10/31: remembering
...that I needed to do laundry so that I'd have a clean pair of pants for tomorrow!
10/30: eating
...Los Angeles Unified School District coffee cake (recipe here) at breakfast, lunch, and dinner today. After lunch I only cut myself a bite-sized piece, but I wanted to be able to say that I ate this wonderful coffee cake at all three meals today.
10/27: comparing
...the Infancy Gospel of Thomas with the Homeric Hymn to Hermes in Greek class today. I love both texts, and I was excited earlier in the semester when I thought of doing this comparison/contrast exercise with the students as a way of wrapping up the IGT. They did a really nice job of thinking about both narratives, and it was a good way to say farewell-for-now to the IGT. It has been such a pleasure to have it as part of my Tuesdays and Thursdays for the past 8 weeks.
10/26: realizing
...that I can shift my tomorrow around a little bit to work at home for longer and get some things done in the morning that I didn't finish today.
10/25: reading
...a (very short) short story while eating my soup at lunchtime. Usually I work while eating, and I suppose that reading the story still counts as work (since it was for my Daphne presentation in a few weeks), but it felt like a break.
10/24: a heads-up
...from Chris about a big traffic jam this morning. He texted me while he was stuck in it, so I was able to avoid it by doing more of my morning work at home and heading to campus a little later than usual. Hurray for home laser-printing: it meant that I could make copies of hand-outs here rather than worrying about getting to school with enough advance time to make them there.
10/23: receiving a letter
...from one of my favorite sendsomething people. It arrived yesterday, but I forgot to get the mail yesterday afternoon, so it was there waiting for me when I checked the mailbox on my morning walk. It was a thick envelope, and I enjoyed the anticipation of getting to open it at the end of my walk.
10/21: revising
...the directions for the remix assignment I'll be giving to the second group of first-year students on Monday. I tried this assignment for the first time with a different group of first-year students last month, and they did a great job. But in the course of grading their assignments, I realized there were some things that I could set up better for this second go. Although I didn't mean to spend my Friday night working on this, I'm glad I did. It'll make the rest of the weekend less busy, and it feels good to have strengthened the framework for the assignment.
10/20: sitting outside
...with a colleague for 45 minutes before my afternoon class. We talked, sipped caffeinated drinks, and enjoyed the air and light.
10/19: explaining
...to my first-year students that I think of a class as analogous to a hortus conclusus or walled garden.
10/18: Greek students and good things
At the start of Greek class today, one of the students mentioned that they weren't feeling well. I said that I had a migraine and wasn't feeling great myself. Then she suggested that we all share good things, so we did. And I told them about this blog! The student who suggested that we share good things said that if I made it through class with my migraine, I could use that as my good thing for today. I did make it through, so here it is as my good thing! And the whole exchange about good things with the class is another good thing too.
10/17: working through
...a challenging to-do list for the day. I'm closing up shop 2 1/2 hours later than I'd like, but it's worth it to not have to wake up tomorrow and feel like I'm already behind.
10/16: finishing
...The Latinist by Mark Prins today. Alas, I ended up not liking it so much (and that is an understatment). I wanted to read both it and Will Boast's Daphne in preparation for a Daphne-related discussion I'll be running in November. In both cases I had noted the novels when they were published but didn't read them at the time because I suspected that they'd rub me the wrong way. I was right. Still, I am glad that I read them and got them done pretty quickly--so now I can feel like I've done due diligence on the Daphne front and can also move on to more pleasant reading before falling asleep this evening!
10/15: lots of literature
...today. Reading about the Book of Revelation, finishing Daphne by Will Boast, starting The Latinist by Mark Prins, listening to Lindsay Ellis' Truth of the Divine, watching a production of Lesia Ukrainka's Cassandra. Boast's novel got me pretty angry (I definitely don't recommend it), I was disappointed by the production of Cassandra, and it's too soon to know what I think about The Latinist, but I'm still grateful to have spent time with so many written words today in one way or another.
10/14: discovering
...A Dictionary of Similes by Frank J. Wilstach, published in 1916 and so safely in the public domain. I'm excited to use it in future projects.
10/13: visiting
...Collins Creek with Chris. It had been quite some time since we'd gone on an outing together.
10/12: staying a little later
...than usual at school to proctor the midterm for a student who couldn't take it at the set time earlier in the day. We worked quietly in the room--me on Greek, the student on Latin--and I appreciated being in a space both calm and intent.
10/11: getting an idea
...about how to frame an assignment for the first-year students. It had been weighing on my mind recently, and I had gotten a little frustrated because, even though I need to finalize it soon, I seemed to have hit a wall in thinking about it. Then this morning, while I was doing my usual getting-ready-in-the-morning things, a solution came to me. Hurray!
10/10: finding out
...that I don't have to proctor a make-up exam tomorrow afternoon after all. If I had had to, it would have been fine. But it's nicer not to have to.
10/9: whew
I finished a big chunk of grading, grade-calculating, and assignment-returning this evening. I'm still not "caught up," but I'm not woefully behind, so I'm going to count that as a good thing. Another good thing: the student grades I calculated were very solid! I'm very glad I gave them the chance to revise one of the substantial assignments for this first half of the course: it made a real difference, and I think (hope?) the revision process helped their learning.
10/8: smiling at a coincidence
I was doing some grocery shopping in the early evening. The store was nearly empty: most people don't choose Saturday night as their grocering time. When I got to the aisle where I was going to pick up some liquid aminos, someone else was there. And he was holding a bottle of liquid aminos. What are the chances of two people on a Saturday night in suburban Arkansas reaching for the same not-often-bought-in-suburban-Arkansas item just a few seconds apart from one another? It made me laugh, and him too.
10/7: getting some work done
...this evening. It's not my preferred way to spend a Friday night, but the school-related tasks have piled up in a daunting way. I'll need to spend most of Saturday and Sunday just trying to catch up. Tonight's work at least made me feel like progress is possible.
10/6: stopping again
...at the pier on my drive to school. It was an especially good thing to do this morning: I had a meeting scheduled for mid-morning that I was worried about, and it calmed me down to breath the good air and feel the autumn sun.
10/5: getting excited
...by ideas. A senior Classics major shared a possibility for a final project, and it's lovely. It loops back to text-alteration work she did with me early in her time at college but extends it by adding a critical/interpretive layer. I talked with her in the early afternoon, and in the late afternoon I went to a discussion on some passages from the New Testament, my Greek New Testament in tow. We were being invited to think about the passages from feminist and post-colonial perspectives. It was very interesting to hear other people's ideas about the English versions of the passages, to make some connections to what they were saying, and to generate some ideas myself by seeing what resonances the Greek contained which might not be as obvious in English.
10/4: stopping
...at the pier this morning to take a few pictures on my way to work. It used to be something I did very regularly, but in the past year I've only done it a handful of times (at best). Today the light was beautiful, and some autumn colors were beginning to be reflected on the water.
10/3: less busy
...at Walmart today than yesterday. I went yesterday because I had to get Tilde the Cat's insulin refill and figured I would do my weekly grocering while I was there. It was not particularly pleasant--too many people, too much awkward navigating, and too much going on for my eyes and ears to handle. And the pharmacy didn't have Tilde's refill ready after all. When I went back this afternoon to get it, things were much calmer. At the end of a frazzling day at school, I was grateful for that.
10/2: another weekend
...of trying a few new things in the kitchen. Yesterday I made vegan sisig, which we enjoyed again for dinner today. This afternoon I made a red velvet snack cake which we had--without frosting--for dessert tonight. I'd made red velvet cake in the far past, but in general it's not my favorite. Chris likes it, though, so I wanted to give it another try. And eating it without frosting made me realize that what I don't like is the combination of the delicately flavored, light cake, the heavy cream cheese, and the double layers of both. On its own, the single-layer cake was lovely. I'm looking forward to having the rest of it in the course of the coming week.
10/1: reading a sonnet
...or rather two sonnets by Edmund Spenser. I came across one of them--Sonnet 28--earlier in the week when I was looking at Daphne-related poems and art. I wanted to think more about it today, and I decided to see what the surrounding sonnets were like. It turns out that Sonnet 28 sets up Sonnet 29 so it's important to look at them together. Taking them as a pair changes my view of Sonnet 28 in a way that I'm glad for.
And another good thing, of a different sort, for the day. Chris grew a watermelon this summer. He thought he was planting a vine for gourds, but it was a melon vine instead, and it yielded a sole, small fruit. Today he muddled some of the fruit and added gin to make a little drink for each of us. I'm not a fan of watermelon in general, but this watermelon in some Ethereal Gin was wonderful.
9/30: ending the work week
...more calmly and pleasantly than last week! I was able to do some grading in my office in the afternoon, then I had an outdoors meeting (in glorious light and air!) with my team-teaching colleague, and after that both of us participated in a book discussion group with some other colleagues.
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