Herr Professordoktor

I've moved in to a fabulous flat in downtown Nowhere, WI (thanks for the help, GB and LM), and after a week it's pretty comfy. Clothes are finally up off the floor, books are slowly making their way out of piles and onto shelves. I have inaugurated the kitchen and taken my first bath. So it's starting to feel like home. I'll have pictures soon.

Among the good points about living here:

• Farmer's market every Tuesday and Saturday.
• Bakery around the corner that sells entire breakfasts for three for the price of a Starbucks Mochafrappawhatsit.
• A campus with a calm, well-trimmed, big-trees-and-columned-building quadrangle.
• Stars. All of them. You can walk five blocks and see the Milky Way.
• My name on a door upon which people will knock looking for Professor Me.
• A coffee house where one can sit for hours eating decent pie and reading Madame Bovary with no music playing. No music!
• A local bar that gets Fox Sports World.

All that said, although I've been too busy to be properly lonely, it's going to come soon enough. I'm jonesing to get back to Madison, to be in a place where everything isn't closed on Sunday, where I can walk three seconds to have Afghan food, where the wholesomeness is not so oppressive and Panoptic that I'm getting paranoid about forgetting to floss.

The College has a pre-semester tradition that will tell you about all you need to know about it. The week before classes start everyone who works for L'Ecole, from the lunch ladies and groundskeepers to the deans and the president, meet in one room. That's ONE room. There are maybe a hundred and twenty of us. And all the new people--faculty, adjuncts, administrators, secretaries, bookstore managers, and physical plant workers--are publicly introduced to the community. So now I know that Deb in the bookstore has six kids and that Dino the janitor enjoys playing and watching sports. It's all very democratic, which is good, but of course there's still a bit of self-imposed ghettoization. The guys with embroidered nametags had their own tables at the staff luncheon. I ate with biologists, myself, but then even if I'd wanted to clique up with the English department, all of us together wouldn't fill a table. It's a really collegial place, beyond the merely polite realm of "Hi, Dr. Weevil; how was your summer?" and into the territory of "Hey, Lorna, I found a stuffed alligator for your daughter, whose diapers I used to change." They all seem to like it, though. Claustrophilia, I guess that'd be called.