Scene: Harriet�s bedroom, Thursday evening. Harriet is folding laundry on the bed. AJ enters from the bathroom, clad only in a towel, which is wrapped around his shoulders, hanging down to his knees.

AJ: Look at me, Mommy! I�m a volcano! (he holds the towel tightly around him, begins shaking and making grumbling noises then suddenly, BOOM! An explosion and the towel flies into the air).

Harriet: Help! Help! There�s a volcano in my bedroom!

AJ: (looking concerned) But, Mommy, did you enjoy the noise?

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My first week of teaching is done. I�m sure I haven�t done the best I could do, but I could have done worse. Yesterday�s class was a hard one to do. I had to talk about a lot of material in a short time that was totally basic for about half the class and completely new and complex to the other half. That�s always a challenge. By the end, they were looking a little glazed over. The fact that the room was hot and stuffy didn�t help matters any.But it felt like a good day and next week the pace becomes a little more humane for all of us.

I spent today playing with AJ and putting the final touches on my conference paper. I leave tomorrow morning for points east. This is feeling like a real test, like I�m really doing what the job I�m training for entails for the first time. I hope I pass. It�s amazing how little time I have for little things. I feel like I spend every waking moment working or taking care of AJ. And yet, it�s not entirely unpleasant. It�s nice to feel useful out in the world. I think I enjoy the noise.

I�m not sure whether I�ll have internet access this weekend or not. I�ve got a five hour drive ahead of me tomorrow. I�ll check into my hotel and then have dinner with my aunt. Saturday morning I head to the local university to spend the day at a conference, give a paper as part of a panel with papers so far removed from what I do that I wonder how I could possibly have ended up on such a session. But then, that�s one of the things I love about ethnomusicology. Just when you think that things are as different as they can be, you find these unusual points of contact. I�m looking forward to that part, in any case. I�m just not so sure about the long solo drive on some of the dreariest highway I know.

I�m not sure when the thought of driving became so oppressive. I used to love driving by myself. When my parents were living in the Midwest and I was on the east coast (we�ve since reversed positions), I used to make the 17 hour drive alone several times a year and I loved it. I had an elaborate system for arranging all my cassettes (I was driving a low-tech 1979 Volvo at the time) on the seat next to me. There were sections of the drive I would program � there was always a lot of house music at the beginning of the trip, always James Taylor as I made the exit toward Northampton, when I was there; always Debussy�s �Pour le Piano� for the Saginaw Bridge when I was heading to the Cape. But mostly it was a spur of the moment inspiration of programming. I�m not sure what tomorrow�s playlist will look like. These days most of my favorite tunes are on my computer. And since I have not yet made the leap to iPod and my CD drive is dead, the tunes are stuck there for the moment. I�ll have to revert to CDs, which will probably include a fair amount of business-related listening. Unless I can sneak my husband�s Wilco CD out of the house. Maybe music is the key to my trip tomorrow. Maybe I should stop thinking of it as time to do work listening and start thinking about rekindling the travel bug. I shouldn�t be looking at Hildegarde and Perotin (who, I must mention, are two of my favorite composers, but are, perhaps, not quite well suited to highway driving) but back to earlier playlists. Hmm. I think I could scare up a B-52s CD, if pressed. I need to find the noise I enjoy.

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