4/30: the flexibility

...to check into a hotel for the night when the power goes out at home.  It wasn't bad to spend the day at home without power (enforced quiet & focus!), but it'll be chilly at night--and so heat as well as the ability to take a hot shower in the morning will be welcome.

4/29: the book review comes through

...by mentioning a book that just came out and that I need to read for my conference paper in June.

4/28: second friday

...in a row that I've gotten to do some book-making.  A student had mentioned that she was thinking of making a miniature coloring book with some of her designs, and I said I'd bind them for her.  Today she dropped them off, so this evening I worked on scanning the images and designing the format.

4/27: another emblem

I gave the Latin class individual photocopies of this emblem (link) yesterday; it was fitting, I thought, on a day of bad weather.  Today I found this one (link) to give them on Monday since it'll be our last class meeting and the emblem's about endings.

4/26: a few

...drop-ins at a notebook-making workshop this afternoon.  It was perfect to have a handful of people (but not more than that) and a break from normal kinds of work.

4/25: two

...bluebirds flying overhead on my walk from the parking lot to my office building.

4/24: cancelling

...a meeting for tomorrow, making today much less stressful.  (The stress would be worth it if the meeting could have helped--but it couldn't, so it would just have meant extra stress.)

4/23: scanning

...one of my students' Odyssey alterations.  It was great to see them altogether as a set.

4/22: making

...a new pamphlet!  This time, an erasure of a journal entry by Dorothy Wordsworth.

4/21: loosening

...my thinking with my weekly quiet writing session.  It helped me figure out what to do for my final exams.

4/20: different seat

I've been sitting in the same place in faculty meetings for a number of years now (a decade?!).  Today Chris and I sat in a different spot--across the room--and the change in perspective was good.

4/19: trying out

...the ancient game of knucklebones, but with plastic ones!

4/18: signs of mid-spring

Honeysuckle and whippoorwills.

4/17: mail and email

I got a great email from a friend this morning and then an amazing photo from a penpal in Switzerland this afternoon.

4/16: hot cross buns

...which Chris picked up at the store because I remembered they'd be in stock for Easter.

4/15: attending to things

Some practical things have gotten pushed to the side in the past 2 weeks, but today I organized receipts (for taxes and for reimbursement from work) and bought my plane ticket to Loretto in May.

4/14: at twilight

A walk with Chris on the ridge and two bats zipping around above us.

4/13: making progress

...on my back-log of grading.  Which is a good thing because a pile of tests came in this afternoon.

4/12: mapping out

...the remaining assignments for the semester for one of my courses.

4/11: reading a bit

...before going to bed.  I haven't been doing that lately as much as I should.

4/10: foggy but not worse than that

I'm in a fog or haze of tiredness and allergies.  But I got through the day non-disastrously and am feeling a little less self-conscious than I have recently, and those are good things.

4/9: experimenting

I was worried that my plan for the conference wouldn't get "buy in" from the attendees, but they were very up for trying what I suggested and talking and sharing.

4/8: only

Thinking about the weirdness of the word only while sitting on a balcony among trees in the late afternoon light and mild air.

4/7: just a little bit away

I'm spending the night in a resort in Heber Springs, which is about an hour from my house.  I'm here for work this weekend, but the surroundings are a pleasure.  I arrived around sunset and got to sit on my room's private balcony amidst the dogwoods as twilight came on.  It was a tough day with some goings-on in my department, so I'm glad for the step away.

4/6: a good thing early

A number of years ago a colleague and I started a tradition at our school:  on the first 3 Thursdays of April--as a way of celebrating National Poetry Month--we have chalk available around the campus fountain so that people can chalk bits of their favorite poems on the pavement.  Since today was the first Thursday I took my bucket of chalk out to the fountain early, and my colleague was already there, chalking.  I didn't look at what she had chosen to write.  I had decided to write out Karen L. George's remixes of two Emily Dickinson poems (you can read them in Heron Tree's found poetry ebook, downloadable at this link).  And then it turned out that my colleague had chosen an Emily Dickinson poem, so there was unexpected/unplanned synergy between our selections.

4/5: qwc

A colleague referred to our "quiet writing community" with its initials today, and that made me smile.

4/4: reading and remembering

I read Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis (in English) tonight and had vivid memories of translating it in 1989.  I'm enjoying how this Trojan War class is stitching together different parts of my reading life.

4/3: sophocles

We're reading Sophocles' Philoctetes in one class and his Trachiniae in another, and I'm enjoying thinking about them side by side.

4/2: dogwood day

The annual trip into our woods to visit the flowering dogwoods is one of our household holidays, and it was today!  We went in the morning when the light was great and before the rain and thunder rolled in.

4/1: cascade

Chris and I took a visiting friend to Woolly Hollow this afternoon, and the water was running over the rocks.  We sat at the top of the cascade in the dappled sun and looked down at the jumping water.