...shortbread with lime and dried elderflowers.
6/29: a cool morning
...and perfect for reading (Artforum) on the porch while drinking my coffee. The cats were happy to join me too.
6/27: a request
...from a former student. She asked which Shakespearean sonnet we analyzed in the etymology course she took with me in 2003; she said she wanted to read it again.
6/26: making
...collages of 1-inch squares. I used index cards, so each one has 15 squares. I tried not to think about them too much and just enjoy putting the squares together.
6/25: finishing
...the half-marathon as part of The Poetry Marathon. I did 12 erasures in 12 hours, and I used Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy as my source text. It was harder going and I'm less excited by my results than last year, but in a way that makes me all the more glad that I just finished.
6/24: our annual celebration
...with a Moon and June cake. It's sweet to have a holiday that we created and that only we observe. This year Chris suggested the design for the cake (a grid with each square holding a different lunar phase), and it worked out nicely.
6/23: stepping outside
...for the sunset and watching the clouds' colors go from white to pink to orange to pink again.
6/22: sending
...an email that I meant to send at the beginning of the month. I've gotten so scattered and unfocused with all the uncertainty about Tilde the Cat's health and adapting to a new schedule for taking care of her, but I'm going to try to get back on track with various professional things for the next month. Luckily, the lag in sending the email didn't matter, so if something was going to get deferred, this was a good candidate.
6/21: at last
...formatting a pamphlet whose words I chose and design I sketched months ago. I didn't intend for it to be about my father, and it's not necessarily or just about him, but it's also not not about him. And as a commentary about him, I think it might sum things up better than anything else I could say, so there's something settling and satisfying about that.
6/20: oh my goodness
Chris and I read Tove Jansson's story "The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters" out loud; I read the first half, and he the second. It was jaw-droppingly good.
6/19: continuing and beginning
Continuing to work on the responding-to-piled-up mail project. I'm not finished, but I've made significant progress.
Beginning to listen to The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley, and appreciating its masterful opening.
6/18: pausing
...while making the salad for dinner in order to stamp the nubbin of the lettuce à la Bruno Munari. I did it multiple times, slightly overlapping, so the print looked like a bouquet. I put it in an envelope to my mother, who sent me some celery stamping she had done recently.
6/17: starting and finishing
...Nancy Garden's Annie on My Mind within 24 hours. There's a bit of a tie to Classics (one of the characters mentions Aristophanes' speech from Plato's Symposium), so I kind of read it for work, but it was clearly a case of work's being a pleasure.
6/15: taking the bride
...to Woolly Hollow for some pictures. Here she is, raising her hand while standing in the dry cascade.
6/13: working on
...some responses to mail I've received. The past year and a bit have been overwhelming, and I just stopped sending mail as regularly as I used to. I kept a basket of things received, though, and now I can work through it. They are almost all things sent "with no strings attached," so it's not like folks were necessarily waiting for a reply, but I still like to thank them and send something back. It felt good to make a start on that.
6/12: reading
...these haiku this morning: https://www.readpoetry.com/10-vivid-haikus-to-leave-you-breathless/. I'd come across 3 of them before, but the others were new to me, and I especially like Hokusai's one with the poppy.
6/11: typing
...an English translation of Sophocles' Antigone. For a digital erasure activity in one of my classes next semester, I need an MS Word version of the translation the students will be reading. So over the past 3 weeks I've typed a few pages a day, and now it's done. I enjoyed the mechanics of copy typing, especially at a time when my mind has been preoccupied and scrambled by cat health worries. It was also good to get inside the play this way, word by word.
6/10: unexpected
If I walk in the late morning, I'm likely to cross paths with the mail carrier as they drive along the ridge. Today the mail person was someone different than our usual person, and when he drove by me the second time he wished me a good day.
6/9: working out
...a pamphlet format. I thought I had one that would work earlier this week, but it didn't pan out. Yesterday it was vexing me. Today I think I found something that I can be happy with. Amidst cat-health crises, it felt good to have a space of relative calm in which to think about something else.
6/7: a variety
...of goodnesses today:
I took a morning walk in new shoes, attempting to find a pair that won't hurt my feet.
Tilde the Cat ate some food on her own so that we didn't need to use the feeding tube for all of her daily nutrition.
Tilde also slept on a chair with Emma the Cat for part of the afternoon, a sign that she's feeling better.
While reading today I came across two instances (in two different texts) of astonished applied to unusual things: a dwelling (actually a kind of cave structure, in Vergil's Aeneid) and the evening (in a haiku by Ole Bungaard).
We had lentil soup for dinner, made from a new-to-me recipe. The lemon juice and zest in it made a big (and good) difference.
I got an idea for a new pamphlet.
6/6: a little Latin
A student turned in their first report for a summer research project using Vergil's Aeneid, and it led me to think about poetic meter and translation issues. It also prompted me to read a bit of Vergil's Latin myself while drinking some afternoon coffee.
6/4: waking up
...with Tilde the Cat also on the bed. She woke soon after I did, and walked a few steps closer to me and then fell back to sleep. She is not at all out of the woods health-wise, but she's now in the at-home part of the recovery process. Fingers crossed and gratitude given for any pain-free time she spends with us now.
6/3: a bloom
...on the one hollyhock that survived last year's Arkansas summer. Chris moved it into his grow-tent for the autumn, winter, and early spring, and it thrived. It grew from heritage seeds sent to us from my aunt who lives in Nebraska.
6/1: getting to visit
...Tilde the Cat in the animal hospital. We went down yesterday, too, but she was too out-of-it for a visit then. She was still fairly out-of-it today, but we were able to pet her, scratch under her chin, and talk to her. She seemed to know it was us.
5/31: organizing
...for the summer by making a calendar and straightening up my home office a little.
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