I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria!  This was made possible by the DHSI and by my dean, and I’m grateful to both.  The Institute’s ninth year was my first time attending, and it was an intense experience.  Something like 35 hours of instruction over five days; evening plenary talks and early-morning graduate student presentations for four of those.  I took the large project planning and management course with Lynne Siemens. It was even more exciting and useful than I’d expected it to be. Who would’ve thought I’d be into project management?  But bring industry-born ideas about cat herding resource wrangling into academe, and I’m there.  We talked about juggling (often too-little) money and time and people, getting folks to be as excited about your ideas as  you are, getting your head around a project in the first place.  We had guest speakers in almost every class and got to plan our own projects.  All of this delightfully low-tech: I’m bringing back large sheets of flip-chart paper with wild scribbles and post-it notes.  Now to get grant funding for this thing.  (Grant application is in, but we don’t find out for a couple more months.  If we don’t get funded, I imagine we’ll apply again.  In any case, the training will be applicable in other contexts, not least of them the everyday juggling of activities at work.)

The best part, of course, were the people.  I saw some old friends and acquaintances, and finally got to spend a bunch of time around Julie Meloni, who is moving to Victoria to work as a postdoc at UVic’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. (ETCL folks put on the Institute every summer—and let’s pause for a second to appreciate the work they do, and their success at it.)

Talking to Julie, and to Jentery Sayers, and Jon Bath, and Susan Brown, and the many other folk I met at UVic,  one thing is clear: networked technologies are finally at a stage where they can be reliably and cheaply used for long-distance collaboration in the digital humanities.  There’s no substitute for in-person interaction, but it’s also increasingly easy to work together over arbitrary distances, meeting in the same place every once in a while.  This is changing our work process.  It’s no longer just that we can email Word documents back and forth.  We can use combinations of text/audio/video chat, collaborative editing environments, remote file upload and syncing venues, online project management systems, even bibliography and research sharing systems to work on projects either synchronously or asynchronously, as circumstances permit, at times across many timezones.  All of these tools have been available for some time, but have been clunky or expensive or not easily interoperable.  The recent explosion of networked tools and services (some of them created by and for academics) is a perfect storm for academic collaboration.

At the beginning of the DHSI week I got pretty discouraged about my self-imposed geographic restriction to Boston.  All this activity swirling around me, watching people who have found inspiration in working with one another, felt like being on the outside looking in.  Which is pretty ridiculous, all things considered: nobody can do everything, and I have a job in Boston that’s at least nominally a digital humanities/digital libraries job.  But it does get lonely at BU sometimes.  There isn’t much DH activity either at the university or generally in New England. (Sure, Brown University is just an hour away, and THATCamp New England has just opened for applications.  But given that we’re in CollegeTownUSA land, there’s still woefully little DH work going on around here.  It’s ramping up, but slowly.)

Well, seems like there’s nothing like a little live interaction to get things going.  Seems I’m about to get involved in a couple of projects that will feed me in ways that will supplement the satisfaction I draw from current in-person work.  This is good both for me and for my workplace.  Information will flow through more channels, inspiration can be distributed. Perspective allows serendipity to do its unpredictable future thing.

I love Boston, and have good reasons to live where I live. This has meant passing on multiple opportunities to apply for jobs I’d no doubt enjoy. But I’ve placed a high priority on being near my people. It was a hard decision to make when I made it, but the rewards are constant and significant. And now, the trade-off doesn’t seem as big as it did even only three years ago.

Being a free agent in the age of networked communication is pretty exciting.

• ++ Birthday! I had one. I went out to dinner with mom and Vlad, and later had a party. It was well attended by lovely people; Mark supplied lights and gorgeous swathes of cloth to drape around things; the food was appreciated; much merriment was had.
• - Then last Monday I started feeling sick.
• - Then last Tuesday I came in sick to cover library supervision in the evening (until 9pm), and proceeded to lie on the table floor for most of the time I was in, unable even to watch stupid TV online, much less work.
• — Then Wednesday I discovered that what I had was strep throat! I don’t remember whether I’d ever had it before; certainly not since I got to the States almost twenty (!!) years ago.
• + Yet I recognized it for what it must be, went to get myself checked out (thanks for the encouragement, mom), and got
• +++ penicillin, which is a wonder of (semi-)modern medicine, even though it’s kicking my butt by greatly diminishing my baseline energy level. But hey, it’s only for ten days.
• - Meanwhile, I missed my weekly playdate/kid-sitting night with four year old Natalie. SO looking forward to seeing her today.
• ++ On Saturday, I had fantastic dinner with my family, all of them—even brother Zhenya, sisinlaw Jo Ann and nephew Tesher came up for this—as a first, early celebration of my mom’s 70th birthday (coming up in May). I do so like hanging out with them, particularly when it involves food and then sleeping in my own bed.
• + The last two nights, I had excellent dates, with conversations and food and laughing that left me feeling hale and whole.
• + Yesterday, I finally finished up the saga of having had to have a tooth extracted a year and a half ago, then get an implant, then get a crown for the implant. Dentistry has been the bain of my didn’t-grow-up-with-fluoride-in-my-water body, and I’m glad this one’s over.
• ++ Also yesterday, I acquired a physical therapist and a therapy schedule to finally fix a year-and-a-half-old shoulder injury. I like the therapist, and I like that he’s two T stops away from the building where I work. Major win.
• + I’ve been productive and happy at work (except for that miserable evening with the strep throat). We submitted an NEH grant proposal; I’ve been talking to faculty about teaching with technology; we have several IT and digital library projects going; and as terrifying as it is to essentially be my own boss most days, I’m also learning new stuff at a pace I can feel. Mostly learning about managing time and expectations. Valuable stuff.
• - Work is also exhausting and often frustrating. Yesterday I shut down my computer after reviewing and commenting on four long library policy documents, and literally couldn’t think for a while, just let myself be on autopilot going home.
• + Good thing cooking perks me right up.
• - I’ve also been chronically under-sleeping again, mostly by making bad time-management choices in favor of being with good people.
• + Good thing I got plenty of sleep while sick with strep throat!
• + On a different note, I’m participating in a Tufts study on how people manage their personal finances (or at least that’s what they claim the study is about). This got me thinking more deeply about my own personal finances, and once again coming to a conclusion that I can manage them well even if the jam-tomorrow enticements that just keep coming from my ex never materialize, and I have to pay his share of our mutual debts too. I wouldn’t be happy doing it, but not having any choice, find it more pleasant to be sanguine about it. Of course I have a rant about that, but that’s not the point: the point is, this isn’t driving me crazy anymore.
• +This past weekend, I saw a bunch of old friends and acquaintances from my days of hanging out on the interactive fiction MUD.  I also got to see a screening of the excellent documentary Get Lamp, by Jason Scott of textfiles fame, which (both Get Lamp and textfiles) I’m highly recommending if you’re into that sort of thing.
• ++ My house and my life are full of people so good in so many ways, it makes me dizzy sometimes.

And these are just the highlights. Life’s full, and mostly good.

Turns out, the alcapurrias are for making tomorrow, because today I turned five cups of flours into a boat load of dumplings.

Housemate Marta is much happier not eating wheat gluten, so I decided to try making wheat-free dumplings. Much as I love to cook, anything involving dough is not my forte; add to that weird flours, and I was in unfamiliar territory — a noteworthy event in the kitchen. Lo, I experimented, and it was good. No, it was great.

I found a gf dumpling dough recipe online, but the proportions seemed all wrong. Here are the ones I came up with, for the dough:

1c tapioca flour [same as tapioca starch]
1c white rice flour
2t xanthan gum
2T oil
14T cold water

Whisk the first three together. Add oil and water, then mix well first with a spoon, then using your hands. The dough should neither be crumbly nor stick to your hands.

Separate the dough into four parts. Cover three of them well with a damp towel. Using rice flour on both the board and the rolling pin, roll out the fourth as thinly as you can. This takes more patience than with wheat doughs, but patience is worth it. Do work quickly enough to not dry out the dough too much.

Using a small glass or your favorite thing with edges, cut out as many circles as you can from the dough. Immediately gather up remnants, ball them up so they don’t dry, and stick the ball to the next quarter of dough, under the damp towel. Cover the cut-out circles with another damp towel.

Take each circle into your hand, put a bit of filling in the center (a line works better than a ball) and pinch the edges closed to make a half-moon. Take care not to break the dough; it’s a pain to patch.

The filling I used ended up needing 2.5 of the above dough recipes, and consisting of:

1lb ground pork
0.5lb ground beef
0.5 can pumpkin
garam masala
crushed cumin
Penzey’s dried onion flakes
Penzey’s dried garlic flakes
soy sauce
salt
pepper

A note on the Penzey’s spices: their onion and garlic are worlds different from any powdered stuff. They’re essentially dehydrated (freeze-dried?) flakes. The garlic is actually spicy.

The dumplings turned out delicious, feeding four people with two cookie sheets’ worth left over to freeze. I boiled them until they floated, dumped in a mason jar of cold water to slow the dough cooking and allow filling to catch up, brought to a boil again, then took them out and fried some of them. Because there’s nothing in the dough that really browns, they weren’t exactly well browned after frying. Butter might have helped with that, but I was using pork fat mixed with canola oil.

Both the boiled and the fried dumplings were delicious with Shane’s dipping sauce: half soy sauce, half rice vinegar, with a motherlode of garlic and ginger. (If you are not a fan of Very Vinegary Flavor, do a 2:1 with the soy sauce.)

Today was victory over unfamiliar cooking territory. We’ll see how I do with the alcapurrias tomorrow.

Thoughtful. A quality I am told I possess, and certainly one I seek out in others. My default synonym for it is not so much “considerate” or “compassionate” as “thinking.” A person of action who thinks before she acts is even better. I personally tend more toward thinking than action, and work to balance the two out. Right now, spring into summer into fall, is the best time for me to do that.

Provided that, you know, we get any actual summer over here. My friend Rosa recently remarked that summer had fallen on a [4th of July] weekend in Boston this year, but I hold out hope that we’ll see some summer yet. Meanwhile, when it’s not raining, it’s perfect biking weather.

Changes. Sometimes they’re like stray kittens that start tagging along on the street, whether you want them to or not, follow you home and settle down there. Sometimes they tear your house apart, and you wish you’d never met them. Other times you look at them and see possibilities that might, in other circumstances, not have occurred at all.

Two of the three biggest changes in my life—emigration, life partnership, and then divorce—were not of my making. Some changes have happened to me, and then it’s a matter of managing my own reactions to them. Other changes, though, I have effected myself—to be clear, usually with the help of others. I like changes. They’re exhilarating, they terrify me, they shake me out of the everyday. Changing the course of my graduate education; sharing my home with people I hardly knew at the beginning, several times over the years; falling in love after falling down hard, and before the healing was over, letting my guard down and gambling and winning at lovers. So far the big changes have been a net gain.

Some changes require more courage than others. Some changes require more energy than others.

I also look for stability in some aspects of my life. For some things to be unchanging. For gravity to continue working, for my beloveds to keep flying with me on the wings of our own creation, for people I can feed with food I cook, for a home from which I don’t move for a good long while. But the changes, they keep coming, they don’t stop; and so mostly the stability I seek is an internal, core thing.

Rest. That thing I don’t get enough of. I’ve stopped making as many social plans as I’d like, in an effort to get alone time. To read, to cook, to sleep. It doesn’t happen every day, but it’s getting better. Energy reserves still mostly depleted, but rest droplets are re-filling the backup vessel little by little.

Reserved. I am, when I need it so I can rest. My heart’s energy is, mostly for those who give back. My respect is, for people who make things happen in the world, and also for people who keep their word.

Moving. Moving forward, which I do on purpose every day. Moving on, which I can’t do because the universe decided to throw a big protracted lesson in learned helplessness in my path, and I spend some time most days fighting to protect my integrity. Getting a move on in the morning, which always takes more time than I think it will and can be gloriously slow because I get up early enough to allow that to happen. Moving aside so as to not get in my own way. Moving out of And/Or and into SCD in pursuit of a life I want. Moving with the rhythm of my surroundings, sometimes adding my own drumline to it. Allowing myself to be moved by breathtaking beauty, kindness, light.

An occasionally resurgent meme has been going around on LiveJournal: “comment on this post, and I’ll give you five words that I associate with you. Then you write about them.” I asked, and I received, and so here they are.

Home. Ooh, this is a good one. I’ve been looking for that for a while. Thought I’d found it with Ethan, but that turns out not to be the case. I miss the home we had [in|with] each other in the first year and a half or so of our relationship. This is somewhat, though not even close to entirely, balanced by not missing the relationship in the months leading to its rather abrupt (for me) end.

When I stayed in Boston after graduating from BU, and commuted to Providence for grad school, initially I lived with Colleen. And other people too, but emotionally it was mostly with her When in late 1997 I abruptly needed to move from where I was living and posted about it to the Moxy Früvous newsgroup, a fellow Fruhead told me she was moving up to Boston in the next five months, and maybe we should think about getting a place together? Five months seemed like a long time, but we did meet at a Früvous show in December with the specific intention of finding out whether this was a good idea, and then wrote each other 300Kb of emails a month or something crazy like that, and in February of 1998 we moved in together. With some geographically and head-spatially induced ebbs and flows, Cee has been one of my closest people for longer than anyone who isn’t my immediate family (brother, sister-in-law, nephew, and mom).

(I have the hardest time calling Jo Ann my sister-in-law. It sounds so… remote. Usually I refer to her and my brother collectively as my siblings.)

In many ways, and up until very recently, that was a unique occurrence in my life. We weren’t related but were quite close, without being romantically involved. It was the quintessential Boston marriage. We seemed to have similar ideas of what we wanted out of a living arrangement, or in some cases we worked it out then. Cee had romantic relationships, and I did too, and eventually, when our adorable quirky 210-year-old house got sold, we moved apart because I wanted to move in with my then-boyfriend. I’ve wondered how differently shaped my life might be had we moved somewhere else together, but ultimately it might’ve been good for our relationship at that particular time. I certainly don’t regret the experiences I did have as a result of that move, either: namely, moving in with a boyfriend who didn’t turn all evil on me in three months’ time, being proposed to and accepting, living together for a while, deciding together that getting married wasn’t a good idea, and eventually deciding together that we didn’t want to be involved, and had in fact grown apart.

All of the time I lived with Chris was hugely educational in that almost completely non-traumatic way, but it wasn’t home in the way that it had been with Cee. We gave it a good try, but ultimately it just didn’t work. I think that one of the reasons for that is my desire to live with other people in community. After some years of living with him, I moved to London to live with my siblings and help raise my nephew for a year, as I was applying for the special-studies PhD program at Brown. That was nostalgic in many ways, I missed my people in Boston, but it was in no way lonely. That was another unique experience in that we bonded, the nephew and I, ooh boy, we did. And I’d lived with Zhenya and Jo before, and we knew we all liked it, and frankly, if circumstances were right (which isn’t likely), I’d live with them again in a heartbeat.

Then I lived alone in Providence for a year and a half. That was perfect, some of my favorite time. I definitely had a home then. Found my feet in that way that’s only possible when you live alone, found my professional feet doing the now-approved PhD in humanities computing, found that having Talan living just downstairs was a good reminder of what it was that I liked about living with other people, without actually living together.

Then Ethan moved in from all the way across the country in Pullman, WA. Someday I’ll write about the arc of that as home, but today is not that day.

The day after I graduated in 2007, we moved to Somerville, a close neighbor of Boston that would be one of its boroughs, were this New York City. We were two humans and two cats in a house of seven humans and five cats (and a dog, and a bird). And/Or was and remains a great place, and was good to live in, but wasn’t that default, deep-down home unless I was actively working to keep my own rhythm aligned to the house’s. Ethan lived there for six months, and I stayed for two years; when I started thinking of how, some years from now, I’d like to be raising a child without a primary partner, And/Or didn’t feel like the right place for that.

So in May I moved to Something Completely Different. We’re experimenting, it’s too early to know, but for now it feels like it felt to live with Cee. People drop by and hang out, from the apartment upstairs and from the outside; a lot of cooking and significant communal eating goes on, insofar as our schedules permit it; there’s both a stated intent and an emotional sense of crafting a home. I’m comfortable here, and even if it doesn’t work, I’ll still have had this amazing reminder, in some ways maybe a crystallization, of knowing what I want in a home.

Heritage. I’m Russian by birth, grew up speaking Russian in a Soviet Republic capital where, like in all of the USSR, the predominant language was Russian. I also grew up in Moldova, where people speak Moldovan (pretty much Romanian) and have Moldovan culture and holidays and food and way of life—and all of that was alongside me, not part of my primary experience. So that’s weird. And it’s weird, too, that I am Jewish (ethnically if not religiously), but didn’t even know my dad spoke fluent Yiddish until I was thirteen and we went to visit his home village and his parents’ graves in the Ukraine before emigrating to the U.S. So I grew up with the Barry Sisters, but still don’t have most of the holidays straight, and don’t like gefilte fish. So that’s weird too.

I was never able to refer to myself as an American, though more than half my life (and therefore part of my heritage) has been spent here. It just didn’t feel like that’s what I was. Oddly, the entire last presidential election season changed that. Then again, I’m a fully vested citizen of the internet, so U.S. national boundaries are about as meaningful as other places in the world.

Dark. A place of introspection, and introversion. A season that’s difficult for me. A time when fun things happen. A time when, and I’m accepting this in stages, I need to take care of myself above most other things in order to remain functional. Also a time when having responsibilities to others (like small-girl-sitting once a week) gets me out of my head and supplies a kind of joy that’s unavailable elsewhere.

Curious. I am! Curious Vika is curious. This sort of gets me in trouble, though not in the way I’m making it sound. I ask people questions and listen to the answers more than I tell stories. In conversation, I tend more toward learning than toward teaching (unless I’m thinking my way through an issue by arguing, which can be great with the right conversation partner). There was just so damn much to learn from Ethan that I fell into this odd and stupid learned helplessness, looking to him for information when I should have relied on myself. When there’s stuff to be learned by talking to someone, I vastly prefer that to finding out on my own. It’s more fun. Unfortunately, it can get on a partner’s nerves.

These days I am re-discovering my curiosity, and pay more attention to balancing out asking questions and telling stories.

Joy. Something I feel quite frequently, in short intense bursts, usually unrelated to any one thing but being rather a confluence of thoughts coming together in my consciousness. Perfect moments, like sunshine and Davis Square and ice cream, or walking under the flame umbrella in pouring rain, singing along with the stuff in my headphones, feeling the air that smells of ocean. Or even snow shoveling during the quiet, voluminous snowfall, under the night streetlights. Or that rare occurrence of having hours on end to do with as I please.

I’ve been blogging the conference–or at least, the sessions I’ve managed to attend. The posts are here; if you’ve been wondering why exactly I’m in love with my somewhat obscure (and yet pervasive and important to all of us, whether we know it or not) profession, this is a good way to find out what excites me about digital humanities.

Oh, and hey, I was lightning-interviewed! Now I have had 1m4s of my 15m of fame.

I could go on (and on), and tell you about the lightbox I got back out in June, and the several draft posts I haven’t made yet (among them one about my not-quite-ADD brain, and why the not-quite part is hard). But instead I’ll trap a little bit of today in amber, because it was perfect.

Never mind that yesterday gave it a run for its money. Yesterday I’d woken up gloriously late, and finally gotten all the parts of my tent in one place and set up and hosed off, ridding the thing of 95% of its playa dust quotient, just in time for a camping trip this weekend. Never mind yesterday, most of which is a tad too personal for this venue. Today.

Today I woke up at 7 (don’t ask). Had breakfast with coffee and quiet sleepy laughter with housemates. Unpacked and moved around some of the stuff that was cluttering the living room, slowly, minding how the house feels to me. (Like home, is how.)

Just before ten I was at Moosecasa, getting quite the reception from two very excited small girls. We took off a half hour later, the three of us, me and two three-year-olds, for Chestnut Farms, from where I get my CSA meat. They had an open barn today. There were goats and chickens and cows and pigs and sheep and baaaaaaaby animals, and they were so warm and soft, and the world was ringing with birdsong, and.

And it was a two-hour drive each way, and that went pretty much perfectly, even though everyone got tired at the end. Trips like this with one adult and two inquisitive, smart, engaged children are a complete toss-up, and this was my lucky day. We talked until we were hoarse, sang songs, listened to Puff the Magic Dragon like half a dozen times, and I got the best small-girl radio from the back of the car. Having the two of them entertaining each other was, I think, most entertaining for me.

We came home, tired. Cee and I got to spend time together, quietly. Three small children and six adults frolicked in a backyard exploding with the gorgeous fruits of gardening, eating cherries and a couple of almost-ripe mulberries and maybe even a strawberry. I came home and cooked dinner, and ate it with People of the House.

I’m exhausted, and for once, my soul is light-filled and well-fed.

I’ll miss And/Or. Then again, they’re still close by. And though there will no longer be a circus band practicing in my living room every Thursday night, they seem to have taken up busking in Davis! Do come out and see them, if you’re local. It’s a good time.

Last week, just as I was on top of things but suddenly sick enough to be unable (unwilling) to pack, moving stress suddenly struck full-force. Up until almost the last minute it wasn’t clear who-all would show up to help me schlep my stuff (of which much had been moved beforehand, in cars and thanks to the efforts of several friends). Lo, enough generous souls showed up to make it a three and a half hour move start to finish. Stressful, as such things are, but not nearly as much as it could’ve been. That, and sushi for a thank-you lunch afterward, and a tenth-wedding-anniversary party at the new house on my first evening there — all of these things made for a good welcome.

There are many children around the house at various times, though none of them live there. My cats are making cautious acquaintance with the two resident cats (who will, alas, soon move out). The people are quirky and passionate and good. The kitchen is well-loved, and a social nexus. There’s a ton of space, genial conversation at breakfast, and at least three different things fermenting on purpose. (One of them is my kefir-like-but-not-kefir stuff! Thanks for the culture, mom.) There’s a garden, which I hope to learn to tend well.

Oh, and bacon. No, seriously. Lots of bacon. You’d think I were following some internet meme, but I’m not. Bacon.

And, of course, what do I do on my first weekday in the new house? Stay at work ’til past 8pm. Time to go home.

In case it’s not clear, this is a helicopter search-and-rescue training exercise. Read more about the video here.

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Thursday was one mad dash after another at work right up until about 6:30pm, and culminated in drinking wine at a reception in our library, chatting with coworkers, then cleaning up and getting a ride home, arriving around 7:45. And immediately turning around to drive the car I time-share to its home, take the bus back, and collapse.

Friday was one mad dash af… well, you know. Ran around almost non-stop 8-6 with a two-hour break for a dental appointment (three cheers for my dentist, again), came home and had a fantastic dinner with this gorgeous babe who is funny and fascinating and has good taste in movies. I showed her An Ordinary Miracle.

Now it’s almost 2am. Not setting an alarm. Still, I’d like to figure out how to live life as fully as I want, and still get anything approximating enough sleep most nights. I feel my immune system wearing down.