Tomorrow I begin a 12-week placement as a clinical teacher within the Fort Worth ISD en route to earning a full-meal-deal schoolteaching certificate. Tonight I’m quite a bit nervous.
The campus is an elementary school. I’ve substituted a fair number of times in the middle and high school grades, as well as in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. I love kids and I love teaching. It requires patience, empathy, honesty, effective communication, a strict but fair approach, courage, an understanding of how people (young folk are people, too) need structure, a knack for facilitating group activity, good documentation skills, the ability to coordinate with coworkers…
So I’m confident in my abilities and experience. The anxiety comes from other causes. I’m not at all the best when it comes to crossing t’s and dotting i’s when time is of the essence, and that’s a necessary part of most work. I still don’t have many of the nitty-gritty details figured out (where do I park?), but I’ve always been able to improvise as a substitute. “Bring it on!” is my basic attitude, but everyone, including me, gets scared.
Wifely Kate has been so supportive and generous with her help. This weekend we did a lot of prep stuff, such as buying me more button-down dress shirts, cutting my hair (I still have a big ol’ shock of cowlick-y hair, which seems to be undefeatable). Marrying her has been the best thing that ever happened to me. And not just because she’s cooking breakfast and packing my lunch in the early, early morning as I get my creative writing in before driving to campus.
Schoolteaching is also scary because of possible political and work-world implications of online activity, online personal opinions. Working — at least as a substitute — has made me an official public servant. And there’s a lot of controversy over schoolteaching — for example, the Texastextbookcontroversy. What if something I tweet — such as this in favor of journalist Glenn Greenwald – bothers a parent or a supervisor? Oh well! I don’t really know how to handle that other than how I handle personal interaction in general, which is to try to be honest, fair, and diplomatic. I’m not one to stay quiet and keep my head down.
I’m ready. Again: Bring it on.
I need to make public something else soon, too, but I’ll leave that as a cliffhanger due to time constraints: I gotta get some sleep!
Looking through a Martha Stewart book, Kate got the idea to suspend baskets, cutting boards, and other cookware from the kitchen ceiling to save space and make the items more visible and accessible. We kept forgetting which pieces we had, and sometimes if we knew, we couldn’t find them. Thus: bring in the dexterous Tyler to construct a gear-storing station, better known as a kitchen rack.
Tyler the Handyman
The actual platform — the piece parallel to the ceiling — is a chainlink fence’s gate. At each of the four corners, Tyler used chains (he adjusted the lengths for leveling) to connect the gate to circle screws he’d driven into the ceiling. Some of the cookware rests atop the gate, and baskets hang from the gate by hooks or cut-off coat hanger tips that serve as hooks.
Kate the Cook
The task was no more complex than it looks, it cost only about $50-$60, but it did take a fair amount of time. However, not as much time as the indefatigable Martha spent in prison.
A frittata, for those of you who don’t know, is, apparently, a hand grenade.
FRITTATA ON YOUR FLOOR
Wikipedia says a frittata is “an egg-based dish similar to an omelette or quiche, either simple or enriched with additional ingredients such as meats, cheeses, vegetables or pasta. It may be flavored with herbs.” But, nope. It’s a bomb!
WELL, NO, NOT REALLY
Recipe for Fritatta Bomb
Procure a pie plate [sic].
Spray pie plate with PAM, or perhaps gasoline.
Within the pie plate, sautee garlic, onion, and peppers — as in pepper spray.
Put in additional food: celery, carrots, brussels sprouts, egg — maybe rat poison, too.
Take to detonation location, set on (portable) stove, cook.
According to their website, they roast their beans fresh to order, and 90-95% of their inventory is “fair trade/organic.” (I’m not sure how the slash affects the percentage.) Kate and I recently spoke with Aduro’s Rupert on a trip to the Market, and after listening to her and my competing coffee preferences, he suggested their Black & Tan Post-Roast Blend, described on the package as half medium roast blend and half dark roast varietal. Rupert struck me as enthusiastic and happy to help — a very personable guy.
This morning, in a Cuisinart set to medium temperature and regular (not bold) flavor, I made Kate and me each a cup. (She cooked scrambled eggs and whole wheat pancakes; yum!)
We’re happy to say Aduro will now be our customary morning coffee. What we drank today tasted robust and slightly caramel-y. None of that burned, hurried taste that so much Starbucks suffers from. Aduro was definitely easy drinking.
According to TCU’s student newspaper, the Daily Skiff, Aduro put together a unique blend for TCU, where it’s served on the Union Grounds. The unfortunately defunct Gallery Art Cafe, one of my favorite places, served it as well. Finally, our local CBS 4pm news aired one of its “Through the Lens” features on Aduro. I can’t find the CBS video online anywhere, so if anyone happens to have it or a link, let me know (in the comments or by email) so I can embed it here. Finally, I’m curious where the name Aduro comes from — anyone know?
On the weekend of September 3rd, Wifely Kate, sis-in-law Emily, and I visited the Durham Farmers’ Market in North Carolina. According to its website, Durham Farmers’ Market is an all-local, producer-only market with 64 vendors. It’s held in the Pavilion at Durham Central Park (501 Foster Street), Saturdays (8am – noon) and Wednesdays (3:30 – 6:30pm), rain or shine.
Part of the Pavilion
We were very impressed by the market’s park location, with its inviting lawns and protective pavilion. The location gave the sense that Durham values its local farmers and food. I really wish Fort Worth’s wonderful Cowtown Farmers Market could get a nicer spot.
The Starlite String Band gave the Durham Farmers’ Market some soundtrack. The Missoula farmers markets had musicians, too. Music really adds to the experience, I think; hearing it is one of my favorite parts of going to farmers markets.
In my experience, farmers markets are fun, positive places. Wifely and I’ll continue to visit them when we travel. Thanks again to Emily for hosting us in North Carolina!
Wifely and I are visiting her sister in North Carolina. In Durham, at 720 Ninth Street (ZIP 27705), there’s an independent bookstore called The Regulator Bookshop (Twitter; Blog). We only checked it out for a bit, but long enough for me to snap two photos that in my mind establish The Regulator’s coolness beyond doubt.
No History Here, Zip, Nada!
Yah, that’s a poster for William Gibson‘s (Twitter; Wikipedia) new novel Zero History. Gibson’s probably most famous for leading science fiction’s cyberpunk subgenre (“high tech and low life”) and for his debut, game-changing novel Neuromancer (1984); he’s also known for coining the term “cyberspace,” for writing the short story on which the film Johnny Mnemonic (1995) is based, and for his most recent set of related-but-standalone mainstream novels: Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and now Zero History. It must have been something, reading back in the eighties, to parse neologistic sentences about characters “jacking in” to “cyberspace” and using “microsofts” … If you think science fiction is irrelevant, that it’s about aliens with creases in their foreheads, you aren’t reading Gibson. From Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988):
There was a trode-net plastered across the guy’s forehead; a single black cable was lashed along the edge of the stretcher. Slick followed it up to the fat gray package that seemed to dominate the gear mounted on the superstructure. Simstim? Didn’t look like it. Some kind of cyberspace rig? Gentry knew a lot about cyberspace, or any way he talked about it, but Slick couldn’t remember anything by getting unconscious and just staying jacked in… people jacked in so they could hustle. Put the trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you can cruise around and have a grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.
This afternoon, while the sisters went out a-sistering, I parked at Mad Hatter Bakeshop & Cafe to finish some work toward a schoolteaching certificate, my copy of Spook Country on the table. Another customer turned out to be a serious Gibson fan, eagerly awaiting Gibson’s Duke book-tour stop, and we talked science fiction for a while. Whenever I meet another fan of serious science fiction, I feel like we’re sharing a vast secret, as if we’ve been studying the same grimoires: we might not understand what’s going on with this crazy future-present, but at least we know that something’s going on — something on the order of the creation of cities, as Gibson once put it. We acknowledge the present with a realism it seems others don’t. It seems like so much contemporary lit-fic (literary fiction) hides in notional 1970s Raymond Carver settings that don’t confront our world of today.
Random Gibson infos:
My foodie wife and I are asking writers about their food preferences; in answer, Gibson tweeted: “@douglaslucas Japanese, Japa Dog, Lebanese street, Hainanese chicken rice, Montreal smoked meat on rosemary and rocksalt bagel…” (Here’s Susan Orlean’s answer; Peter Straub’s.)
There in Seattle I asked Gibson two questions; if I get the chance to go see his Austin book-tour stop this month, I actually don’t know what question to ask! I’ll come up with something interesting, no worries. But I feel comforted to know that at this point I don’t particularly have pressing questions to ask an awesome artist; I feel quite confident with my own knowledge right now.
Saturday mornings Wifely Kate and I go to the Cowtown Farmers Market (Twitter) for much of our week’s groceries. Kate looks at tomatoes and squash, and I eat free samples and look at Kate.
Beautiful Day, Beautiful Girl
The food at this market is grown locally; the vendors, who’re actually informed, can tell you about what you’re purchasing, how they grew it, what goes well with what, and so forth. Like many in the Fort Worth of my background, I grew up on Brinker Inc. & SpaghettiOs & Kraft. But! Even here, there’s arugula and okra and all sorts of real food. Pro tip: food is often an acquired taste; try alien food (asparagus?) several times, across several days, and you’ll grow to like it. Everyone admits beer is an acquired taste, right?
A Good Sign
Cowtown Farmers Market is on the Weatherford traffic circle: 3821 Southwest Blvd, Fort Worth TX 76116. Wednesday and Sunday, 8am to noon.
They sell fair trade organic coffee & tea. Kate told Rupert I prefer bold coffee, whereas she prefers more mild stuff, so he suggested their Black & Tan blend, designed to please all palates. After a good smell of the package, we bought it — I’ll let you know how it turns out, okay?
This post would be remiss without a shout-out to Artisan Baking Co. (Twitter), which makes great bread that feeds me frequently. And the various cheeses from the happy goats of Latte Da Dairy cannot be forgotten!
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