party we held this year on "Unofficial." Some of our closest friends are in our Bible study, a motley crew of graduate students and like-minded folks who get together on Tuesday nights to talk about faith and other times to hang out and enjoy each other. One of them recently got her green card approved after a looong process, so to celebrate, we held an "Official" party for her. It involved wearing green, mint-chocolate-chip cookies, margaritas, and apple pie, because America. Of course we played Apples to Apples--green card, anyone?

For an entree we had chaat, an Indian street food. There are a variety of recipes, but this one involves chips, potato, chickpeas, yogurt, onion, tomato, tamarind chutney, and masala powder. Here's my bowl before I stirred it up into deliciousness. Cheers to being one step closer to citizenship!

p.s.--It's a total in-joke, but for posterity's sake I thought I would record the group decision on which nine states would be included in our perfect republic. You see, the flag on the fruit pizza above only has nine stars, so we debated the merits and finally decided to keep California, Colorado, Hawai'i, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. Sorry, Ohio. Maybe you can become South Canada.

What Do Library Science, History, & Civil Engineering Have in Common? On Location Part 1 of 2

Editor's Note: Over the years long-time readers will have noticed that I frequently refer to the campus faith group with which Dear Husband and I celebrate holidays (some religious, some not), play games, and do arts and crafts. We are an eclectic group of "graduate students and like-minded persons" who meet weekly during the academic year to discuss books or videos. During the summer we sometimes offer alternative programming. This year, we are visiting our respective buildings around campus to learn about each other's research. Here is a sampling of the visits thus far.

The first week, a recent graduate of the library school took the group to the Rare Book Room to marvel at unique texts--such as a 1976 draft of the Star Wars script in which Luke Skywalker is still named "Luke Starkiller"--and very old ones, such as a book from the Cavagna Collection, Per la facciata del Duomo di Milano (ca. 1657) (below). This collection of opinions about architectural renovations to Milan's cathedral has what amounts to the papermaker's version of a footprint in fresh concrete: a handprint made while the paper was still wet. You can see more images, learn about making paper in the early modern period, and read about the Milanese cathedral blueprints in this blog post.

I led the next tour, representing history. We traipsed through four of the five stories of the big old building that houses my department. In one of my old classrooms, we stopped to do an exercise I learned in a German course and have used to good effect in history classes: we put up pictures on the walls and "visited a gallery." This gallery had portraits of Jesus: Jesus looking holy in Warner Sallman's ubiquitous "Head of Christ," Jesus teaching in a Rembrandt, and Jesus doing both at the same time in the Christ Pantocrator (Christ the Savior) icon from the 6th century... Check out the  picture above. The right side of his face is calm, and he lifts his hand in a gesture of blessing and teaching. The left side of his face is stern, and he carries a heavy Bible for instruction. This particular image is the oldest version of a common Orthodox icon and can be found in Saint Catherine's Monastery near Mount Sinai in Egypt. Then we went out for ice cream.

Finally, the group went to the civil engineering building, where we started by ogling the cranes, earthquake simulation center, and concrete canoes. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Our guide showed us the special material he studies with a super-high-tech microscope that can zoom in reeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaallllly close to the surface of a specimen. He uses a diamond to stress the material, measures various parameters, and develops models for understanding these things. Then we went out for Indian food.

It turns out that what Library Science, History, and Civil Engineering have in common are graduate students excited about their research and eager to share it to build a community of faith. Check back later for more summer tours!