My great friend Marcus, who has popped up around these parts periodically, has finally launched his own site, MarcusMcAllister.com.  There you can see a wide range of Marcus’s work and keep up with the goings-on in his atelier.

And there’s the thing, right—having a studio is cool, but having an atelier is much, much cooler.  As is having a website in French, because instead of that dull “Loading” message, you can watch the “Chargement” of each page.  I’ll admit, though, that there’s something a little unnerving to my American brain about the verb “télécharger” for “to download”; I keep waiting for the charges to pop up on my American Express card.

All beside the point, of course.  The point is the seriously cool site, and Marcus’s amazing work.  Check it out.

The leak in my garage continues unabated, through three plumbers who can’t seem to figure out what the problem is, when I keep telling them that the leak isn’t coming from my condo, it’s only ending up in my condo.  They run my showers and flush my toilets, and say, nope, no leak here.  And leave.

If that were the only leakage, though, it might be more bearable.  I think we’re moving up on the forty-days-and-forty-nights mark here in SoCal, or maybe it just seems like it’s got to be divine wrath falling from the sky.  What’s clear is that I don’t think I’ve actually been fully dry in over a week.  The basement of our office building has flooded repeatedly, and my classroom—in that basement—is now dank and cold.  Enough.  Or, in case English just isn’t carrying enough weight with the divine these days:  Basta.  Ca suffit.

On a happier note, though, I’ve gotten my wi-fi all wi’d and fi’d, and so am able to work from my second-floor-landing office nook now.  I’m still having to negotiate the security issue, though; my after-market original Airport card and my new router simply can’t get together on either WEP or WPA.  So right now I’m using MAC address control to prevent random folks from glomming onto my bandwidth, but my packets are nonetheless still leaking out all over the neighborhood.  Of course, my packets are largely dull, so it’s probably not an issue, but I’m just saying.

Mileage for week: 16 (was meant to be 28)

Number of run days: 2 (was meant to be 4)

Long run for week: 13

Aches, pains, complaints: I’m tired.  Seriously tired.  And overstressed.  And tired.  I made it through my 13 today, though much of it hurt (sore knees, perhaps because I’ve once again been failing to take my vitamins, perhaps because I haven’t gotten to eat a meal at home except on the weekends in eons; very sore arch in my left foot, which may indicate that I need to replace my shoes).  One of the shorter mid-week runs was overcome by an early meeting; the other by my desperate need to sleep past 6.30 the morning after not getting to bed until 1.30.  The time off was, I’m sure, a good thing; I’ve recovered from the 13 today fairly well.  I’m still very nervous about the prospect of running twice as far, of course, and particularly nervous about the fact that I’m now entering the last week of my training schedule that does not have a marathon at the end of it.  Interestingly, though, what I am looking forward to is finding a sensible level of training to maintain the fitness gains I’ve made over the last four months without subjecting myself to the massive ritual punishment of crazy long runs.  Something sustainable.  Which makes me think that, in fact, I may already have accomplished one of my major goals for this whole process:  finish my training without burning out so badly this time around that I quit running for another six months.

Is it a problem to have produced a 6800-word outline for a 5000-word essay?

(The good news is that I somewhat arbitrarily set the word-limit myself, so I can probably violate it at will.  The other good news is that the essay is, by and large, written, though in bullet-form; some sentences need subjects and articles yet, but many of them are already in place, and just need reformatting.  The less-good news is that that’s all I’ve accomplished so far this weekend.  Off to run, now, so I can cross something else off the list…)

Things that must get done in the next four days:

– Write 5000-word essay on critical methodologies in literary interpretation for Intro to Literature anthology.
– Comment on senior thesis chapter.
– Grade second batch of papers.
– Read Joanna Russ’s The Female Man.
– Read Paul Gilroy’s ‘There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack’ : The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation.
– 13-mile long run on Sunday.

Sheesh.

’Djever have one of those days where you find yourself expending energy trying to make everybody happy and only succeed in pissing everybody off?

Yeah, me neither.

A colleague of mine who’s been reading around in here noted the other day that Planned Obsolescence has of late become much more about my personal life (not personal personal, but, you know, personal) than about work; I’m not blogging my thoughts about books, about academia, about writing, even about television anymore. And I’ve been wondering since what that’s all about. Part of it is that the personal has been where the action is, of late—the condo obsession and the marathon training have taken over what little available brainspace I have. The rest, alas, is not taken up by deep thoughts of a bloggable nature; instead, it’s committee meetings and student crises, program reviews and visiting writers, this memo and that memo and the million and one stupid details of my administrative life that are constantly threatening to fly completely out of control.

The result of this overflow of nonsense is that I’m not watching any television, I’m not reading (except in the sense of desperate cramming-in of text in order to remember what it is I’m teaching), and I’m certainly not writing. And the result of that is an increasingly boring blog and an article that is becoming more and more overdue by the day. So overdue, in fact, that (as another colleague pointed out is her own tendency with the missed deadline) it now must be a work of genius in order to justify its lateness, and so it grows later and later and later.

I have to get back to work. To writing. I have to find ways to prioritize that time, in the same way that I’ve managed to prioritize my running—by doing it first, by keeping it relatively contained, by refusing to schedule anything else during that time. I need one inviolable hour every morning, one hour at home, before I go to the office, with no email, and no blogs, and nothing else but me and this damned article. One hour a day, and it’ll eventually get done.

The trying-to-make-everybody-happy problem, I’m not sure I can solve so easily. At least not without a licensed therapist. But the writing, I ought to be able to control. At least better than I am now.

If you have one of those weekends where you have a big pile of work to do—say, a couple of books to read and a stack of papers to grade—and intend to do something ridiculous like run 17 miles on Sunday, don’t leave half of the work undone on Saturday.  Because you may find yourself incapable of doing anything other than lying on your bed watching movies after that run.

You know, hypothetically.

Mileage for week: 29

Number of run days: 4

Long run for week: 17

Aches, pains, complaints: I just got back in from that 17, so this is probably not the best taking-stock moment ever—but good gravy, everything hurts.  The 17 was composed of—and probably only those in the Claremont-know will be at all impressed, but nonetheless—3.5 miles from home to the parking lot on Mills at the top of the Thompson Creek Trail, 2.5 miles down the trail, 2.5 miles back up the trail, 2.5 miles down the trail, 2.5 miles back up the trail, and 3.5 miles from the parking lot back home.  So in other words, half the run was dead uphill, and the other half downhill.  I covered the entire distance in 3.20, and that includes 15 minutes of waiting in the parking lot for last week’s running partner (who did not show) and another 5ish minutes of waiting at various lights, stopping for water, etc.  So 17 miles in something like three hours.  I should be all kinds of impressed with myself.

Instead, I’m a bad combination of panicky and delirious.  The delirious part bears no explanation.  Panicky, though, because of the degree to which I Felt Bad during the last five miles of the run, particularly as combined with the knowledge that in three weeks, I’ve got that much to do plus another NINE miles.  Seriously—that’s a minimum of another hour and a half of running, if I’m still able to run at that point.

It’s conceivable that the excitement of the event and having company along the way will help carry me through that last third of the marathon.  But it’s also conceivable that I’m going to be in some serious trouble, particularly given that from mile 15 on, the course is predominantly uphill.  Unless something goes really, really wrong, I’ll finish, but I may finish walking, I’m afraid.

I was just about to head out the door to a party a few minutes ago, when I got a phone call from James Earl Jones telling me that my DSL was ready.

It’s the most remarkable thing:  I click on links, and pages open.  Right away.  I feel like I can breathe again.

If you’re still reading after that title, thanks already.

Here’s the deal:  For the last two and a half years, I’ve been living in campus housing, in which pretty much every room was hardwired onto the campus network.  There was thus no reason for me to think at all seriously about networking technologies, because, plug this cable into that outlet, and lo but there was the broadband.  And in the places I lived prior to that, the proximity of desk and phone jack and the simplicity of networking needs—am I connected to the Internet?  Then I’m done— made a wired network the obvious choice.

Things are not so simple now.  I’ve gotten my equipment from Verizon, and as of February 17, my DSL should be fully activated.  But of course the spot where I want to put my desk is nowhere near a phone jack.  And, once R. is here, he’s going to want to use the broadband, too, and not from the very same spot where I’ll be working.  So it’s now necessary for me to go wireless.  Which, great.

But I could use some advice on what hardware to get to build this wifi network.  That first-gen flat-panel iMac is now about three years old, but still runs like a champ, and I really don’t want to replace it until absolutely necessary—which means I need to buy an Airport card for it.  And I need a wireless router of some variety.  Here are the choices, as I currently understand them:

– an Airport Extreme base station

– an Airport Express

– a non-Apple wireless router, such as the Linksys WRT54G

I’ve been trying to track down some comparison data among these options, and am coming up only with the obvious stuff.  I’ve got a good sense of the spec differences among these three, but not of how they actually operate in the real world.  We’re an all-Mac household, so that needs to be taken into consideration, as well as the 2.4 GHz wireless phones we’re using all over the house, which I understand can interfere with a wifi signal.

So what do you use?  And how does it work for you?