This week in prognosticated data.

Things that I hope will arrive at my office: one long-ago ordered bookshelf.

Amount of books that will fit on my hoped-for shelves: ten boxes' worth, please oh please.

Hours I will spend in my office: between three and twenty-five? 

Syllabi that will be completed: two. I hope.

Books that I will finish reading: two.

Reviews of books that I will commence writing: two. (I hope.)

Number of meals I will cook and/or otherwise prepare at home: five breakfasts, three lunches, four dinners. 

Proportion of clothing I will cull from my closets to give away, because items to be given no longer give me, personally, a spark of joy: 25%, I hope.

Christmas trees that will come down down down: one.

Remaining holiday food that will be either eaten or discarded, such as naked sugar cookies and stale baked goods:  all of it, ALL! come hell or high water.

Poems to be written: I am planning on three.

Number of birthdays this week in my family: one!

Amount of birthday cake I will eat, even so: not one piece, because the birthday boy lives in Arizona for the love.

Movies I will see: three, or I will know the reason why.

Blog posts to be written: As God is my witness there shall be SEVEN. 

Who's ready? Also: weekly recipes.

For breakfast, I mean. Well, not till tomorrow morning, but: I am! I am continuing my long tradition of postponing the hardest work as thoroughly as is humanly possible. Which, it turns out, is quite thoroughly.

But I sent my syllabus to students. So that's something. I have some links in my online course. That's another thing. And there's a lot of content that just needs to be framed into "modules" and "discussion posts" and other linky links that...ack.

Currently resisting putting together a PowerPoint. Death to PowerPoint! or at least this particular PowerPoint.

Wait! I have two recipes to give you.

RECIPE ONE: baked macaroni and cheese with other stuff in it.

So: cook however many penne noodles makes sense for you. Bear in mind that you can eat leftover baked macaroni and cheese  for a few days. So the number of penne could be many.

Then make your bechamel sauce. Quick version: saute a tablespoon or so of minced onion in 1/4 c. butter. When the onion is soft, sprinkle over the butter, which should be gently bubbling, 1/4 c. of flour, and with a whisk, make sure that the butter and flour are well acquainted, and that the flour browns slightly. Then stir in a cup or a cup and a half of warm milk. If you have basil, you could have steeped the basil in the milk, and that will make a slightly more flavorful sauce base.  Once you have stirred in the milk, whisk it around while the sauce thickens.

When the sauce has thickened, take it off the heat and immediately add about a cup or more if you like more of cheese. You can actually be fairly inventive, but it needs to be a melty cheese--not a hard cheese, and not, probably, a blue cheese. I used some entirely pedestrian already-grated colby jack cheese, which I have around because my son likes grated cheese, because evidently grating cheese is very hard work. Back to the sauce: put the cheese in the sauce that's hot, but off the heat. Let the cheese melt. You can whisk it a couple of times if that makes you feel useful.

Mix the noodles and sauce together. Now: take a zucchini. Take two. And take a handful of cherry tomatoes. Or any tomatoes, really. Slice the zucchini thin but not too thin. Halve the cherry tomatoes.

Put half your noodle sauce mix in the bottom of a baking dish, whatever size is appropriate. Then lay the zucchini and tomatoes in an even layer over the noodles and sauce. Then, cover the zucchini and tomatoes with the rest of your noodles and sauce.

Now, take some stale bread with a small chunk of parmesan and put them both in your blender, the bread torn into smallish pieces. Pulse it until everything is crumbs. Sprinkle all that goodness over the noodles. Bake that at 375 for 20 minutes or as long as it takes for the whole thing to get golden and bubbly.

Point one: hot cheese. Point two: unexpected vegetable bonus. You can actually change up the vegetables and you won't be sorry.

RECIPE TWO: Oatmeal cookies with a little extra business.

Make your regular oatmeal cookie recipe. I happened to have some oats in the tall cylindrical container situation, and I used the recipe on the side of the cylinder. I also substituted demerara sugar for brown sugar. If you have some demerara sugar, you should try this. It was good.

But that's not the business to which I am referring. Once I had my cookie dough, I divided it in half. In one half, I threw some chocolate chips. Also not the business to which I am referring, but my son likes these cookies with chocolate chips, so I made these as an acknowledgement of his tastes.

In the other half, I put unsweetened coconot flakes and golden raisins. Did I mention that, instead of cinnamon, I used cardamom and fresh nutmeg in the cookie dough? Well I did. Those spices plus the raisins/coconut combination--excellent cookies. Really superb. The demerara sugar, which is coarsely grained, also added a little crunchy something.

Happy first week of school, all y'all for whom this is the first week of school. We who are about to die salute you.

Edging closer.

Over the past few days, I've responded to questions from some creative writing students about the place of creative writing in the world. I also responded to an e-mail or two about curriculum, which led me to first find, then to take a look at my notes from May of this year--that's right, two and a half months ago, like an eon--notes from a meeting where I started to imagine what I wanted my composition courses to look like this fall. That's right, a month from now. Less than a month.

But who's counting.

I'm also at a point where my own creative projects seem to share a margin with work I hope my students will do. I worked some more on my photo essay, which is shaping up pretty nicely. It involves images from the Scotland trip and some thoughts about ruins and ruination. I'm also using photos of the shacks from our Joshua Tree/Morongo Valley trip from last year.

It's great to work with those images and to bring my disparate thoughts about these abandoned and collapsing structures together into a series of statements with something like a coherent through-line. This is something I would like my students to be able to do, with or without the photos. Same with my video essay about feminism--assembling primary and secondary research materials, ordered and juxtaposed in a way that creates a nascent argument, with the writer's own point of view to frame and shape all of it. With or without video, voiceover, ambient noise, or a soundtrack.

But it's okay that my projects are verging on demos for what I want my students to do. It's what teachers do--find a connection between their own projects and what they hope their students might be able to do. Yep, that's me, a teacher. Getting ready to teach, although well in advance of actual syllabus making.

Today, this came to me as a recommendation from the UK Amazon:

Amazon.co.uk, you've got my number.

A little tragic.

Brief statements concerning the movies.

1. In our preparations for the Academy Awards, we have been unstinting. We have seen the documentary shorts, the people. THE SHORTS.

However, we have not viewed 127 Hours, citing the little-known "I am not required to watch movies where guys saw off their own arms" clause of the Movie Enthusiast's Commitment Contract. Nor have we seen Javier Bardem in Biutiful. Javier Bardem is, indeed, biutiful, but I understand from my "sources" (two young women we talked to in the lobby at the movies last week) that the movie is hella depressing.

Therefore, we ate Mexican food and I watched episodes of Veronica Mars.

[brief aria on Veronica Mars:] O! Veronica! Had I known how very good you were, I would not have said, "Who in the hell is this Kristen Bell?" when I first saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Instead, I would have basked in the glow Veronica Mars cast forever upon Kristen Bell, kind of like the glow The Man Who Would Be King and, let's be honest, all the James Bonds, cast forever upon Sean Connery, even though he mostly made crap for most of his career. I love Veronica Mars, and that is all.

Also, we watched the 30 Rock episode we missed last night because we went to a poetry reading. High culture! It is so distracting from important television!

2. There are certain people whose performances was robbed in terms of Oscar nominations. As if you care, right, but in case you do:

• Leonardo DiCaprio, for Shutter Island;
• Pierce Brosnan, for The Ghost Writer;
• Greta Gerwig, for Greenberg;
• Andrew Garfield for every single thing he was in this year;
• Noomi Rapace, for all those Girl With movies;
• Catherine Keener, for Please Give;
• Russell Brand, for Get Him to the Greek;
• Bill Murray, Robert Duvall, and Sissy Spacek, for Get Low;
• Matt Damon, for True Grit.

Also, are we sure we didn't find Andrew Garfield's to be a likable character in The Social Network? I am pretty sure that he was.

3. We will be watching the Academy Awards with family. There will be food and there will be friendly wagering. And probably loud talking and some arguing. It will be great.

4. I was so tired tonight, at the end of a looooong four-day week, that I didn't want to go see a worthy movie. And there weren't any unworthy ones I wanted to see. That is a little tragic, in my own personal opinion, if you want to know.

But I did find out that the lead guy from The Dandy Warhols, Courtney Taylor-Taylor, has a series of one sentence movie reviews on the official The Dandy Warhols website. Sample review: Of the 1967 Lee Marvin Point Blank, Taylor-Taylor says this: "This movie is so totally fuggin cool that I didnt really mind the little bit of bad acting and editing which included some real ham-fisting by Star Trek’s very own Dr Roger Corby whose name it took me going to sleep and waking up to fully recall without any help from imdb."

Oh, okay, another one: of the aforementioned 2008 Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Taylor-Taylor says, "Don’t let the lame-ass “Something-ing Someone” title fool you, this flick is only about twelve lines shy of being the perfect gutbusting break up comedy of all time."

(I don't think I could get sick of writing "Taylor-Taylor" for a very long time.)

(Also, the reason I am listening to The Dandy Warhols and going on their website and reading their one-sentence movie reviews and all is not because of one of the greatest songs of all time, "The Last High," but because the theme song for Veronica Mars is a The Dandy Warhols song. And it is good. The people, I am in the grip of a small obsession.)

Today I rather enjoyed . . .

. . . doing preparatory work for the new semester, wearing stylish sweats all day, having a parcel arrive on my porch, taking Bruiser for a walk in the early afternoon, finding an $8 dress--purple! with sparkly stuff!--at Target, eating pancakes for breakfast and leftover jambalaya for lunch, getting an alert from the library's robot that there were detective novels waiting for me at the library, going to the library, watching The Good Wife, fixing sandwiches for the newly returned son, listening to The National while I worked, making soup for dinner, practicing hibernation whilst watching a little television and reading a little V.S. Naipaul before succumbing to crime. One of the detective novels, that is.

Industry.

We were pretty industrious today. In fact, I think of this time of year as particularly industrious, what with the harvest--or in our case, the purchasing of other peoples' harvests--the provisioning and preserving of food, the cleaning out so that we can at least start ahead of the enclosing of everything when we hole up for the winter.

After we got back from the farmer's market, and we took Bruiser for a walk, and the historian went for a bike ride and I contemplated my options, we got to work. The historian worked away in the backyard, trimming and cutting back, while I pulled out some of the baskets and boxes that have been collecting rejection letters, magazines, old greetings from friends, bank statements for the children who are away, old agendas and notebooks. I threw away a huge amount of stuff, enough to make a dent in the rest of my accumulation, enough to make me realize that, if I had in mind to control the accumulation, I would need to spend regular time doing the same for, well, the rest of my life. I think some people call that "housekeeping." Am I signing up for it? Well, provisionally. Check back with me in awhile.

Bruiser was very watchful during all these activities. What with dogs living to the west and the east, he has a lot of policing to do. Not to mention the dangerous little old ladies, school children, and UPS trucks there are to announce. Doing his job, and very effectively, I might add.

After our labors, which are not finished and which will never be finished, we went to a family gathering at a park. My cousin and her husband recently adopted a boy from Ethiopia. She met him there when she was part of a humanitarian mission (she's a nurse). The gathering was so we could meet him. The weather and the light could not have been more beautiful. The kids played some soccer and some basketball, we all chatted and visited, and Will crawled around after a ball. These days, September and October in Utah, are some of the best days ever. It's like cherishing the last peaches or cherries or celebrating when the asian pear guy is at the market. It's brief, it's wonderful, it's going going gone.

(picture of Will taken by college daughter--thanks!)