weekend roundup

Friday proved a good day. A lunch meeting and the desire to work out at the rec center took me to campus where, unbeknownst to me, the department's promotion and tenure committee was meeting. In what seemed like a "go see the principal" moment, the chair summoned me to her office and informed me that my tenure case handily made it through the department. Outside review letters arrived, the committee read and discussed them, and now the case goes to the college level in November. Then the faculty senate, then the provost, then the board of regents. If I keep making it past each committee, I'll get final notification from the regents in May. Postscript to outside reviewers: Due to weird, vaguely medieval practices, I'm not permitted to know who you are. Apparently you said nice things. Thanks.

Friday night, a family birthday party that involved playing cards and watching a particularly nasty Tigers fiasco where, speaking of medieval, Gary Sheffield tried to get all medieval on the ass of Fausto Carmona but ended up bruised. Nice metaphor for the whole Tigers season. Saturday morning, door-to-door canvassing with the Berkley Obama team. Noteworthy memory from this week's canvassing: Two separate older men commented that since Obama reminded them of JFK, they planned to tune in to the debate and see if he can perform as well as JFK did vs. Nixon. The Berkley team also talked me into hosting a debate party this Friday. Saturday night, a big Ramadan (month of fasting) banquet at school hosted by the Muslim Student Association, one of the biggest and most active student groups on my campus. Delicious food, good company, and entertainment by Baba Ali, "first Muslim youtube celebrity." My sister and her family joined us and I think everybody had a good time.

Sunday morning, Nicole and I visited the new Crossroads Soup Kitchen, now located a couple blocks from the old Motown studio. We're organizing our church's "Crossroads day" next month. They serve 700 people every Sunday, one of the few places in Detroit that has such a service on Sunday, when most soup kitchens shut down. After Mass, I worked in the yard all day, cleaning gutters and getting the garden ready for the winter. Made pasta and meatballs and had Nicole's family over for dinner, after which we played cards and watched another Lions fiasco (gee, is there a trend here?).

Aside from reading some rough drafts from students and doing a couple short writing sessions, I did very little work over the weekend, which means today I should not be taking a break to blog. On Friday, I'm leading a "Civic Literacies in First-Year Comp" workshop with our writing program faculty, so prepping for that is a big chunk of this week's work. Plus, Lew and I have swapped drafts of our collaborative empathy article, so reading and synthesizing and even revising is also on the to-do list.