12/31: filming
...glinting light on the lake this afternoon. It seemed a fitting video to send to my sister and her spouse with happy anniversary wishes.
12/30: a full-page drawing
...in crayon of a young woman (or princess?). I found it on an unprinted page in an old copy of Spinoza's correspondence.
12/28: punctuating
...the serious with the less-so.
The serious: We had to do some mop-up rounds today, attending to a slowly leaking washing machine. And I finished Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional. I also sent out all the remaining Heron Tree PDFs for volume 12 for the authors to review.
The less-so: Film versions of Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. We had seen the particular (Dakota Johnson) version of Persuasion before, but we didn't mind watching it again. At certain moments we laughed out loud. We hadn't seen the Sense and Sensibility (Hallmark) version before, so it was nice to add that to our list of Austen adaptations.
12/27: watching Coppelia
...with Chris. It turns out that the version we watched significantly changed the plot (and not for the better), but it was still interesting to watch and then discuss together afterward. We both really loved certain moments with the female corps (danced with wit), and some of the jumps by the key male dancers were almost unbelievable.
12/26: lucky timing
...for my morning walk: I got to see my neighbor drive some small children who were visiting him (his grandchildren perhaps?) back and forth along the ridge in his golf cart. They were enjoying the sun and the air and the simple fun of it.
12/25: a day quiet yet spangled
...with good things, including:
- having stollen for breakfast (and for a mid-morning snack)
- texting back-and-forth with a good friend
- beginning Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
- working on a pamphlet, start to finish
- cleaning and refilling the bird baths
- watching the video for Briano Eno & Beatie Wolf's "Suddenly" (link)
- listening to Brian Eno's Apollo album
- making "meat milk" for the cats (it was for health reasons for Emma, but they all love it as a treat too)
12/24: deciding
...to make stollen. We had the ingredients on hand, but I waffled, unsure if I wanted to make it now or wait until next week. This afternoon I decided on "now," and as a result there is one loaf to cut into tomorrow morning and another one in the freezer for later.
12/23: working on
...the remaining Heron Tree PDFs for volume 12. Throughout the day I was worried about Tilde (an early vet visit was concerning), so it was good to stay at home near the cats and be able to focus--even if intermittently--on something other than my worry.
12/22: mobile phones
I grew up in the days of land-lines and different kinds of calls--local, toll, and long-distance. Toll and long-distance calls meant additional charges. When cordless receivers became widely available, it was a big deal. When phone plans offered the flexibility to make long-distance calls to certain people for free (or at a discount), that was also a big deal. Now I take for granted the ability to talk with people across the country, and sometimes for hours, as part of regular service.
12/20: getting to 10?
It was a low-energy day for me. It makes me want to do a tally, thinking of my friend Barbara, to see if I managed to get 10 things done. (She used to challenge herself to keep going and get to 10 on hard days, and I remain ever-grateful that she told me about it.)
So today I:
- finished reading a short novel set at Christmas
- worked on a PDF for Heron Tree
- glazed the Sicilian pepper cookies
- texted a little with a friend & played Words with Friends with another friend
- wrote a couple more holiday cards
- made chocolate chip and cardamom cookies
- wrote in my quiet writing notebook & looked over my blog while writing about good things from the year
- peeled (carefully!) the stamps off envelopes that I had prepared to send to Chris' dad at an address he doesn't use (alas)--there's a case where my readying-weekly-mail-to-get-ahead-of-things didn't actually work out
- packaged cookies for Chris to take to his father
- tidied my office tables a little
- did a little holiday decorating with Cris: cubist Christmas tree, a row of received cards, a crocheted angel from my aunt
And that gets me to 11 : )
12/18: elaborate
...caramel & candy-bedecked apples gifted to us by my sister and her spouse. We split one for dessert this evening.
12/17: filing
...grades hours earlier than I had expected. And that freed up time this evening to address holiday cards.
12/16: an early email
...from a colleague whom I haven't met in person but whose ceramics I admired in the campus window gallery this semester. I wrote to him last night to let him know how much I liked them, and he wrote me a very nice thank-you this morning.
12/15: slide by slide
When writing the directions for the Vergil students' recorded PowerPoint presentations, I gave them a slide-by-slide checklist of what they needed to include. I think it helped them stay on track (no wondering on their part what I would/wouldn't expect), and it's helped me as I'm grading them.
12/13: enjoying
...a cold-weather walk and thinking about good things that were part of 2025. The year has held a lot of difficult and disturbing things, and it felt important to try to formulate a list of 10 good things that happened.
12/12: changing
...a framing box in a pamphlet to 2 horizontal lines, one running across the top and the other across the bottom. The switch seems to let the pamphlet breathe.
12/10: a mouse button
...made and gifted to me by a Latin student who remembered that I like Codrington's Mus Rusticus version of the Aesopian fable.
12/9: pink
...in the sky and on the water as I drove home. The calm of it was welcome, since my school day ended pretty badly.
12/8: 100
...holiday cards for the Angel Card Project. Most of them were written by students at a campus event that Chris and I hosted; I wrote a handful at home in the evening to round out the number from 94 to 100.
12/7: taking a walk
...this morning. Yesterday I was too exhausted to leave the house, but this morning it felt good to be moving in the outside air.
12/4: remembering
...the Pompeian graffiti on a launderer's shop that toys with the opening of the Aeneid. It was fun to bring into our last Vergil class.
12/3: extra apple
I didn't eat all of my lunch apple yesterday, so I included the remainder when I packed my new apple slices for today. And I ended up having to stay at school much later than I planned, so I was grateful for the extra fuel.
12/2: two things
1. Thinking about Vergil's Dido and her relationship to Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, Medea, Ariadne, and Cleopatra--first in my office on my own (as I prepared for class) and then in class with the students' input and observations.
2. Receiving colored envelopes that perfectly match this year's holiday card.
12/1: the excitement
...of a student who was making a connection between the Percy Jackson class and a course they are taking on the Book of Job. They had a light-bulb moment during class and then came to my office hours later to explain the idea to me. The idea was very good, and I'm grateful that the student shared with me their excitement at making the connection as well as their fleshing-out of the idea.
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