6/29: a decrease
...in wrist pain over the course of the day. (Fingers crossed that the decrease holds.)
6/28: having the energy
...to go grocery shopping this afternoon. I meant to do it yesterday but was too (inexplicably) wiped out.
6/27: phew
Tilde the Cat was limping yesterday, and Chris called in the late afternoon to get her a vet appointment today. Our vet isn't in on Fridays, but they scheduled us to see another vet at the clinic. We really love our vet, but it's also nice that he now works in a joint practice so that there can be a back-up option on days when he's out. When I took Tilde in this morning, they x-rayed her leg: no break and no signs of other chronic troubles. So they gave her a meloxicam shot for inflammation and pain, and we're hoping that the limp disappears over the weekend.
6/25: persisting
...or trying to persist through an awkward day. Nothing bad happened, but the heat and my migraine are lingering, and I got very itchy for a chunk of hours until an antihistamine took the edge off. I had a hard time settling into anything. But I got some mail ready, read some of Maggie Su's Blob (a kind of Pygmalion story), listened to the rest of Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland, made crumpets (but sort of messed them up), did some Heron Tree work, tried to write about Gender Swapped Greek Myths, and exercised on our indoor machines (treadmill, rower, sitting elliptical).
6/24: in spite
...of a migraine (and associated eye trouble and nausea), there were many good things today! I dealt with a practical website problem that I was anxious about addressing. I wrote notes to go into the mail. I texted back-and-forth with my brother for 45 minutes and had a quicker text exchange with my sister. I received a great set of Rhode Island trading cards made by a friend and his son for a school project.
6/23: doing some work
...on my Pegasus website that houses my work on Classics and children's literature. Today I added to it the short write-ups that I've done for the Calliope's Library project. It was affirming to read them altogether: I can write! I'm a professional! (Things that it's too easy to not register/remember/feel.)
6/22: returning
...to a pamphlet I planned last June but didn't finish formatting in Word. Today I realized how I could make that job easier. There were still hours of tinkering involved, but it's done now. It's a little strange in that it feels like something from an Old Me rather than the Current Me. Perhaps that should make me especially fond of it, as a way of honoring last year's self.
6/21: sorting
...through 2 years of personal mail. It's not that I hadn't read it--I had! And I'm grateful for every bit of it! But I had put off working through it systematically and deciding where to store certain things (e.g., artist-books go somewhere different from postcards which go somewhere different from letters).
6/19: having a little breakthrough
...in designing a pamphlet for my Bloomsday erasure. I also had a little breakthrough in my mental block about sending out past pamphlets--I readied a stack for mailing tomorrow.
6/18: thinking about
...different Greek words for "holy" in the Divine Liturgy of John Chrysostom and talking about that with Chris as we prepared lunch. It was part of getting ready for my last online session with a student who has been working on translating bits of the service, and I've enjoyed spending a little time over the past three weeks with this particular stretch of Greek.
6/17: revisiting
...a pamphlet that I thought was done last night--but when I woke up, I realized I needed to do some more tinkering with spacing.
6/16: a quick erasure
...of a paragraph from Joyce's Ulysses this evening to mark Bloomsday: the possible is a library of candescent forms.
6/14: reading good articles
...in Artforum this morning. Now that I've worked through my stack of past NYTBRs, it's time to move on to accumulated Artforum issues, which tend to get my brain going in interesting ways. During the school year I don't usually have time to let my brain "go in interesting ways," so the copies pile up until breaks and summer.
6/13: more website work
...though this time for Altered Odysseys, the online gallery in which I post students' creative projects using Greek and Roman epics. I needed to add a selection of pieces from each of the 3 students who did the project this year, and I also spent time checking past posts and tinkering with them if/as necessary (for formatting issues, consistency, visibility, etc.). I've had 20 students participate in the project since it started (in 2016), which I think is a nice number for a wholly co-curricular, self-motivated, and admittedly off-the-beaten-track undertaking. I felt fondly grateful to each of them as I revisited their pieces today.
6/12: learning
...a new word: hocket. It's a noun that names the alternating of a melody line between two (or more) voices or instruments. One voice or instrument picks up when another ends. The musical practice (from the Middle Ages) is interesting, and so is the word's etymology: it comes from the French word for hitch or hiccup!
6/11: some tidying
...of the Heron Tree website. I decluttered the archive contents pages. As websites go, they weren't very cluttered to begin with, but I wanted to streamline them even more.
6/10: the whole night through
I've been waking up in the middle of the night most nights recently, but I didn't wake up in the wee hours today.
6/9: four for four
I've attended four Zoom lectures since the semester ended, and all of them have been good.
6/8: reaching the last
...in my pile of to-be-read issues of the New York Times Book Review. I hadn't been keeping up with them weekly during the spring semester, so reading one a day has been a nice way to enjoy more leisurely summer mornings.
6/6: making crumpets
...for lunch. I found a no-yeast recipe online (here) and used some credit card points I had to buy a set of crumpet rings. Chris helped when it came to getting them out of their rings to turn them over. Success!
6/4: working on
...Heron Tree. We're reading through volume 12 submissions, and I picked the words that will be on the cover of the volume 11 collection (one word from each poem): branch, bread, cargoes, door, echo, equilibrium, expedition, faces, figures, filaments, forest, gown, grass, haze, history, impression, jar, lesson, light, lightning, line, miles, night, path, quilts, relief, roofs, room, search, shade, shell, shoes, summit, surface, translation, variations, violets, visitors.
6/3: connections
A Teams meeting with a student to do some Greek, a sweet message from a neighbor, two pieces of mail from friends, various texts with family and friends, and an email from another friend.
6/2: inside / outside
The morning inside: listening to a lecture about Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Harryette Mullen, and Sappho.
The afternoon outside: visiting the cascade and creek at Woolly Hollow (a long deferred trip).
6/1: submitting
...my paper abstract before lunch (today was the due-date). It wasn't something that I had to do, but it was something that I wanted to do. Given the flurry of the past 2 months, it recently seemed like I might not get it done--and though that would have been understandable, I would have felt like I let myself down. I'm glad not to have let myself down.
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