Manic Vampire Baby

So Jamis has confirmed our worse fears. He is really undead. How would you like to wake up to this every morning? Yeah, I didn't think so. Although, our increased garlic consumption doesn't seem to phase him. We hope this vampire thing is just a phase that will pass along with his tendency to bite - necks that is.

The Wait is Over...a new one begins

Finally our wait is over. Firstly, I have finally graduated from my Master's program. I was able graduate with a 4.0. If nothing else, I am pleased with myself. There was a good group that came to my graduation to support me. My parents and my little sister Lindsay flew from Idaho to be with us that day. My in-laws were there as well as Morgan's grandparents and aunt and uncle came as well. Thanks to everyone who came and supported us on that day. We had a hooding ceremony where everyone receiving the master's degree was able to spend a moment pick someone to bestow the master's hood on the graduate and then explain who the individual is and why he or she was picked to bestow the hood on the graduate. I picked Morgan to place the hood on me. She's the best.
In other news - In the fall, we will be starting another step in our schooling. I was accepted into a Ph.D. program and will be starting that in the fall. I will start the Ph.D. program at Idaho State in English and the Teaching of English. It is a program that specializes in producing teacher scholars rather than researcher scholars. I look forward to it.
We have also been offered a one-year appointment to teach English full time at BYU-Idaho. I will be teaching composition courses with maybe an option later to teach a literature course. It will be a full teaching load, but I know that I will have a lot of fun.
So, in theory I will work full-time and start my Ph.D. program part time. It will be a crazy but fun time. The immediate plans are to move back to Idaho in June and get ourselves braced for the start of the next school year.

Waiting

Waiting, waiting, waiting. I hate waiting. I have passed my comps (yeah!) and I am mostly done with my classes now. It looks like I will pass the classes and graduate just fine. Now we are just waiting to hear back from schools and Ph.D. programs. Hopefully we will hear back within a few weeks. In the meantime, we are waiting to head back to Fargo in two weeks for a conference I will be presenting at. I will be showing how the genre of Kunstlerroman with its inherent conflicts can be transposed onto Sartrean psychoanalysis. I will be illustrating this point with Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World. Should be great laughs for all involved.

We are also waiting for Spring. I am on "spring vacation" right now, but the temperatures are still in the 30s at best, there is still snow on the ground, and the sun has not been visible all week. This is a joke. Call me old fashioned, but when I have spring break, I want it to be in the spring. Anyway, we will let everyone know our future as we learn about it.

Christmas '09

We had a great time in Idaho this year. Here are some pics from our trip.

Reading List for the Comps

I received my reading list for the comprehensive exams that will take place in February. I am very pleased with the reading list. I either presented/suggested to others to present/ or brought up 8 out of the 17 works during the course of our tutorial without knowing beforehand that the works would be on the exam. Pleased? Relieved? Smug? Yes, all of the above. Out of the entire list, there are only 2 works that I have not had a decent amount of exposure to already: The Woman Warrior by Hong-Kingston and Midnight's Children by Rushdie. I think that I can possibly do this thing. Possibly. I'm just excited that Hawthorne and M Shelley are both represented.

Grad studies

Many people have started to ask me about my intended course of study and where I am applying to. First the easy question. So far, I have applications being sent to Idaho State University, University of Utah, Washington State University - Pullman, and University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. I am looking for some other University in the mid-west to apply to as well. I have found through research that the regions of the country that are consistently hire the most professors are the Northwest, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic. So I am focusing my search for schools to those regions. Ultimately, I want to end up at a junior college or a small university where the focus will be on the students rather than on research and bringing prestige to the university down that route. Because of this, I want a program that will have some emphasis on pedagogy - for this reason, ISU would be my top choice (not to mention it has a 94% placement history for tenure track jobs among its graduates). However, WSU has a great program that is much more established than ISU. UofU program is pretty good, and it has a great philosophy program that I can tap into (more on that later). UM-TC is just an all around great school. I would like one more in the Mid-west just to get a round 5 options. So what do I want to focus on?
Well, as I said before, I want pedagogy to be some part of it, but I am too in love with abstract ideas to focus completely on something useful as pedagogy. On face value, I want to specialize in Romanticism. In particular, I want to focus on how Romanticism acted as a transition between German Idealism to Existentialism. I think that it is interesting how a movement that was strictly philosophical could be incorporated with a movement that is mostly literary, and then (I feel) morph into a movement that splits pretty evenly into literary and philosophical writing. If I can pull this off, I could possibly find a job for a position in 18th, 19th, or early 20th century lit (although I wont hold my breath). In particular, I want to focus on some of the dark romantics (Hawthorne, Shelley, Byron, etc) and the parallels that they share with the first Existentialist - Kierkegaard (a contemporary of many of them). I am in the process now of writing a paper comparing Hawthorne's The Marble Faun with Albert Camus' The Fall. I am looking at how the two men use the symbol of the Christian doctrine of the Fall of Adam to shed light as to the meaning of life. Since both men have radically different backgrounds with Christianity it is interesting how they are both drawn to Christian doctrine to explore the human condition. It is also interesting all of the similarities they draw from the symbolism and where they depart.
Anyway. Since this is what I want to do, I need a program that will allow me access to a good philosophy department. I just hope that I am able to get in to a good program.

GRE & Grad School Future

I think that Morgan and i are looking more and more at going on straight from Winona and getting into a Ph.D. program somewhere. I was going to apply to the University of Illinois, but due to the widespread corruption in the system that has been recently exposed in that university system (but it's Illinois - I shouldn't be too surprised), we are shifting our search elsewhere. I have recently taken the GRE (both general and subject) and am pleased to announce that overal, my scores are good enough to get me in almost anywhere. Granted, my math was low (52nd percentile), but all of my programs look to make sure that the cumulative GRE score is over 1100 (I cleared that easily), and their main focus is on the analytic and verbal sections. I received a 5.5 out of 6 for the analytic putting me in the 88th percentile, and I received a score on the verbal section that put me in the 94th percentile. I do have to say it was a good feeling to see that I am in the top 6% of individuals who have taken the test at least in the verbal section. So, I am now garnering some good letters of recommendation in the hope that I will be accepted into a program by next fall. If not, it's off to find a teaching job for a year in order to try again. Anyone know of some good schools?

Introducing Jamis

Jamis Blaine Robertson was born Sept. 24, 2009 at 5:04 pm. He is 20 inches long and weighed 8 lbs 12 oz. What is more - he has a full head of hair. He slept soundly his first night and had to be woken up by Morgan and the nurses in order to eat. He has been quite content to be swaddled and held. Kyla and Daria are still trying to make out exactly what to think of him, but they do call him "Baby Brother Jamis" or (phonetically speaking) "Baby Bwuddar Jamis). They will be good big sisters; I'm sure.

Morgan is doing fine enough. While trying to give her an epideral during delivery, the needle poked a small hole in her lining which caused an immediate migraine. The doctor administered just a test dose of the anesthesia to see how she would react. It had the effect of a spinal tap. Everything from her navel down went numb, and she couldn't move her legs. So between the migraines and the inability to move her legs, she was pretty miserable. The positive side is that she couldn't feel any of the contractions. That state only lasted for an hour or so before the medicine wore off. She started to feel all of the labor contractions, and they were the mean ones. Fortunately, she didn't have to endure them for long. Jamis was born within the hour of that. Morgan is doing much better today. She is able to get up and walk. Her headache has gone down drastically, and I think she is enjoying all of the attention the nurses and staff are giving to her.

More updates to follow.

Scout Camp

This last week, I went with my Branch to the Regional Aaronic Priesthood Encampment. Following are several pictures from the week. Most are from the beginning and closing ceremonies.Josh Albers






























Eric Norgrant


































Nathan Neefe


















Spencer Neefe































Ken Norgrant



















and me

The Girls are Growing

The girls are growing, growing, growing. Some days they don't seem like toddlers but small adults - or teenagers depending on their attitudes.




Sleep has become an important topic at our house. The girls have graduated to twin sized beds. There has been only one falling out of bed (that we know of). We knew that the girls were ready to handle the height after we had found the girls a couple of times sleeping together on our couch without falling off.












After a while of letting the game sit, we got Guitar Hero back out. The girls have decided that they really like it. They have become little rockers. We are trying to get them to say "Rock On."Someday. In the meantime, they are getting into the rock and roll lifestyle.

School and a Table

So Derik finished his second semester of Grad school and maintained his 4.0 GPA! Woo-hoo. To celebrate he made a goal to read one book a week during the summer. So far, he is keeping to that goal. We also decided to get a new kitchen table (sort of). We received Morgan's Parent's old table since they were going to throw it away. We stripped all of the old varnish and stain off of it and redid the table top. We were able to fix alot of the discoloration and water damage that was on the table. It is sitting in our basement right now curing. The table top at least looks really nice. Not bad for our first effort with furniture restoration. In a week or so, we will be able to get the table upstairs and ready for some light use. We are currently also looking to upgrade Kyla and Daria to twin (no pun intended) size beds. We have found a pretty good deal at the Salvation Army that we will probably take. Here's hoping that the girls show at least a little mercy towards their beds when they get them and don't try to jump them to death.

We are looking forward to catching up on everything that we have fallen behind in during the school year in the summer (including this blog) talk to everyone soon.

Books read during Spring semester

• Kafka on the Shore, Invisible Man, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Good news, for a change, The Four Giants of Russian Literature, Dante's Divine comedy, No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Tripmaster Monkey, Lady Oracle, To the Lighthouse, Song of the Lark, An Artist of the Floating World, Fahrenheit 451, History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, Oranges are not the only fruit, Maria W Stewart: America's First Black Female Political Writer and Speaker, The Conquest, Paradise, Little Black book of Stories, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Beloved, Einstein's Monsters, Kindred, Northanger Abby, Lydia's Story, First Love, Last Rites, The Light Fantastic, Religous Literacies, Sorrows of Young Werther, The Bondwoman's tale, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, The Stranger, The Blue Death, Epic of Gilgamesh, All I Did Was Ask, Asking the Right Questions, Equal Rites, The Plague, Elantris, Birthday Boys
  

Birthdays and Valentines

Big News, Big News. We can start with the day that Kyla and Daria turned two years of age. They had a good birthday at their Grandma and Grandpa Firl's house. They were really spoiled with presents sent to them from all over.

Kyla and Daria enjoy the attention of everybody singing to them.

They did well in blowing out their candles.














They really liked the cake!















Both the girls really got into the spirit of unwrapping their presents.











































For Valentine's Day the girls received a special treat - their very first Twinkies!

How our girls like to have fun...

More fun times! Look how high those two jump!
(Even though we try t0 get them to stop)

Happy Birthday Grandma Robertson

Happy Birthday Grandma. We Love You

Jumping fun!

Thanks for the great toys grandma and grandpa!

Reading list I

Books Read from August to mid December. The titles that we would suggest for anyone to read are marked by an asterix. Dirty Job, The Piazza Tales, Candide*, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*, The Color of Magic, Spook, Kafka: the Torment of Man, My Freshman Year, Guards! Guards! (Discworld #9), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,Staircase of a Thousand Steps, Brave New World*, Clockwork Orange, The Amulet of Samarkand*, Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, Teaching composition as a Social Process, Diversity and Motivation, The Vocation of a Teacher, Teaching Literacies, Extras, Graceling, The Art of Literary Research, Goodbye Chunky Rice, Analyzing Prose, Specials*, Pretties*, Uglies*, Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, The Golem's Mighty Swing, The Metamorphosis*, Maus, Cairo, TheTruth (Discworld #25)*, Academic Literacies, Performance of Self, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, Theory and Practice for Writing Tutors, Hawthorne: a Life, Bone*, Devil in the White City, The Book of Mormon*, The Brothers Karamozov*

Christmas time is here. As always, we have been very spoiled. Here are some of the images from Christmas.

Snow

It finally snowed here in Winona. I think that the weather has decided to make up for lost time. After being promised snow on the ground for Halloween (there wasn't) and for sure snow for Thanksgiving (nothing) it has finally snowed. The snow waited for the very last day of November and then it dropped about two inches. Then it flurried December 1 and 2 than today (the 3rd) it dumped another two inches. It came faster than some expected today. So much so that local schools here were delayed two hours before starting.

In other news that is perhaps a bit more cosmic than the weather, today was my last day of classes of my first semester of Grad school (angels sing and crowds rejoice). Now I just have to wait a few weeks to find out how I actually did in my classes. I am hoping that I will pull out with no real battle scars. The school here doesn't give pluses or minuses on their grades, just the letter. I think I might be on the boarder in a class or two so I don't know how that will pan out. At the very least I will just be relieved that this semester is over. That means grad school is 1/4 way over as well (at least for the master's)

More Pics

So cute - Kyla













Daria is a little lady.


















Takin' it easy













Kyla is a Babooshka













Daria will eat you!!