Working on casa bava

I’ve spent much of the last week working on my kitchen. We’ve been in our house for three years now, and all that time the kitchen has been a wreck. I was able to make almost the entire house livable before we moved in 2009, but ran out of time because Anto was pregnant with Tommaso and at some point labor has to give way to life! The kitchen needed a good work over, so given the time constraints we had to put it on hold. I thought I would get to it that Spring, or latest the following Fall but time flies when home repairs are crazy expensive and money and time are scarce. We finally had a contractor in this past Spring to rip up and replace the subfloor and clean up the walls (as well as add a window), but contractors get expensive quick so that couldn’t last. Finally, after a Summer of dreaming about it, I began the process of finishing the kitchen off myself: ripping out and rebuilding a closet, priming, caulking, and painting in preparation for putting down the backerboard and laying down ceramic tile. I’ll be floor sometime this coming weekend—you have no idea how good it will be to have a fully functioning and finished kitchen in casa bava.

I have to admit that sometimes I really like, and need, manual labor like this. When work is kicking my ass (and it has been) it helps to really focus and think for hours on end about a wide range of things. There is no music, no internet, no interruptions, no eating just work. It’s similar to my experience—more than 20 years ago now— of running long distances. I would think intensely about a number of things and really begin to feel outside of time. What I’ve been thinking about is what lies ahead for DTLT, but more on that in another post, my upcoming presentation (i.e. this  Monday!) at James Madison University’s Teaching and Learning Technology Conference for which I will be using The Tales from the Crypt aesthetic to discuss life after online education—playing with the concept of the undead while exploring the example of ds106 as a model.

After that, this Wednesday I’ll be presenting at UMW on another undead-related topic:

I’m excited about this presentation as well because it will be to a random group of UMW students that will be eating pizza! This will be a full-on lecture and  I will be focusing on the parallel cultural histories of zombies and pirates from the 17th and 18th centuries through to the 21st.  I’ll be making the argument that the return of both zombies and pirates to the forefront of internet popular culture over the last decade is in direct response to the outdated copyright regime of the twentieth century. I’ll be blogging both of these talks over the next couple of days because, alas, I won’t be working on the house for a bit after tomorrow. So, I guess I just wanted to capture what I’ve been doing over the past week. Think of this post as a kind of placeholder for all the blogging I’m doing in my head these days.