Christmas 2012: Stop in Philadelphia

This holiday season was a good one for me. I started my break with a stop in Philadelphia and visited with Vogel and David. Fun times!

The first day I was there, David and I visited the Eastern State Penitentiary, something I have wanted to do for a long time. It was really interesting. The different parts of the prison really tell the story of how attitudes about human nature, crime, and rehabilitation have changed over the centuries. I was most interested in the nineteenth-century stuff, of course, but there's lots to be learned about the twentieth century. Al Capone spent time here, after all.

Standing in one of the shower rooms. As I was posing, David said something inappropriate like, "Imagine yourself surrounded by all those men."

David standing in the "center center," the place in the original structure where a guard could see down each corridor. Foucault would be impressed.

A tree growing out of the top of the old wall.

The death row cells.

Buttons for the death-row cells. These were the only cells with electric locks.

Later, we met up with Vogel and had dinner in the city. Very yummy!

Me and Vogel at dinner. 

All in all, a great way to start my holiday break!

Fall wrap-up

Now that I am catching my breath, here are some photo highlights (?) from this past semester...

First, there were the conferences...


Vogel and I at SSAWW in Philadelphia in October. This is the one decent photo I have from that conference.


Aaron and David at SAMLA in Atlanta in November. A couple of hotties, right?


Gretchen was at SAMLA, too, and we totally geeked out over her presence at the book displays. The above photo is a blurb she has on the back of this book.


And of course we had to get a photo of her just happening to notice her own book on sale.

Of course, it wasn't all about glamourous conferences and travel this semester. There was also, as I've complained about a lot on this blog, tons of freakin' work to do!


Not everyone was happy about all that work. Here are Bing and Wes doing their best to talk me into taking a break one night. This was in the middle of advising, as evidenced by the spring course schedule and catalog in the picture.


Bing's tactics got increasingly desparate that night. "If she won't stop, I'll just throw myself on the papers and look cute."

Again, it was a long semester!

But there were some fun moments, like the one below, from Allison's Halloween party.


Why yes, that is Little Red Riding Hood, Marie Antoinette, and a poor imitation of the Octomom.

"The Black Cat" Presentation...

If you are wondering what the image below could possibly have to do with Poe's "The Black Cat," you'll have to come to my presentation tomorrow.



Special thanks to David, who knew how I could get that image off of my cellphone and onto my computer. He's my tech go-to guy.

Mini-Jane Meets Academia

As I mentioned earlier, after spending time in Virginia (twice), Arkansas, and New Jersey, Mini-Jane came home with me after Alumni Weekend. (See here for some background if you don't know who Mini-Jane is. And some more pictures of our adventures so far here.) It became apparent pretty quickly that life with me is not nearly as exciting as life with the Hollandsworths (babies! chemisty labs!), the Lobes (12 cats! lab rats! yard work! crafts!), the Nagles (another baby! a classroom of fourth graders!), or the Flegals (real Jane's family! Christmas! presents!). What is life like here in Heidi-ville? Well, poor Mini-Jane found out...the short version: lots of teaching, grading, reading, and writing. Not a bad life, but not it doesn't make for the most exciting pictures.


Mini-Jane with a stack of final exams.


Collapsing on a stack of papers. I guess she doesn't know that you aren't supposed to grade in red. It's bad for students' self-esteem or something...


But it's not all bad! Sometimes we get to dress up! Here she is with me on graduation day.

Mini-Jane soon learned that "summer break" isn't exactly the break it's supposed to be. Even when we hit the road for a trip to Greensboro, we still had to get work done. Even David got in on the act, working on his dissertation with Jane's help.

Greensboro Visit: Around town...

There are certain almost mandatory stops on any return trip to Greensboro. One of these is, of course, Old Towne. We got there at 5 on Friday and I am pretty sure we left after midnight. Wow.


Vogel, David, and Sara at Old Towne. (It's still light out at this point.) Hmmm...no more pictures from that night. Weird.


Another required stop: Thai Garden on Tate Street. Here's Vogel and David after lunch.


And look who came with me! It's Mini-Jane! (Look for her to be popping up in a few more posts...) Here she poses with my yummy leftovers (Chicken Pad Thai, of course.)

(Who the heck is mini-Jane? Well, she's like our own version of Flat Stanley, handmade by Shannon, and a stand-in for the real Jane, who is off doing great work in Azerbaijan. You can read about some of mini-Jane's previous adventures here, here, here, and here. So far she's been to Northern VA, Richmond, New Jersey and Arkansas. Now I've got her and find that she might be getting kind of bored. My life isn't nearly as exciting as the lives of my friends. I also think I might be a bit crazy, because I think I purposely shielded mini-Jane from the more debauched aspects of the Greensboro visit. That is crazy on at least two counts: 1) it's a freaking doll and 2) the real Jane is all about the occasional bout of debauchery.)

Walt Whitman House

As regular readers no doubt know, I am a total geek for Walt Whitman. So, as you might expect, the news that Vogel had made arrangements for us to visit the Walt Whitman House in Camden put me in Nineteenth-Century American Lit Nerd Heaven.

We weren't allowed to take pictures in the house, but I do have some from the outside.


Here's David outside. He was a tough little trooper since his knee was really hurting him.


Vogel out front. Look how happy she looks--well, it's a bit hard to see, but trust me--she's happy! She was especially excited about seeing Whitman's actual boots in his bedroom. I'm not gonna lie--that stuff rocked hard core. They even had things like dishes he used, chairs he sat in, and his cane. I know most museums have things like that, but in this case, because no rooms were roped off or anything, it just seemed so natural--like touring a house, not a museum.


And here I am, posing for my front steps shot. Don't I also look happy? I was--I really, really was!


A view of the back of the house. I was a bit surprised that I didn't notice a big lilac bush, but maybe I just missed it.

Anyway, if you find yourself in the Philadelphia area and you love Whitman, you so need to go!

Vogel's Birthday Dinner

Just a couple pictures from a delicious birthday dinner David and I enjoyed with Vogel a couple of weeks ago.

Quick trip to Philadelphia...

A couple of Saturdays ago, David (who had driven up to WV on Friday night) joined me for a quick visit to Philly to see Vogel. We were only there about 24 hours, but had a blast.


David and Vogel at lunch at Solaris, a yummy restaurant right in Vogel's neighborhood.

After lunch, we headed to downtown Philly, specifically towards Independence Hall.


Independence Hall.


A really great shot of Vogel and David in front of Independence Hall. We didn't actually get to go in since they'd already given out all the tickets for the day, but there are tons of other fun (and free!) things to do in the immediate area, as this very helpful guide in the visitor center explained to us. We decided on two activities right away: seeing the Liberty Bell and visiting Franklin Court.


In line to see the Liberty Bell. Notice David playing with his iphone. He is so in love with that thing. He kept using it to look up where we were and give us background information. He was like a little kid with a toy he wanted us to covet. And it kind of worked...I want one.


The bell. I had seen it once before--way back in third grade, but I don't remember getting this close to it. And hey--I even got a shot of the crack. (Ha ha.)


Vogel wondering why I am taking so long to snap the picture. Sorry. But I posted this one in part because of dude in the back who is making a peace sign. What kind of adult does this in someone else's picture? It made me laugh, actually. I guess he couldn't help himself.


A much better shot.


Not sure what David is doing here. I think it's his impression of Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin holding a shotgun. (He had just watched the SNL clip of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler).


Now the non-silly shot.


After the Bell, we headed down to Franklin Court. On the way, we laughed at this sign. "Check out that funny looking lady!" I said, before my friends explained that it was supposed to be Ben Franklin in a chef's hat. Still...pretty lady-like, we thought.


"Life-size Jellybean Children and Butterflies"? Huh? Sounds terrifying to me. It was an exhibit here.


Soon we arrived at Franklin Court, where Ben Franklin's house used to stand and which today boasts an underground museum (tell me that "underground" doesn't make it sound a thousand times cooler!). Notice the white sign in this picture. It explains that Franklin would have walked through this little alleyway every day. I thought that was pretty awesome and asked Vogel and David to pretend they were Franklin walking through. Vogel, who is always happy to oblige my photo-shoot demands, did her best. David...not so much.


Here they are both next to the sign. Notice Vogel's arm. She still can't stop acting like Franklin walking home.


Franklin's house was torn down about 20 years after he died, but there are some very important markers of the structures that used to be there, like, for instance, his father-in-law's toilet.


Or Franklin's privy!


Inside the the underground (ohhh!) museum we saw lots of Franklin's inventions, including this one that impressed us the most: a chair with a built-in step ladder.


I also liked this one--a four-sided music stand so that a quartet could play.


After the room of inventions, we entered this huge space with dozens of phone and a wall of numbers. You could dial an extension and "talk" to a famous person who was influenced by Franklin in some way. It's a pretty cool way of illustrating just how influential Franklin was and is. We called Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain, among others. Vogel loved the phones so much that it was hard to tear her away.

At the end of the museum there was a little theater showing a Franklin Film Festival--including Ben and Me, which I adored as a kid and would have loved to see again. But we were about 40 minutes away from the next show and David was getting hungry. He was also getting entirely too jealous of Franklin. "Man, how come I never invented anything?" he asked. So we moved on.


After a brief stop for a drink and a snack, we walked through a park where some well...interesting performance art was going on.


Now admittedly, we only stayed for a little while to listen to this guy sing about rivers (represented by the blue tarp behind him), so it could be that the show was very good. But just the part we saw left us trying not to laugh out loud (and getting dirty looks from a Ben Franklin impersonator nearby.) Let's just say he rhymed like Adam Sandler's "Cajun Man" and used works like "olfaction" and "putrification" as his end rhymes. You can read just a bit about him here.

After walking around a bit more, we headed back to Vogel's, crashed for a bit, and then had a lovely dinner here. The next day it was back to WV for me and NC for David. Still, it was a great little visit.