365: My first year as faculty

My glorious and divalicious friend Brandi is doing a 365 project documenting her daily life from age 29 to age 30. I commented on how cool that idea was and she suggested that I document our first year in Chico. As we had already been here for a week and I didn't want to start off on the wrong foot (e.g. starting late) I decided to take that idea on with a twist. I was going to document my first year as a faculty member at CSU-Chico by taking a picture a day starting August 16th (my official start date at school), that way I could mentally prepare for the task and give myself a little time trying out different iPhone apps so that I could take some jazzy photos using different effects in case a day's subject matter wasn't quite jazzy enough on its own. I decided in order to kill two birds with one stone I would publish my photos on the blog so that I would have fresh content every day! Some days it might be just the picture with only a small caption, but I'm guessing on many days there will be a full-fledged story to go with the picture. If I have other stories or musings I will post those too, but with this project I'll at least be giving you something new every day! It's a big undertaking to post every day but I feel like I take millions of photos every day anyway, so it's just an extra step to publish them here! Wish me luck on my endeavors and I hope to share the next year with you!

Here's a little taste to get you excited (or not):

Our local grocery store has an awesome bulk section. They even have LIVE bees producing honey! Ange and I thought this was the COOLEST.

Slowing things down

You will begin to notice a bit of a slow down here at the blog in the next few days. I'm going to try and do a blog post every other day rather than every day. There are a few reasons for this:

• My life is not all that exciting. Now that I've settled into a normal routine, which basically includes hanging out at the university, home or church, there isn't too many exciting stories to tell. I'm sure little bits and pieces of funny things will happen, but overall, I'm just living a normal life like all of you. Normalcy usually means nothing blog-worthy.

• Now that I am really settled, more and more of my daily routine will be stuff that I actually can't write about. Anything that has to do with details of my research will need to be protected for privacy sake. Additionally, because my day-to-day life is more settled I am hanging around a lot of the same people, and these people's lives are very enmeshed with mine and it becomes difficult to talk about my daily life without featuring their lives in my stories, and I want to keep their lives out of my blog as much as possible. None of them have asked to star in my blog so I am respecting their right to privacy by not posting anything related to them as much as possible. When I have stories that are interesting and can be told without too much involvement of those around me I'll be on top of it, but hopefully you can understand my need to keep some of my daily life undocumented in the public sphere.

I'll also be writing about things non-specifically Nigeria related. In an attempt to fill in space created by the above points I'll be writing about some other things. Hopefully all interesting to readers!

The M Family

I had a very interesting discussion with L today that is prompting me to rename their family for issues of privacy. I was telling her that last year when I blogged about our trip I had included her name and when I got a new webcounter on my page I found a really cool one that gave me tons of information including the source page that leads people to my blog. A lot of the hits either come from Facebook (when I’ve posted a link on my page) or “No Source” which I generally assume it means it came from someone’s bookmark or something. However, right after installing it I found out something interesting. A HUGE number of hits came from L’s name on Google. She thought that was pretty funny but also said that she has some light “cyber stalkers.” Nothing serious, but more people who are curious about who she is, what her story is, etc. After all she is an American woman married to one of the most respected men in the Benin community. So this got me thinking a little bit. It reminded me of when my sister put up her classroom blog. Trying to be supportive I “followed” it so it looked like she had some supporters (which of course she did). When she had it evaluated by the township they basically said “Who’s the sex freak who’s following you?” and expressed concern that people could follow the links back to my page which is generally not appropriate for people who would be looking at her page. She gently asked me to “unfollow” her which of course I was happy to oblige. Just because I enjoy my blog and work doesn’t mean everyone would. 
 

She didn’t ask me to do this and it’s not that I think this is a grave issue of security/privacy but because their family has been so wonderful and kind to me I feel like I should give them as much privacy as possible as well as the same issue of my sister’s blog…I didn’t want anyone looking for her to be unwillingly (sort of) subjected to my blog. You’ve all seen their names and/or have heard me talk about them, and if not, it doesn’t really matter what their actual name is all that matters is who they are and what role they are playing in my life. So henceforth I will be referring to their family as the “M Family” instead of by their real last name (which is quite unique). Why M? Well two reasons. When I was thinking of a pseudonym it popped into my head because tonally it is similar (lots of vowels, 4 syllables) and because it reminds me of home, specifically my sisters who love the movie “Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa” which has a character named M who sings a song that reminds them of me. So just so you are in the know and warned when you start seeing M you know what the heck I am talking about.