10/7: getting some work done

...this evening.  It's not my preferred way to spend a Friday night, but the school-related tasks have piled up in a daunting way.  I'll need to spend most of Saturday and Sunday just trying to catch up.  Tonight's work at least made me feel like progress is possible.

10/6: stopping again

...at the pier on my drive to school.  It was an especially good thing to do this morning:  I had a meeting scheduled for mid-morning that I was worried about, and it calmed me down to breath the good air and feel the autumn sun.

10/5: getting excited

...by ideas.  A senior Classics major shared a possibility for a final project, and it's lovely.  It loops back to text-alteration work she did with me early in her time at college but extends it by adding a critical/interpretive layer.  I talked with her in the early afternoon, and in the late afternoon I went to a discussion on some passages from the New Testament, my Greek New Testament in tow.  We were being invited to think about the passages from feminist and post-colonial perspectives.  It was very interesting to hear other people's ideas about the English versions of the passages, to make some connections to what they were saying, and to generate some ideas myself by seeing what resonances the Greek contained which might not be as obvious in English.

10/4: stopping

...at the pier this morning to take a few pictures on my way to work.  It used to be something I did very regularly, but in the past year I've only done it a handful of times (at best).  Today the light was beautiful, and some autumn colors were beginning to be reflected on the water.

10/3: less busy

...at Walmart today than yesterday.  I went yesterday because I had to get Tilde the Cat's insulin refill and figured I would do my weekly grocering while I was there.  It was not particularly pleasant--too many people, too much awkward navigating, and too much going on for my eyes and ears to handle.  And the pharmacy didn't have Tilde's refill ready after all.  When I went back this afternoon to get it, things were much calmer.  At the end of a frazzling day at school, I was grateful for that.

10/2: another weekend

...of trying a few new things in the kitchen.  Yesterday I made vegan sisig, which we enjoyed again for dinner today.  This afternoon I made a red velvet snack cake which we had--without frosting--for dessert tonight.  I'd made red velvet cake in the far past, but in general it's not my favorite.  Chris likes it, though, so I wanted to give it another try.  And eating it without frosting made me realize that what I don't like is the combination of the delicately flavored, light cake, the heavy cream cheese, and the double layers of both.  On its own, the single-layer cake was lovely.  I'm looking forward to having the rest of it in the course of the coming week.

10/1: reading a sonnet

...or rather two sonnets by Edmund Spenser.  I came across one of them--Sonnet 28--earlier in the week when I was looking at Daphne-related poems and art.  I wanted to think more about it today, and I decided to see what the surrounding sonnets were like.  It turns out that Sonnet 28 sets up Sonnet 29 so it's important to look at them together.  Taking them as a pair changes my view of Sonnet 28 in a way that I'm glad for.

And another good thing, of a different sort, for the day.  Chris grew a watermelon this summer.  He thought he was planting a vine for gourds, but it was a melon vine instead, and it yielded a sole, small fruit.  Today he muddled some of the fruit and added gin to make a little drink for each of us.  I'm not a fan of watermelon in general, but this watermelon in some Ethereal Gin was wonderful.

9/30: ending the work week

...more calmly and pleasantly than last week!  I was able to do some grading in my office in the afternoon, then I had an outdoors meeting (in glorious light and air!) with my team-teaching colleague, and after that both of us participated in a book discussion group with some other colleagues.