10/24: us on the island, a fox on the road

We went kayaking this afternoon, and the lake was so high due to recent rain that we could paddle right up to an island whose shallow waters we usually need to skirt. We beached our boats and walked around a little. It was fun to be on land that--under normal circumstances--we can only look at.

On the way home from the grocery this evening we saw a fox right on the road not too far from our house. He looked magnificent, trotting along. And as I type I can hear him calling outside.

10/23: on my own

I had to go back to the office after dinner this evening because I forgot to send some information to my committee and they needed it before Monday. To send the information in the tidiest way possible I had to merge multiple PDFs into one. Some people might know a quick trick for doing this, but I don't. And no one was around for me to ask, the office building being empty at 6 p.m. on a Friday. So I did a quick web-search, found a free download tool, merged my PDFs into one tidy packet, and sent it off. Mission accomplished, and on my own.

10/22: apples as a staple

In the winter of 2007 I had some dental work done that turned out pretty badly: biting into anything hard became painful, and it wasn't until winter 2009 that everything in my mouth was made right (or at least right-er) again. Prior to the dental debacle I used to pack an apple every day as part of my lunch for school. Apples became too hard to manage with my injured mouth. But this school year I've been able to return to apples as a lunch-time staple, and I think I appreciate them all the more now. Today's apple tasted so good.

10/21: office hour visits

Some really nice students came by office hours today for various reasons: advising questions, Greek problems, Classics issues, recommendation requests. They kept me busy pretty solidly from 1:45 to 4:15, and it was so good to touch base with each of them that the time flew.

10/20: a good committee

I chair a committee at school, and I think I do a good job of helping things go well behind the scenes. I'm not so pleased with my ability to run meetings (alas), but that's another story. What is good is that we had a meeting today, and I am so thankful that everyone on the committee did a great job of preparing for our gathering and of chiming in thoughtfully as we talked this afternoon. Everyone was careful and considerate and good.

10/19: early bird benefits

I'm not an early-morning person, but I got up today at 5:30 in order to get a jump on school-work this week. One nice thing about driving to campus early is getting to see the colorful sunrise over the water as I pass the lake. Another happy thing about arriving early at school today was that my favorite parking place was available (other people really like it as a spot, too, so it's rarely free if I go in at my regular time). And a final good thing about getting to work early today was that I really did manage to accomplish my tasks in a timely and unhassled way.

10/18: in a row

I've managed to take a walk for the past five days (at least). Today's stroll in the oblique and yellow-y autumn light was especially wonderful. And Chris has come along each day, too, so that's an added good thing.

10/17: (lost and) found

I've been using my new Macbook for everything but images. For picture editing I haven't switched over from my PC yet, and today (alas) my PC did something really odd: it deleted about 30 pictures from one of my folders for seemingly no reason and without sending them to the recycle bin (where I would have been able to recover them). So I purchased an "undelete" program, and it was able to restore most of the lost pictures by using the data on my camera card. I'm grateful to have some skies back which I thought were gone. Here's one of them:

And while I was at school this afternoon, I snapped a photo of some of the asters blooming in the Arkansas garden. When I looked at the picture more closely here at home, I found a bug lurking amid the blossoms. Here's a crop of the photo showing him--or her: