Il freddo di febbraio

Hurry, a post before February is over so I can at least maintain my one-a-month pace. This is not about how cold February is. Sorry for the false advertising. I'm just freezing right now as I write this, so think of it as the backdrop to this post.

Today was a day for kudos. (Let me start with a shoutout to our dear birthday girl, Nancy! She deserves her kudos for being alive and being a wonderful, effervescent person).

And the kudos I got today? I think I deserved them after the work I've put in.

I've been apprenticed to our grant writer-former funder extraordinaire so that I, too, can have the ever so marketable skill of grant-writing. And so that I too can suffer when we get the call from one of our funders: Quick, your report that we never told you about was due a week ago. Send it to us yesterday!

This apprenticeship is extremely exciting. I want to have this skill. It's simultaneously terrifying and painful, because it's like writing a college paper except some disgusting amount of money is depending on it, which, if nothing else, makes cramming even less desirable.

This is a combined proposal and report for a foundation that is near and dear to us and took part in the founding of PTP. So after a number of weeks of chipping away at it fruitlessly (or perhaps it was fruitful in a way, because it all led me to today), I finally arrived at a draft that GW-FF extraordinaire says is "really, really excellent". Oh stop! I'm blushing. Well, my genius all lies in taking notes verbatim, fleshing them out slightly, and then turning them around to her. So I'm a little more than a fancy speech-to-text machine, but not much. Either way, all this pain has been very good for me. I'm internalizing our language and organizational culture (nod to Lubeck and his field notes lecture) in a way that I wouldn't be able to without actually writing it down myself. So yay! I think I'm making progress. I even feel the difference in the way I'm writing this post. Short, meaningful, unflashy, NON-ACADEMIC, sentences. Maybe the narrative arc is not quite as perfect, but that's because I haven't been working on this post for the last four weeks.

In other news, I'm taking a slew of classes and doing lots of new activities to continue the trend of exploration and adventure that Minnesota has inspired in my life. (Did anyone catch the NYT travel article about MN, Trekking with Wolves? Disclaimer: don't expect wolves).

After going salsa dancing with my UCSC linguist friend (he wouldn't admit to it) E who is here on a temporary work contract, I realized I wanted to actually learn how to dance. So I signed up for Salsa I through Minneapolis Community Education, a great resource. While I was at it, I thought I'd sign up for Sewing I as well, and then the Learn How to Make Money Recording Audio Books workshop caught my attention. So I'm doing all of the above. I'm also playing indoor soccer on Sundays at Powderhorn Park (my neighborhood community hub) which is keeping me active. And for anyone who's considering Zumba, I highly recommend it. I just started going at my local YWCA - it's an "aerobics" class, but really, it's hyped up dancing to Latin music with a crazy, non-Minnesotan who knows how to move named Bernice.

The challenge is to maintain balance and get enough sleep. Which is where I'm headed now. Last kudos before I go: my sweet former Italian language student, Celeste, is studying abroad in the adopted motherland this semester. She has a beautiful blog and actually posts regularly and has recently made me as famous as I'm ever going to be by posting about her tour of Bologna (and my recommendations) in it. Check it out! (She also may be the only one who reads my blog, so more kudos to her for her attention!)