2/8: finding
...a great snippet from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations to share with the Greek students: o kosmos alloiōsis. The order of things is the process of becoming other. This is extraordinary. I ran into a colleague I hadn't talked to in years at the end of the day, and I told her about it, and she loved it too.
2/7: starting
...the work-week on a nice note by seeing a rabbit hop across my path as I walked down the hill to my car this morning and also by spending some time appreciating the Jack Frost patterns on my car windows.
2/5: coming together
I've been tinkering with some ideas for projects for the past two weeks or more, and nothing seemed to click. Today there was some clicking for two different projects. I try not to get anxious and frustrated when things don't come together quickly, but I'll admit I was getting frazzled at being stymied on two fronts, and it feels good to end the day unfrazzled.
2/4: good things in books
I got to think about similes as I was comparing a Vergilian simile to one from Rick Riordan's Lightning Thief. While I was making the salad for dinner, I told Chris that it always makes a day better when I get to think about similes.
After dinner Chris and I read more of Moominland Midwinter aloud. It was a fantastic chapter about a blizzard (among other things), which made it fitting material for a snowed-in day.
And I looked at Twain's Extracts from Adam's Diary with a view to using it in a project soon.
2/3: outright cancelled
I didn't teach online today after all: my school officially cancelled everything due to weather. That didn't make the day "free" for me (like snow days of childhood), since I spent a lot of time figuring out how to reconfigure things to cover the missed material and rearrange assignments. Still, I think it was good for me to have a break from people (other than Chris and the cats) today.
2/2: being relieved
...that we'll be allowed to shift our classes online tomorrow and Friday if the winter weather that's coming our way makes getting to campus tricky. In the past that hasn't been an option, and the decision to drive into town or not on icy and/or snowy days was stressful. In December we had gotten word that we wouldn't be able to go online for weather-related reasons; I'm glad that the administration changed its view.
2/1: two Greek things
The quotation I started Greek class with today came from Hippocrates, and it made me think about the impetus behind ancient (and maybe modern?) medicine: to find any patterns amid the great varieties and differences of "both souls and bodies," to use Hippocrates' phrasing.
And then I lingered on a simile in the Odyssey that I can't believe I hadn't been struck by before: the Phaeacian women's hands, moving quickly while weaving, are like leaves on a tree.
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