3/31: reading
...Robert Bagg's translation of Sophocles' Women of Trakhis in preparation for class this afternoon. It's not one I've taught with before, and it was nice to read it at home with coffee in the morning before heading to school. I think students did well with it, too, so I'm glad I made the change.
3/28: having a nice talk
...with one of my advisees about their schedule for next year. It's not an advisee who has come to talk with me much, so I was especially glad that we got to spend some time together this afternoon.
3/26: a full draft
...of a pamphlet I've been imagining for awhile. It still needs some work, but at least it's not just in my mind any longer.
3/25: outdoors
...for a lot of today. I walked in the morning, sat on the porch for part of the afternoon, went to an outdoor birthday celebration for one of our neighbors in the late afternoon, and visited the dock at sunset.
3/24: a variety
...of good things:
Sweeping the floors and tidying my home office.
Doing some erasures of pages from Homer and from Twain.
Walking down to the lake to watch a colorful sunset.
Downloading and working through the photos I took at the lake. (Photo-processing time has been weirdly hard to come by recently.)
Seeing that folders of old emails that I thought had been a casualty of my email provider's transfer to a new platform were suddenly restored after a few weeks of being missing.
3/23: less trouble
...with arthritis today (knock on wood). It had been bad for the past four days in a it-hurts-when-I'm-just-sitting-or-lying-down kind of way. Today it was such a pleasure to walk that I walked longer than I had meant to. The good spring air was an incentive to keep walking too.
3/22: finding
...the holiday lights on when I came out of the bedroom and into the main room this morning. Chris had turned them on. We decided not to take them down when the holiday ended, and it cheers me to see their colors.
3/21: dealing
...with a flat tire. We had driven out to Cove Creek for a walk, but as we pulled into the parking area there, the low tire pressure indicator sounded. We must have run over something sharp on the gravel roads we had been driving on to get there. When we got out of the Jeep, we heard the tire hissing, so we got back in and headed back before it got too low to drive on at all. We pulled into the parking lot of a Dollar General store in Wooster and changed the tire there. Two different men so kindly asked if they could help us out, but we managed it ourselves.
3/20: oh my goodness
I had no idea how wonderfully straightforward it would be to make boiled wontons using wrappers from the grocery store. I mixed up a filling of ginger, vegetarian "chicken," carrots, green onion, soy sauce, and cornstarch, and then we wrapped it into the pre-cut squares. After boiling them, we ate them with some chili garlic broth, and they were so good.
3/19: three things
In the morning I finished some grading that I had hoped to finished yesterday afternoon. It felt good to get it done, and I especially liked seeing some of the comparison/contrasts that students had to do for part of the assignment.
In the afternoon I worked on some materials for the erasure workshop I'll do at the end of the month.
In the evening I looked up at the stars in a clear sky.
3/18: deciding
...to do an erasure workshop at school after spring break. I thought I had decided against doing one this year, but then I felt the urge, so I scheduled the day, time, and room while at school today and this evening at home worked on a poster to advertise it.
3/17: Irish soda bread
...for breakfast, sent by my mother. That taste at this time of year is a thread of continuity across the decades.
3/16: good sentences
...chosen by my students to illustrate how choices about form can reinforce content. The students who needed to bring examples today chose interesting ones, and the other students did a nice job of adding their observations.
3/15: a work-around
I wanted to write sentences about cake for Greek class today, but the students don't know the Ancient Greek word for cake, so I used the phrase the beautiful bread instead.
3/14: a lightbulb moment
One of my students is trying to put together a research project for the summer but is having a little trouble coming up with something that will work well idea-wise, strutcture-wise, time-wise, and ability-wise. This morning I thought of a comparison project involving various translations of Vergil's Aeneid that I think will work very well and that gives the student a focus and structure but also space to make the project their own. And there are some recent translations of the Aeneid that seem like they'll be interesting to work on and explore.
3/13: delighted by
...an answer on one of the Myth students' tests. They were asked to identify Eumaeus, they loyal swineherd from Homer's Odyssey. Eumaeus is addressed multiple times by the poet as "you" (which is unusual), so one student began their answer, "You, Eumaeus, are..."
3/12: enjoying
...a walk while the snow was still around but melting fast in warming air. I saw an eagle and finished listening to The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber.
3/11: an assortment
...of good things to end the work-week:
A student was excited about officially declaring a Classics minor.
A prospective student in Greek class wrote down all the notes--no mean feat for someone who's taken no Greek before and doesn't know the Greek alphabet.
In Greek we translated one of my favorite passages in Ancient Greek: the verse in Luke where Gabriel refers to Mary's future baby as "the holy thing"--something that usually gets reworded in published English translations.
In my afternoon class, we shared moments of humor in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.
A colleague and I left campus early to beat the bad weather. We didn't coordinate it, but we were locking our offices at the same time and so headed out to the parking lot together. And our timing was perfect: just as I was getting home, the precipitation was getting solid and icy.
The precipitation didn't stay icy, though: it turned into one of the best kinds of snow, fluffy and picturesque. I was able to work at our long table this afternoon, which gave me a great view of the outside as the snow was falling. When I finished my work, I put on my coat and boots and tromped in the snow for a bit.
After dinner I walked with Chris to a neighbor's house where he was going to hang out for awhile, then I continued walking on my own. I had my lantern in the dark, and being in the snow and air and night was wonderful.
3/10: time
...with Hesiod, this morning and this afternoon. I tried out (somewhat successfully) a new format for my class session on the Theogony, and it was nice to have one-on-one time with the poem before that.
3/8: no one rushing
...to finish the Myth test today. It was trying a new format for tests in this course, so I wasn't sure if it would be too long or too short. Maybe it was just right.
3/6: spotting
...a Lenten rose in the woods as I walked this afternoon. Then later, this evening, a friend posted photos she had taken of some Lenten roses during her walk today (in a totally different part of the US).
3/5: heading out
...for a morning walk at Cove Creek with Chris. There had been a controlled burn there recently, so there weren't the early spring flowers we had been hoping for, but Chris caught a little snake along the trail and we admired it for awhile, then later I spotted a little snake too. And some trees were just beginning to bud and flower.
3/4: clearing
...some "to do" items off my list before leaving work this afternoon. I am not ahead (at all), but I am not behind.
3/3: time with Homeric Greek
...this morning, as I prepared some passages to share with the Myth class so they could see how different translators tried to bring certain aspects of the ancient language into English. Penelope's wordplay in book 19! The use of the dual in book 23!
3/2: surprise visitors
...to my office hours this afternoon: a former student, his partner, and their puppy! I was in the middle of a session with a student, and they were just passing through town, so we couldn't really talk much, but we all cooed over the puppy and shared general good feelings.
3/1: coming back from campus
...and seeing pelicans on the lake (still!), then finding that Chris had heated up some cheese dip so we could have a few tortilla chips with dip while we were getting the rest of dinner ready.
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