...a favorite brunch for dinner. Old version (from my childhood): crepes, applesauce, sausage, butter, maple syrup (all rolled together). Today's version: crepes, blended berry sauce, chopped pear, vegetarian sausage, vegan butter, maple syrup (all piled together).
2/27: a thank-you note
...from a student. I felt like I didn't deserve it today, but I will try to deserve it tomorrow!
2/26: almost
...done with typing my comments into the students' corpus assignments. I have 3 more (out of 19) to go. I had been hoping to finish them this weekend, but I'm not too far off, and I'm going to consider it a victory-for-personal-selfhood to stop working before it gets too late.
2/25: getting through
...my first full reading and preliminary grading of the corpus assignments from my Etymology students. I'll have to do another pass tomorrow to double-check my grading consistency and type in the comments I've handwritten on paper copies, but at least I finished the first pass today without working into the wee hours (whew).
2/24: dinner waiting
...for me when I got home. I usually make dinner, and I enjoy doing it. Chris then takes care of all the clean-up. But today he made the dinner--before I even got home--and did the clean-up. So welcome at the end of a packed week and at the start of a packed weekend.
2/23: the Sappho workshop
...which I'd been planning with a colleague happened today. And it was good. The students seemed into it, and the aleatory techniques we had worked out yielded sweet results.
2/21: adding
...chopped celery, sliced grape tomatoes, green onions, and little more soy sauce to my Momofuku noodles for dinner.
2/20: a government holiday
...today, coinciding with a day of no classes at school. I still have to go in to work this afternoon, but I worked a little at home this morning. Then I took double advantage--of my flexibility and of the road crew's holiday absence from the ridge--to take a walk.
2/19: seeing
...a review of Selby Wynn Schwartz's After Sappho in the NYTBR (last week's edition--I'm a bit behind in my reading). It seemed a good omen for the Sappho workshop in the coming week.
2/18: noticing
...a recipe for pear patina in a cookbook of ancient-inspired recipes, and giving it a go this evening. We used honey from our hives and prune wine that Chris had made.
2/17: doing some planning
...that was a little overdue for some upcoming assignments in my Latin and Etymology classes.
2/16: some good moments
...with the Odyssey today: reading it on my own before class and noticing some new-to-me things; asking a very specific question about Waterhouse's Sirens painting and its difference from similar ancient depictions; hearing the thoughts of a student who is usually more quiet in class.
2/15: nice email
...from two people on a day when reassurance was especially welcome. They weren't trying to reassure me, which makes it even better that their good words had that effect too!
2/14: flowering
The winter honeysuckle near the carport; I smelled it before I drove to work this morning. The Japanese quince on campus; I passed it on my way to and from my office. One of the magnolia trees outside the Life Sciences building; I saw it from afar.
2/13: doing
...one of my favorite activities in Etymology for the first time with this group of students: making a word web, building off a single word by changing prefixes, bases, and suffixes to create other words. The task today was to get from transparent to infinite, and more of them seemed to have fun in the process than I had anticipated. That's a nice way to have one's expectations countered!
2/10: being asked
...a follow-up question. On Wednesday I made a quick positive comment in class about bats. Today a student stayed after class because she wanted to know why I like bats.
2/9: tinkering with
...some word remixing, first on my own this morning, then with a colleague mid-day, then on my own after dinner. These weren't long sessions at all--just a few minutes each--but I am grateful that they were part of a day that was largely vexatious in other regards.
2/8: inceptive -sc-
I love the Latin -sc- infix, which signals that something is in the process of happening but isn't completed yet. Crescent, rubescent, iridescent!
2/7: having an excuse
...to look at the Greek of the Odyssey. A student in Myth class had asked a question about some of the Greek in Book 5, so it was a pleasure today to dip into it, see what the Greek was doing, and have some new-to-me thoughts.
2/6: working on two holidays
Now that the winter holiday is over, we're applying a protective coating to the 114 wooden blocks which we painted shades of green, silver, and gold for our cat-proof Christmas tree. It will take a little longer than a week to do, since each side needs two coats, and on weekdays we can only manage to do one coat, but it feels nice to have this stage of the project underway.
And this evening I finished writing Valentine's Day cards.
2/5: thinking about
...the katabasis in Nicole Kornher-Stace's Archivist Wasp in comparison to the katabasis in Vergil's Aeneid.
2/3: collaging
...words from Dickens' Little Dorrit, Woolf's Orlando, and Thilly's History of Philosophy into a sort of little triptych.
2/2: letting myself
...read Books 5, 6, and 7 of the Odyssey as I prepped for class. I could have taught the class without re-reading, since I've read and taught those books so many times now. Because I especially love them, however, I wanted to give myself the treat of reading them and having new thoughts about them. It means having 2 hours less to do some other tasks, but I think it was worth it.
And also letting myself read the first issue of the Telemachus comic in the morning. Not at all necessary for work, but related, and also worth it.
2/1: getting a meeting switched
...from in-person to remote for tomorrow morning. The roads may be icy, so the switch takes pressure off the "should I drive in to school, should I not" double-guessing game.
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