The University of Chicago, where we lived and worked for four years, is in the midst of a tragedy, where a 29-year-old graduate student, Amadou Cisse, was shot near campus last week. He was in the “dodgy” area south of the midway, where there are some student apartments, and two young men, 16 and 17 years old, have been arrested and also tied to other violent crimes in the area. Lots of details can be found on the University news page.

This is a terrible thing, obviously, but I’m finding the University reaction to be too much too late. I’m still on many email lists there as I’m doing long-distance consulting work, and I’ve gotten at least one message per day relating to the incident and boosting campus safety in the wake.

As tragic as this particular case is, to be honest the only notable thing about it in the context of the neighborhood is that a student was the victim, instead of an anonymous member of the community. There is at least one shooting death every couple of weeks there, but it’s never been a student before.

My husband went to the drugstore for milk one night and witnessed the murder of Dion Bufkin, a murder that was never reported in the papers. I wrote about it here, and his account is here.

So what does the relative hoopla surrounding the death of Amadou Cisse say about the value that the University places on the lives of “ordinary” people right in their own backyard? Is a murder only tragic if it robs the world of a potential brilliant scholar? Where was all of the extra police protection and new substations when it was just the “neighborhood hoodlums” involved?

This makes me kind of sick, really. And angry. And yet, selfishly relieved that we don’t live there any more.

• Grocery shopping with a cooler in the trunk

• Seeing things like this out the window:

  
  (and that’s nothing, really, compared to views just five minutes from the house. . .)

• The vast amounts of water I have to drink to feel human

• Not going to the office

• Being one of those moms who can go and volunteer for stuff (more on that forthcoming)

• Being able to tell the kids, “Go outside!!” without having to go with them

• All of these stairs in this telephone-booth-like house, and being so out of breath at the top of them

These two seem to be settling in just fine, though. . .

Especially this one (Scout):

I can’t post pictures at the moment, because the cable to connect the camera and the computer is. . . somewhere.

But the scenery is amazing, and the sky is just fascinating.

Tonight we’re going to Overlook Park in White Rock, 10 miles away and down the mountain a bit, to take in the meteor shower.

~~~

Marching band was one of my favorite parts of high school. I played the piccolo, and our band was one of the best in the state of Iowa. We worked really hard, the athletes and the nerds and the theatre geeks, all together.

Yesterday, there was a parade in downtown Los Alamos as part of the county fair, and we had a chance to check out the local high school marching band.

I almost got teary, watching those kids. It’s not the greatest band, but they’re not bad, and they’re enthusiastic, and they were all doing the roll step I remember spending so much time mastering.

I love being back in a small town. I love that my kids will go to school in a small town.

~~~

And can I just say that having a dishwasher is a fabulous, faaaabulous thing?

Chicago is a very grimy city. And since we lived over three restaurants, the grime had a seriously disgusting sticky quality to it. My beloved Rubbermaid plastic canisters for flours, sugars, and rice, a design they don’t make anymore, had become . . . eeew.

But then I put them in the dishwasher, along with my collection of metal cookie tins, and it’s an absolute frakkin’ miracle.

I can actually make things CLEAN here, and they stay that way!

We’re settling in to Los Alamos, though we don’t yet have furniture — that’s scheduled to arrive on Thursday.

I’ve just finished getting the internet to work, and just have to find the ideal location for the wireless router in this tall, skinny condo. The main computer desk will be on the first floor, and we’ll want wireless access sometimes on the third floor, in our bedroom. No use for the signal on the second floor, and that would require running a lot of cable all over the place. So, we’ll see.

Next is taking the kids to the library, registering them for school, and painting the living room and our bedroom. Can you believe I just want them white, after all these years in all-white University housing and other rentals?? The living room has two-toned walls, some taupe and some patchy white. We’re going to fix the patchiness.

The bedroom, though — I’ll put up some before pictures later. You won’t believe it. Oy.

The Chicago apartment is no longer home, having been emptied of all of our stuff as of 7 am yesterday morning. We got fed up toward the end hauling trash out and left most of the cleaning supplies under the kitchen and bathroom sinks. The place is mostly clean, and I can’t bring myself to care anymore since it’s owned by the University, who will send a crew in to repaint, shampoo the carpets, and hopefully fix all the stuff they never bothered with while we lived there. So, harrumph, we have our stuff, and we’re done.

For the next few days while we wait for the call from the moving company as to when they’ll deliver our thousands of boxes, we’re at my parents’ house in Iowa, with almost no responsibilities except to soak up some R&R. I’m waiting for two rhubarb-custard pies to come out of the oven, and then we’re taking the kids to the pool.

We’re trying not to think about the cliff we perch upon, before diving into our new lives. This is the part where we breathe.

Left work for the last time today.

As places to work go, it really wasn’t all that bad for a finite period of time. I met some really great people, who I’m sure I’ll keep in touch with, and I learned a whole lot about all kinds of things.

But I hate getting up early in the morning and going to work for other people. Just hate it.

Don’t think for a moment I don’t know how lucky I am to be able to follow my own bliss for awhile.

The moving truck comes Monday!

Today is a test of who really looks at me in the course of my job.

Yesterday I had 16 inches of my hair cut off. It’s pretty dramatic. And I like it, ’cause, honestly, I had just been lazy about finding a new stylist after the one that I liked quit more than a year ago.

So far, at least a dozen people having been encountered, only the very nice woman who works in the coffee shop where I get my chai every morning has noticed.

I have to say, I’m not all that bittersweet about my last day being Friday.

Today marks the end of the seventh week that I have been posting over on Best of UU, and I think I’ve found some really good stuff, if I do say so myself. If you’re tired of waiting for me to post something interesting here, in the midst of all the lists (and even my lists have lists, plus extra random post-it notes) and the packing and the running around like a chicken with my head cut off, you might check it out.

Highlights:

• Patrick O’Neill’s brilliant sermon, “Out from Walden,” from the 2005 Service of the Living Tradition

• Nancy McDonald Ladd on “Why Church Matters”

• a prayer by Marjorie Bowens Wheatley

Submissions are always welcome — I can’t read the whole of the internets myself!

These next two weeks are just looming like giant thunderheads over an already rain-soaked landscape.

My job ends two weeks from tomorrow, and there is still so much I’ve promised to finish before then.

The moving truck shows up two weeks from Monday.

The lists grow longer.

Wow, am I in that overwhelmed-oh-my-gods-is-this-over-yet place.

I’ve finally finished sorting all of our CDs and filing them into five 2-inch binders.

It’s amusing to me putting them into alphabetical order when things happen like Suzanne Vega and the Violent Femmes sharing a binder page. Or Tuck and Patti faced with Tool. How would Tracy Chapman and the members of Cake get along?

Ponderable.

It’s also interesting to think about how long I’ve had some of these CDs, and what I was doing when I would listen to some of them regularly. I still know lots of the words to songs I haven’t heard in ages.

The next step is to make some new mixes for the three day car trip, including kid-friendly ones.

And I’m still looking for a way to recycle the hundreds and hundreds of jewel cases I’ve just emptied.