is it just me?

My two alma maters faced off last night in the ACC-Big Ten challenge. Since I love college basketball, having my two teams play each other was very exciting. In the end I was kind of cheering for Duke, though it was sort of an involuntary reaction to watching a game in Cameron. I kept forgetting that those were my Wisconsin Badgers. Unfortunately, the Badgers got killed, and I was hoping for a better game but oh well.

Anyway, during the first few minutes of the broadcast, they showed a somewhat heavyset, middle-aged woman with a cheesehead on. At first I thought, come on – can’t we find a somewhat more flattering representation of this fine state? But upon further consideration I thought “Yeah, it’s kind of like that.” As I have mentioned before, once I moved here I realized that Wisconsin is one of the go-to places when you need a random reference in movies or tv. It is the flyover zone between the two coasts. It is not next on the list of terrorist targets. But it’s a nice little place where the people are relatively friendly and the weather is bad and the food is fattening and the beer and cheese are delicious. Just the other day I was leaving our parking ramp and I held the door for someone behind me. I had to wait a few seconds, no big deal. When he gets to the door he says “Thank you! I apologize for dawdling so! I am not quite with it yet, it is Monday after all.” And I thought – who talks like that? Dawdling so? Seriously. But people in Wisconsin do. All the time.

On the radio this morning they were talking about the tally from deer gun hunting season. The gun season here is only nine days long, which always seems short to me, and means there is a LOT of shooting in those nine days. Seriously, you cannot engage in outdoor recreation anywhere with a tree during those nine days. We mistakenly went out to a state park with our dog during the season last year and now he owns a blaze orange vest. Haha. So, how many deer were killed in nine days? 343,644. I am not kidding. Three hundred and forty-three THOUSAND deer killed in nine days. That’s more than 38,000 deer per day. (I was a math major.) That is insane. This is reported on the news, along with the number of hunters killed. On the radio one DJ was saying that at another station she used to work at they had a pool about how many hunters would be killed and “heart attacks didn’t count”. Haha.
Also newsworthy in Wisconsin this morning: the fact that you will not be able to see the Packers game in Madison if you don’t have NFL network. People are outraged. We already can’t see anything but national coverage of UW football and basketball, and now no Packers. People here are serious about the Packers. They paint their houses green and gold. They dress the entire family in packer gear and take pictures. We LOVE the packers. So people are not happy. Not happy at all.

One final note, at my ten year college reunion I had to tell lots of people that I live in Wisconsin. Since I went to college on the east coast, with lots of other people from the coasts, this is unusual. Most people said “Really? Why Wisconsin?” But several people said to me “Man, everyone lives in Wisconsin!” which I thought was strange because I don’t know anyone else from college here. But it turns out that one of the nicest, prettiest girls in my whole class lives here. You know the girl - everyone knows her. I bet you could ask almost anyone in my graduating class about this girl and they would say “Oh, she’s so nice.” I would say that and I have never even met her. Seriously. So she was there, and everyone was talking to her and hearing that she lived in Wisconsin which became ‘everyone’ living in Wisconsin. Haha. Unfortunately, since I am not the person that everyone knows she does not know me so we aren’t friends, which is too bad because it’s hard to find anyone who cares about Duke around here. Oh well.

If you meet someone and they are from Wisconsin, I would suggest not asking them about cheese or cows. It gets old. It’s not quite as irritating as living in Boston and having people say “do you pahk the cah in hahvahd yahd?” but it’s close.

Round and round
Last night was a rough night with Baby Lizard and no one got enough sleep. She woke up late this morning, meaning I had to try to throw her in some clothes and get out the door. But trying to rush a 15 month old is about as easy as herding cats, and several temper tantrums, a smashed banana and much whining later we were out the door, more than 20 minutes behind schedule. I currently have a CD of kids’ music in the car that, while kind of annoying, makes the little Liz very happy. During the break between songs she immediately says “more?” which of course there always is. But as I was singing how much “I like to oat opples and bononos” just minutes before I was due at the office, I was thinking: today I don’t know if I can do this. Being a working mom is hard. It is hard to switch gears. I have don’t have much trouble completely devoting myself to my child when at home, but I do have trouble completely devoting myself to work when I am away from her. It is hard to be singing kid songs, then come in, set your bags down and make phone calls to update someone on a new impact evaluation project in Kenya and balance a budget. But I think some days I do really well at being a mom, some days I do really well at being a worker, some days I am great at both, and other days I fail miserably at both. Today, unfortunately, falls in category four but the good news is there is always tomorrow to wake up and try again, hopefully on more than 5.5 hours of sleep. Until then, the wheels on the bus still go round and round, all over town.