Happy News, and a Whole30 Chicken Curry Recipe

Yesterday I received some of the best news I've received in a while. For weeks (months?) now I've been applying for jobs, and other than an interview last week for an online teaching gig, I haven't heard anything. YESTERDAY, though, I found out I won a summer fellowship from my university so that I can work guilt-free on my dissertation all summer. Essentially, I'm being paid to make dissertation writing my full-time job this summer, which frees me from having to continue the disastrous job search right away. I couldn't be happier.

The annual English Department award ceremony is on Friday, and they will be announcing the winners of the fellowship then and presenting them with...something (a certificate, I assume). At first I thought about driving down for the ceremony and staying the night with my friend Jamie, but then I started trying to figure out how I could pull off two days away and stay true to my Whole30 diet and decided it wasn't worth the stress. That's the biggest problem with this diet: you can't really go out to eat. I'm sure if I lived in L.A. or New York I could find plenty of restaurants that cater to the paleo lifestyle. For that matter, if I were in New York or D.C., I could just eat at Chop't every meal and be perfectly happy. But here, not so much. Even if I were to order a grilled chicken salad, I'd have to worry that they cooked the chicken in vegetable/canola/peanut oil. There probably aren't too many (or any) restaurants cooking strictly in coconut oil or extra virgin olive oil.

I just wonder how people on a strict paleo diet travel. Since travel is such an important part of my life, I can't imagine giving it up for any diet, no matter how healthful. I've decided that I'm going to try to keep eating a paleo diet at home after Whole30 is over, but I'm not going to restrict myself when I want to go out or when I travel. I definitely think this a healthier way of living, and I've really enjoyed the foods I've made these past nine days, but I'm not going to give up all the foods I love forever. I'm just going to eat them with far more moderation than ever before, seeing it as a treat to eat cheesecake/coffee cake/strawberry shortcake/etc. and not as a right.

Until May 8, when I can welcome those things back into my life, I'm going to be satisfied with meals like these:

Tuesday, Day 9
Breakfast: leftover Sweet 'n Savory Quiche and a side of raw baby carrots
Lunch: leftover tarragon chicken and grilled onions, zucchini, and squash from last night's dinner, and a plum
Dinner: smoky kale chips, chicken curry, and Indian-spiced sweet potatoes

This is the chicken curry I made tonight, from my own recipe! Really, it's a combination of several recipes I found as I tried to compensate for my lack of some fairly standard curry ingredients, such as garam masala, and to replace some ingredients that weren't Whole30 friendly, like sugar and yogurt. I also didn't bother to make rice to go with this curry because I just didn't have the stomach for cauliflower rice tonight.

Here's my recipe:

Whole30 Chicken Curry

Ingredients:
1 lb. chicken breasts or tenderloins
1/2 a yellow onion, chopped
2-3 tablespoons coconut oil
2 tablespoons minced garlic
1 tablespoon fresh chopped cilantro
1 tablespoon fresh minced ginger
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 can coconut milk
1 tsp. curry
1 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. coriander
1 tsp. salt (preferably kosher)
1/2 tsp. pepper
1/2 tsp. turmeric
1/4 tsp. cayenne
1/4 tsp. cardamom
1/4 tsp. cloves
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
additional salt and pepper to taste

1. Cut chicken breasts in halves and trim them.
2. In a large skillet, heat coconut oil 2-3 minutes. While oil is heating, salt and pepper each side of the chicken to taste.
3. When oil is hot, reduce heat to medium-high and place chicken in the pan. Flip them after 2.5 minutes and cook the other side 2.5 minutes. Remove the chicken from the skillet and place on a clean plate.
4. Add garlic, onions, and ginger to the skillet. Cook until onions are soft, nearly translucent. Reduce heat to medium.
5. Add coconut milk, spices, chopped cilantro, and lemon juice to the mixture. Allow to cook together for about a minute. 
6. Add chicken back in, cover with the sauce, bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low. Allow chicken to simmer 3-5 minutes, or until chicken is thoroughly cooked.

I paired the curry with these delicious Indian-spiced sweet potatoes:

Seriously. SO good.

We were supposed to have leftover grilled veggies as our second side, but due to an accident in which the leftover veggies were left out all night, I decided to whip up my first batch of kale chips instead:

Instead of making the regular kale chips with just sea salt and olive oil, I decided to make these smoky kale chips because I thought the smoked paprika would complement the Indian dishes. I ended up eating them almost as an appetizer instead because I had to prepare them first so I could roast the potatoes at a much higher temperature. I really can't wait until we get our double oven so I can say good-bye to that issue!

For my first time making kale chips, I was pleasantly surprised at how they turned out. They were just as good and just as addictive as people say, although after having the smoky variety, I'm not sure if I'll be able to switch to just salt.

Doing Whole30 right is time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes even a little stressful, but with meals like this one, it's so worth it.

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Resisting Temptation: A Whole30 Weekend

T.J. and I have officially reached the quarter mark of the Whole30 challenge, and we are going strong! This weekend presented its biggest challenge because temptation was everywhere. Last week I mostly confined myself to home, so I was never tempted by the signs and smells of restaurants. Out of sight, out of mind. Most weeks I'd take at least a day or two and go work at Panera or a coffee shop, but since I can't have my usual chai latte (or anything else on the menu), I've had to work at home. I'd forgotten how the sight alone of certain restaurants can stir cravings, but when we were out this weekend, just seeing Chick-fil-A had me craving, of all things, a strawberry milkshake. (And I can't even remember the last time I had one.)

Saturday presented our biggest test yet when we attended the Battle of the Buffalo, the annual cancer foundation fundraiser hosted by one of the fraternities at T.J.'s university. It's a chicken wing festival/competition to see which of seventeen competing restaurants makes the best wing. That's right. Seventeen wing restaurants. Twenty-four thousand wings. And T.J. received free tickets to the event, so we could have eaten our fill of wings (and cotton candy and snow cones) for free if we hadn't been on Whole30. When T.J. told me about the event Friday night, I was already imagining myself caving as soon as I smelled that delicious barbecue. I was already rationalizing that I deserved a cheat day, that I could just add an extra day onto the end of the challenge, as if it works that way.

It was a beautiful day, and T.J. and I had a relaxing early morning breakfast and then drove over to the farmer's market. It was the first weekend it was open, and there were lots of plants for sale, but no fruits and veggies ready yet since we've had such a long winter. We also drove around to some yard sales since both our subdivision and the one across the road were having community-wide sales. We came up empty-handed there too, as we are looking for just a few specific furniture items, but we still really enjoyed just being outside on such a gorgeous day. That afternoon we headed to Big Spring Park, which is where BotB was held, and it was such a perfect day to be at the park--warm, sunny, but with a pleasant breeze. Too cool for bugs, but warm enough to be out in just a long-sleeved tee.

Although entering the event meant walking past tables full of people chowing down on wings (and smelling them), once we were inside and had done a loop around the booths, we went down to the children's play area to find some of T.J.'s friends from work. Fortunately, this area was away from that amazing barbecue smell, so we were able to relax and chat and enjoy our evening without feeling constantly tempted to cash in our tickets for a pile of wings. We left the event that evening proud that we'd stayed wing free, and we agreed that if we could survive that temptation, we could survive anything during this challenge! (And T.J. is going to be challenged a lot in the coming weeks. He attended a banquet at work last night where he could only eat olives and salad without dressing, and he has two more this week.)

We spent the rest of the weekend shopping for groceries (five different stores: Sam's, Costco, Earth Fare, Publix, and Kroger), hanging pictures in the house, looking at paint samples for the downstairs, and picking out new comforter sets for the twin bed guest room. T.J. also got a new lawnmower, which he was super excited about.

Tiny old lawnmower, meet your new big brother.

And while most people were eating out, chowing down on wings, or glutting themselves on sweets this weekend (which we would normally have done), here's how we were dining:

Day 5, Friday 
Dinner: Italian Crock Pot Chili w/ fresh avocado

Day 6, Saturday
Breakfast: leftover Sweet Potato Hash w/ a side of raw baby carrots
Lunch: leftover chili w/ avocado
Dinner: Paleo Meatloaf, mashed cauliflower, roasted asparagus

T.J. followed the directions for the meatloaf pretty precisely, but he added diced sweet peppers, and I really think they took the recipe up a notch. It might have been the best meatloaf I've ever had. The asparagus was also very good, but the mashed cauliflower...well, we're going to have to work on the recipe a bit. Ours was a little too garlicky (and that's saying something coming from me), and there was still a bit too much of the cauliflower taste in it that I hate. I'm making it again later this week, though, so hopefully we can learn from our mistakes.

Day 7, Sunday
Breakfast: Sweet 'n Savory Quiche and raw baby carrots w/ almond butter
Lunch: leftover meatloaf, mashed cauliflower, and asparagus
Dinner:  leftover meatloaf on a bed of steamed broccoli slaw w/ spaghetti sauce

Breakfast quiche. It was better than expected (because up until yesterday I refused to eat cooked spinach--it's a texture thing) but a little dry and needed a little more flavor. Maybe add mushrooms and a few more eggs next time?

Fresh, all natural almond butter from Earth Fare

Originally, I was going to make zucchini noodles for my "spaghetti." I was also going to  make my own meatballs. But T.J. was at his banquet and I wanted an easy dinner, so I used leftover meatloaf in place of meatballs and used broccoli slaw in place of zucchini, and the result was fabulous. (And made in under ten minutes.) (Idea and "recipe" for the broccoli slaw is from Pinterest.)

When we went to Kroger we looked high and low for a natural marinara sauce with no sugar, preservatives, etc., and we were so happy (and surprised) to find this one. DelGrosso is a company local to the area where we lived in PA (and I'd never heard of it before moving there). They own an amusement park about an hour from our old house, too, and we went to their Italian Food Festival last year. We'd never seen their sauces in the South before, and it was one of those things T.J. lamented that we wouldn't be able to find when we moved back to Alabama, but here it is!

Delicious final product! At first I just put the sauce on that way to take this photo, thinking I would add more afterward, but that ended up being the perfect amount. The sauce, meatloaf, and slaw went together so beautifully I felt like I was really eating spaghetti and didn't miss noodles at all.

Today's menu is the same breakfast as yesterday, same lunch as dinner last night, and a favorite from last week (tarragon chicken, grilled veggies, and fruit) for dinner. I have an exciting menu of new, different foods planned for the rest of week, though, so Week 2 should be interesting.

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(Happily) Surviving Whole30

It's Day 5 of my and T.J.'s month-long commitment to clean eating, and so far the Whole30 challenge...hasn't been much of a challenge. I know I might regret that statement in a week or two, but the first 4.5 days have gone better than I ever imagined possible. So far, this is how we're feeling:

Me: no headaches, no blood sugar problems, no digestive issues, no acid reflux (other than a little at breakfast this morning after accidentally eating apple slices that had some preservatives in them), and sleeping all night every night for the first time in recent memory.

T.J.: no digestive issues, no acid reflux, only one nighttime headache (probably from dehydration as he'd just spent the past hour push mowing our lawn in the Alabama heat), but sleeping has gotten worse instead of better. :( (He's always been a terrible sleeper, but he's sleeping so poorly this week that he wakes up exhausted, comes home exhausted, and falls asleep on the couch by 8:00 p.m. I really hope his sleep improves in week 2.

I'm really surprised that we haven't had bad headaches this week, especially from sugar withdrawal, but it probably helps that neither of us have a caffeine addiction to combat. I used to drink hot tea occasionally and a glass or two of iced sweet tea every day, but neither of us are coffee drinkers and we rarely drink soda, so my body hasn't missed caffeine so far.

I'm even more surprised at how well I've survived without sugar, though. My sugar addiction is well-chronicled (just check out my "Recipes" board on Pinterest, which is 95% sugary desserts), but so far the only time I've really craved sugar is at breakfast, which is still a bit of a struggle for me. I'm trying to adopt the Whole30 mindset that breakfast is just "Meal 1," no different from the other two, and I know that the whole idea of having separate "breakfast" foods is a Western concept and that in most areas of the world it's perfectly normal to eat the same thing for breakfast as for dinner...but it's still hard for me to stomach veggies for breakfast every day. And twice this week I had to eat omelets, which, you aren't going to believe, but I had never tried before, and now I know why. Because I'm not a fan of veggies with my eggs. Or anything with eggs really. Except bacon. (Which, alas, I am not allowed on Whole30.)

Today was my most successful breakfast, though, so maybe I'm on to something. Last night I made sweet potato hash for us to eat today and tomorrow for breakfast, and it was by FAR the best breakfast food I've eaten this week:

It was really simple to make, as well, thanks to a little prep work earlier. I had half a chopped onion left over from dinner the night before, and T.J. cubed two large sweet potatoes for me on Tuesday night when we were making sweet potato fries. To make the hash (which I adapted from the recipe in It Starts with Food), I put a pound of ground beef in one skillet and put the cubed sweet potatoes in another with a couple of tablespoons of coconut oil (a.k.a. My New Best Friend). I seasoned the beef with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. When the sweet potatoes started to soften, I added the chopped onion and cooked until the onions were translucent and the potatoes were completely soft. I seasoned them with about 1/4 teaspoons of cinnamon and paprika, added a dash of nutmeg, then added in the drained meat. I mixed all the ingredients together and then let them simmer for a few minutes, then let it cool a bit before separating into four containers. Voila! Easy breakfast for the next two days. 

It was actually really good too, much better than the "Breakfast Mix" (apple, ground turkey) I made earlier in the week. We had a couple of those pre-cut apple/caramel combos in the refrigerator (because I'm six and so lazy I usually don't even cut my own apples), so instead of just eating straight from the Tupperware this morning, I decided to plate my hash and add the apples on the side, lest I be tempted by the caramel. It might just be because I've been sugar deprived this week, but I would swear those green apple slices were the sweetest things I've ever eaten. However, not five minutes after finishing them, I started coughing, which usually means I have acid reflux, which I'd sort of forgotten existed since I've been free of it for five days. I dug the apple package out of the trash, and lo, there were three ingredients added to the apples. Preservatives, I'm sure of it. So there's your proof, kids. Preservatives hate your body. Or vice versa. Whatever. AVOID them when possible, in other words.

Other than breakfast struggles, though, the rest of our meals this week have been some of the best I've ever prepared at home--super tasty and flavorful and filling. Next week I'm going to be more ambitious, which means a higher risk of failure, but for now let's enjoy a few pics of the meals we've tried this week, all of them delicious and nutritious and definitely on my "to cook again" list:

Dinner Day 2 (and Lunch Day 3): deconstructed hamburger with caramelized onions, roasted broccoli w/ garlic, and baked sweet potato fries with smoked paprika and cinnamon. The ones that were a little burned were the best, and they actually reheated well in the microwave.

Day 3 Dinner (and Day 4 Lunch): Moroccan chicken, microwaved sweet potato w/ ghee and cinnamon, and roasted cauliflower and broccoli w/ garlic. I've never liked cauliflower, but I LOVED them roasted.

Day 4 Dinner (Day 5 Lunch): Spinach salad w/ Cajun-seasoned chicken, cucumber, red onions, grated carrot, and grape tomatoes.  T.J. also added black olives to his. Dressing is just EVOO and balsamic vinegar (so glad I got used to using oil and vinegar for dressing when in London). By Thursday night I was ready to make something simple (and that didn't leave a pile of dirty pots and pans), and this salad nailed it. It was a bit difficult to find a blackening seasoning that would be Whole30 approved (it's amazing how many things have artificial ingredients and/or SUGAR--even our chicken broth had sugar!), but T.J. found one and it was really yummy. And SPICY. I don't usually eat creamy salad dressings, but I was kind of missing ranch with this one. There are paleo ranch recipes out there (and T.J. even  made one on Monday), but they generally require a raw egg...and the thought sort of turned our stomachs. Making ranch is time-consuming, anyway, so oil and vinegar FTW! (Bonus: helps meet healthy fats quota)

It doesn't look like these meals would be time-consuming, but for someone who used to only make veggies from a bag, and who tried to avoid chicken altogether to keep her hands from getting slimy, prep time has taken quite a bit of time as I wash and cut all of the veggies and trim and cut the chicken. Hopefully that time will be reduced in the coming weeks as I become more adept at peeling, skinning, chopping, etc.

Up tonight: meatloaf with mashed roasted cauliflower and green beans. I can't wait!

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Whole Body, Whole Mind, Whole30

It's no secret that T.J. and I have had a lot of health problems over the last year or so, many of which our (multiple) doctors have been unable to help. We both have digestive issues--his worse than mine--and I have problems with elevated blood sugar but am not diabetic. I have suffered from fatigue for a while now, but all of my tests have been negative (except I do have a severe B12 deficiency for which I receive shots). We also both have gained a bit of weight in the past year, despite no real changes to our diet. For a (very) brief time, we tried the gluten-free thing, but after T.J. had an endoscopy that ruled he was not allergic to gluten, we saw no reason to deprive ourselves of bread, pastries, and the millions of other things in which gluten is used as a preservative (such as salad dressing, salsa, beer, and even some cheeses). It's reached the point, though, where we can't keep living the way we have and we know that no matter what the tests say, something has to be wrong with us if things are getting worse instead of better.

In an effort to change the way we eat and hopefully the way we feel, on Monday we started the Whole30 challenge. Normally I avoid fad diets, and I've read enough about the paleo trend to know that there are a lot of skeptics and people who think the idea that we should eat as cave people did is ridiculous (and when put that way, I would have to agree). But I'm willing to give this program a try simply because it allows us to rid our diet of most everything that could be causing us problems and to gradually add those things back in in order to understand which foods our bodies can't tolerate.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Whole30, it's a relatively simple food program that asks you to cut dairy, grains, sugar, legumes, and alcohol from your diet for thirty days, and instead eat "Good Food" three meals a day, with no snacking in between (unless you are working out). Basically, each of the three meals should consist of a palm-sized piece of protein (organic, grass-fed meat, seafood, or eggs), a plate full of vegetables, and some healthy fats, such as a closed handful of certain nuts or seeds, a heaping handful of olives, or a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, coconut oil, coconut butter, almond butter, ghee, etc. You can also have 1-2 servings of fruit each day. This sounds pretty simple, but I spent most of Sunday just reading the second half of the Whole30 book, It Starts with Food (T.J. read the first half, which is the science behind the program), and planning our menu for the week. For someone who considers making jar spaghetti "cooking," it was a little intimidating at first planning enough different kinds of meats and vegetables for twenty-one meals, especially knowing that everything would be made from scratch. It was also difficult to plan meals without any sugar, dairy, grains, or legumes. Those things made up probably 60-70% of my diet before.

For example, on a typical weekday, I generally have a Nutri-Grain bar and a glass of milk or orange juice for breakfast, a sandwich or Nathan's hot dog for lunch with chips or potato salad, and maybe steak tips (marinated in brown sugar and Dale's sauce), broccoli with cheese, and a baked sweet potato (loaded with butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon) for dinner. Guess what? I can't eat any of those meals on Whole30, although I could have a steak without sugar-based marinades and a sweet potato without butter and brown sugar. So you can see why a food program like this one is challenging for someone like me, for whom the only cravings I ever get are for sugar and occasionally dairy. And I'm used to indulging those cravings, not silencing them with glasses of ice water. (As I have to do now.)

So Whole30 is going to be a real challenge for me. And it's expensive. Eating three balanced meals a day instead of one really strains the budget. And eating whole, fresh foods is far more expensive than eating processed ones. We spent $212 at Earth Fare and Kroger buying all of our food for the week with nothing extra. We had an entire cart full of vegetables and organic meats and never even went near the middle of the store other than to look for ghee (clarified butter) and a couple of other small items I'd never even heard of before Sunday.

On Sunday night, after putting away all of our groceries and throwing away anything that might tempt us to cheat, we began prepping for the week ahead. I made a "breakfast mix" (ground turkey, apple, cinnamon and nutmeg) for breakfast the next morning, and T.J. boiled eggs so we could have fresh spinach salads for lunch. Monday night we made dinner together: tarragon chicken with mushrooms and green onions in a coconut milk sauce; grilled zucchini, yellow squash, and onions cooked in a ghee, salt, pepper, and garlic marinade; and fresh strawberries and blackberries. On Tuesday T.J. made us breakfast before work (omelets with mushrooms, yellow and red sweet peppers, and onions), we had leftover chicken and veggies for lunch (with a banana and handful of cashews on the side), and for dinner we made deconstructed hamburgers with caramelized onions, baked sweet potato fries, and roasted broccoli.

My new best friend

Tarragon chicken yumminess.

Forgive this terrible iPhone photo. The grilled veggies were my favorite part, though, (and were even better the next day), so I had to share.

Although learning to eat "real" food for breakfast is a huge challenge for me, so far Whole30 hasn't been too hard. About ten times a day I have to remind myself that no, I cannot have that box of Nerds I tucked away in my office drawer, and yesterday I noticed my hair conditioner looked and smelled a little too much like whipped cream, but I'm learning to ignore my cravings and avoid reminders of what I'm missing. I'm focusing on the things that after two days I already love cooking with, especially ghee and coconut oil, and the fact that I get to use fresh garlic (which I love) in almost every meal. I'm playing with spices and really cooking for the first time...maybe ever. So even if I don't feel better after finishing Whole30, even if I go right back to eating tons of sugar, grains, and dairy, maybe I will at least have learned to be a better, braver cook and will see cooking as more of a pleasure than a chore.

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Of Two Minds

It's been a busy few weeks around here--and a busy few months before that--so I'm finally getting the chance to sit down and focus on my dissertation for the first time in months. First there was my 30th birthday weekend, when my husband had all sorts of lovely surprises planned, the best of which was a surprise visit from my best friend from grad school, Miranda, and her husband and son. T.J. had wanted to have lunch at Newk's, and when we got there Miranda and Co. were waiting for us. I was super surprised (so surprised that my first reaction was "What are you guys doing here???") because they live four hours away (and of course lived much further away when we lived in PA), and we don't get to see them very often.  We had a nice weekend with them, and I'm so happy they were our first house guests!

Then the next week I drove down to my parents' for a couple days. I hadn't seen them since December and my brother was visiting from Orlando, so I squeezed the visit into my schedule because he doesn't make it home often. It was good to see all of my family (parents, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, siblings), and to get to spend a little time with my cousins, even if it was just hanging out around the house and driving down to Destin for dinner.

Then this past week I attended the national American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) conference in Cleveland, where I had a great time rooming with my friend Cassie and meeting lots of people in the field. Cassie and I went to the member reception on Thursday, which was held in the beautiful glass atrium of the Cleveland Museum of Art, had breakfast with a prospective AU PhD student Friday morning, and then Friday night went out for dinner and drinks at an Irish pub with a big group of grad students (and I got to have my first draft Strongbow since London!). In between glasses of wine, mugs of chai latte, and pints of Strongbow, we managed to make it to a few panels, mostly on travel or pedagogy, and Cassie presented on performances of drunkenness on the eighteenth-century stage and I presented on teaching women's writing about India in a poster session. I'd never done a poster session before, but I worked hard on the poster and it was really well-received, with lots of people taking pictures of it and some emailing me afterward for copies of it. It was a great opportunity to network and to strengthen previous connections I'd made with other eighteenth-century scholars who work with India (we're a small bunch).

I have to admit that the conference didn't leave me feeling as inspired as some others (mainly creative writing ones) do, though. In the Chronicle, in our departments, and now even at conferences, we are constantly being reminded that academia is in crisis, that there are fewer and fewer tenure-track lines available and more and more adjuncts filling those roles, most making less than $20,000 a year. I went to pedagogy panels where well-known scholars who've been in the field dozens of years talked about the burdens of teaching additional course loads, of teaching mostly composition and core literature courses, as departments shrink and even tenure-track or tenured faculty must bear the load of increased University enrollments.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the role of the university has changed in our culture, and humanities departments have not adapted to the new consumerist mindset. Students are worried about the future the way that we all are, and they are going to be less inclined to go into majors where the job path is less defined. Civil engineering majors know exactly what kind of jobs they can apply for after earning their degrees, as do management majors, marketing majors, accounting majors, etc. English and history majors...it's a bit more vague. I don't think it's necessarily that people don't enroll in these disciplines because they will make less money than their business and engineering counterparts; I think they are worried whether or not they will be able to make any money at all, or at least a livable wage. And most departments just expect people to enroll in English, history, etc. for the love of the discipline. They aren't actively recruiting high school students the way that engineering and science programs often do, and they aren't selling and supporting the professional aspects of their discipline the way these other disciplines are. Where are the required internships, the job talks (other than about grad school and academia), the networking outside one's own discipline? Why not create more hybrid majors that unite the critical thinking skills and empathy developed in an English major with a more "practical" discipline--English/business, English/political science, English/health sciences, etc.? I know most departments have never had to think about these things and many over-burdened (and especially tenured) professors don't want to go up that road, but it might be the only path to survival. I honestly don't believe that the reason our departments are shrinking is because fewer people want to read books and talk about them; it's because more people are saying, I can do that on my own or with friends or as a minor. But how am I going to make money? And until we can answer that question for them, English will always be in crisis.

I've been thinking about all of this a lot more lately as I've been searching for a job here in Huntsville/Madison and wondering more and more often if I made the right decision to go so far down this rabbit hole. A part of me will always wonder if I should have just pursued writing instead, gotten my MFA and then gotten a job in the private sector doing something boring and mindless but that would support my writing and give me plenty of brain space leftover at the end of the day to create. It was telling when after the first panel I attended at ASECS, my most useful note was about something I could use in my novel, not in teaching or scholarship. Although later panels reminded me of why I love research and my field, that reminder was always tempered by the knowledge that it's nearly impossible to get a job just researching and teaching my areas of speciality, and that even if I did, I would be expected to focus solely on my field and not deviate into creative writing.

The dissertation has to be my priority now. I have to finish and earn my PhD. No question about that. But what comes after that is more obscure to me than ever.

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Southern Ghostbusters, Izzy Brannick-Style: A Review of Rachel Hawkins' School Spirits

This past Friday I received the best birthday gift from NetGalley possible: a copy of Rachel Hawkins' SCHOOL SPIRITS, a book I pre-ordered on Amazon months ago. Usually the books available from NetGalley are from debut authors or writers who aren't well-known yet, so I was surprised (and delighted) to find a highly anticipated book from a NYT-bestselling author like Hawkins there.  

SCHOOL SPIRITS is a fast, fun spin-off for any fans of the HEX HALL series or Rachel Hawkins herself. The story follows Izzy Brannick, the younger cousin of Sophie Mercer, the protagonist of Hawkins' HEX HALL series. Sophie doesn't make an appearance, but Izzy and the other new characters we meet are compelling enough that I wasn't longing to be back at Hex Hall with Sophie, Archer, and Jenna. 

Without giving too much away, the basic plot of the novel is that Izzy is forced to attend a regular high school in Mississippi after a ghost attacks one of the teachers. Izzy is one of the last of the Brannicks, a family of female warriors who hunt Prodigium (supernatural creatures), and she is charged with going undercover at the school, playing the role of a regular high school sophomore, in order to find the ghost and eliminate it. Izzy has never spent much time around regular human teenagers, so of course her interactions with them as she learns how to navigate the delicate social sphere of an American high school are entertaining and often hilarious. Mary Evans High is not a school out of MEAN GIRLS, CLUELESS, or GLEE, though. The characters are more than just cliquish stereotypes pulled from Hollywood's idea of high school. MEHS seemed much more authentic (at least to the American South), and even though I've been out of high school for...a few years now, as a former high school teacher and Southern student, I could identify with the small town world Hawkins builds and her characterization of high school life. At the same time, people from OUTSIDE the South shouldn't read that description and think this is a book full of y'alls, cowboy boots, shotguns, pick-up trucks, and other Southern stereotypes. The South has those things, obviously, but most books and movies set in the South show a version of it I don't even recognize. Hawkins' South is much closer to the real thing, I think.

The best part of the book is Izzy herself, though. Her voice is witty and endearing. She's immensely likable and very funny, like Sophie, but has a personality and voice all her own. Although I loved the characters Dex and Romy, too, my favorite secondary character was probably Torin, who really comes alive here. In SPELL BOUND, Torin had a minor role but seemed more of a decorative piece, whereas here his personality is really well-developed and Hawkins uses him well to propel the story forward.

My only real issue with the novel is that it appears to be a stand-alone, yet some of the problems are unresolved or open-ended in a way that left it open to sequels. I'd love to read more of Izzy's story, so I hope Hawkins considers writing at least one sequel, if not giving Izzy a trilogy of her own.

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The Commitmentphobe Buys a House

At first, T.J. didn't appreciate it too much when I told him buying a house was the biggest commitment I'd ever made. Sure, marriage is a big commitment, but a marriage doesn't necessarily tie you physically and financially to one spot on the planet. Some marriages might, if you marry someone averse to travel or being away from his family or who is tied to a career in a specific location, but thankfully my husband isn't like that. (And, honestly, I wouldn't have married anyone who was.)

It isn't that I never thought we'd buy a house. Owning a home is part of the American dream. But when our realtor Lisa called to say our offer on our near-dream home was accepted, I suddenly realized what a BFD home-buying is, and I turned a little green. 

After T.J. moved from Tennessee to Pennsylvania, his house sat on the market for nearly three years before finally selling at a loss. That's 36 months of mortgage payments, utility bills, hired lawn care, all gone. So what that experience taught me, perhaps erroneously, is that buying a house means you are stuck in a place or, if you try to leave when the market is unfavorable, you're going to be financially drained by it. My wanderlust kicked into overdrive at the very thought of homeownership. 

Still, the rental market in the Huntsville area was pathetic, so we didn't have many options. We'd outgrown apartment living and could find no reasonably priced houses or duplexes for rent in decent condition. Buying looked like the only good option. 

On our very first full day back in Alabama (February 1), we spent the day with realtor Lisa, a friend of T.J.'s family, touring 10+ houses in southeast Huntsville. I'd combed Trulia, Zillow, and Realtor.com, looked through hundreds of listings and countless pictures, to narrow our list down to houses of a certain size, in a certain area, in a certain price range. We saw some contenders, but nothing we were in love with, nothing that said this is our home. I grew up in the country and didn't realize how much that had affected me until I started looking at houses with tiny backyards, or with five sets of neighbors staring into the backyard. We quickly learned how much superficial things like chain-link fences and above-ground utilities bothered us. And although we wanted a house in a more established neighborhood (with trees!), we wanted one that didn't require a ton of updating and remodeling. But the only two houses with private backyards (backing a green belt) needed at least $50,000-$100,000 worth of work just to be livable. We toured only one house we could honestly see ourselves in (and even it had a tiny backyard surrounded by neighbors), and when we decided to drive by it the very next day, found a "SOLD ANOTHER ONE" sign in the front yard! We couldn't believe our (rotten) luck. Just the previous weekend, we'd found a house that we thought was the one (with a lovely backyard of willow trees, a stone's throw from T.J.'s parents), and it sold before we could tour it--after sitting on the market for 6+ months.

While Lisa worked with some visiting out-of-town clients that weekend, we drove neighborhoods looking for "for sale" signs. We drove all over the northeast side of town, over the mountain in Hampton Cove, in Owens Cross Roads. We looked at older, established areas on the south side of town and brand-new developments of cookie-cutter houses, like something out of the Truman Show (so said T.J.). We were feeling more and more down about the loss of the other two houses that had sold just after we discovered them. We drove past the rest of the houses on the list we'd given to Lisa and ruled them out because of the neighborhoods, the neighbors, the steepness of the driveways, the school districts. After three days of full-time house searching, we were tired and dejected. We decided to take the night off to go to a movie, but we ended up house searching on our computers anyway.

Finally, we decided to look at houses in Madison, the neighboring city to Huntsville. T.J.'s commute would be about the same either way and some of the school districts were just as good as those in SE Huntsville, so we decided to give it a shot. We narrowed our list down to five or six houses and went out around dusk just to drive by them. One in particular we loved practically on first sight. We loved the neighborhood. We loved the curb appeal. We loved that the house had a huge backyard and backed up to a relatively quiet road, so the yard felt private. 

We sent our list of Madison contenders to Lisa, and the next day we drove out to see them. We ruled out several almost immediately. And then we toured the house we'd loved on sight. And we loved the inside even more. It just felt like home. So sunny, warm, with a good flow and lots of functional space. It had almost everything on our wishlist: four bedrooms, a study for me, a playroom for future kids, 2.5 baths, plenty of garage/storage space. We took T.J.'s parents and sister back the next day to see it, and that night we wrote up our offer. Less than 24 hours later, the homeowners had countered and we had accepted. We were going to be homeowners.

We are going to be homeowners. At 4:00 today, we will sign the papers that will officially make this house ours:

I'm excited. I'm nervous. I'm more than a little overwhelmed and intimidated. But I'm so ready to call this house our home. 

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Moving to Madison

By now this post is less an announcement than an acknowledgement that T.J. and I have moved back to Alabama. If you'd told me six months ago (or even two months ago) we'd be back here, I wouldn't have believed you. But fate has a funny way of backing you into the least expected (yet somehow inevitable) corners.

You might have noticed that the blog went silent during the last third of 2012, in part because right after I said on Aug. 27 that we were hoping to make a permanent move soon, we decided to throw caution to the wind and he turned in his sixty-day notice to the university. In some fields, sixty days is probably plenty of time to find a new job and relocate, but the world of higher education moves much more slowly, so although he spent the next two months applying to more than forty jobs all around the country, we heard very little during that time. Even though we knew we couldn't move until after the semester ended and I was finished teaching, it started looking less and less like he would have a new position by the start of the spring semester. Then, right before Thanksgiving, he started getting daily calls for phone interviews. In a two-week span, he did around 15+ phone interviews with schools from around the country, from private colleges in Boston to prestigious public universities in California. Then, right before Christmas break, the calls for on-campus interviews started coming in. I have no idea why hiring committees wait until the end of the semester--by all accounts one of the most stress times of the academic year--to start moving on these searches and interviewing and bringing candidates on campus, but we were just thankful that there was finally some movement, some hope, that he would have a job soon.

He did three on-campus interviews in the two weeks immediately before Christmas, and he received his first offer when we were in New York for our anniversary. It was a tempting offer in a fantastic metropolitan area, a place where the cost of living wasn't outrageous and we'd have access to museums, live music, parks and festivals, organic grocery stores, international cuisine. But the job wasn't a good fit for him and we worried that taking it would mean another move in a couple of years. We'd agreed that this next move should be good for both of us, should be an opportunity to settle down for at least five years or so while we started our family and he got his doctorate. It was a tough decision, but he turned the job down, trusting that something else would come through.

In January, we returned to Pennsylvania after a couple of weeks in Alabama visiting friends and family, and the position we were in suddenly got very scary. We had to be out of our house by the end of January, and we still had no idea where we were moving. We knew he had two more on-campus interviews in the coming weeks but had no idea if he would receive an offer from either place.

Thankfully, both interviews went extremely well, and when he was at the second interview he actually got an offer from the first place. Because of the nature of these searches, the second place still had another week of interviews before they would be able to make a decision, so even though he was told he was in the top two candidates for that position, he had to accept the first position before hearing the results of the second. Which is how we came to be back in Alabama.

If we'd had another week to give an answer, who knows, we might be living in Washington State right now.

When we started the job search, he applied to jobs around the country, but we specifically targeted the West Coast and Boston area. In the South, we targeted Florida. I believe he applied to around seven schools in Florida. None even called for a phone interview. He applied to two in Alabama and got on-campus interviews at both. How bizarre is that?

So that's how after a nationwide search we came to find ourselves back in our home state, and not even just our home state, but T.J.'s hometown. A part of me will always wonder, what if? What if we'd moved to the West Coast, to Washington, to that beautiful little city on the Puget Sound, just minutes from the Canadian border? It's about as far from Alabama (physically and philosophically) as you can get and still be in the continental U.S. And I know I would have been happy there, would have felt like I belonged in a way that I've never felt in Alabama.

But another part of me is just happy to be back in civilization, minutes from shopping, dining, stadium-seating movie theaters (surprisingly difficult to find in central PA). And the OCD over-planner in me is just happy that at least some uncertainties are coming to an end. After all these months, it feels good that T.J. is now back at work, that I'm working on my dissertation again, that some normalcy is returning to our lives.

No kidding, we got this fortune two days after moving back to Alabama! 

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