6/30: blueberries

Blueberries on my cereal this morning. And they were grown here at our house and hand-picked by us!

6/29: magical nomenclature

I decided that I couldn't think of my to-do list as a task list. So as I was formulating my plans this morning I wrote at the top of a sheet of paper Today's Adventures Include.... The list of "adventures" that followed was pretty prosaic, but it felt better to call them something different (and exciting) for a change. So today's good thing is language itself, and how different words can get us to feel different ways.

6/28: reminiscing italian style

Okay, here's a second entry for today. We (meaning I) finally got around to making vegetarian meatballs, and while I was doing that Chris worked on some red sauce. So we ended up having a very Italian dinner (home-cooked Italian food is something we both enjoy). The meatballs reminded Chris of the submarine sandwiches his grandmother used to make at his parents' pub, and that led us to talking about all sorts of things related to Chris' childhood. And that was good.

6/28: resized to fit

I did the unenviable work of cutting my paper down today: all told, 4 pages had to disappear. It made me sad to remove some of my more subtle (but less necessary) observations and to demote other discoveries to footnotes. But it needed to be done, and done it is. Chris helped a lot, both in terms of advice and morale, and for that I'm so grateful. I can tinker with the paper in places for the next few days, but in essence it's ready to go. Now I can turn my attention to other aspects of preparing for our trip!

6/27: (almost) full draft

Today's writing-time has been good, and I have only the final sentence of my paper to write. The whole paper will need to be cut over the next few days to make it fit in the amount of time I'll have at the conference. But the hardest part--getting it onto paper at all--is pretty much done.

6/26: private library

Ever since our last house-moving operation (in December 2007) I've been mostly vexed by the number of books I own. But today I enjoyed the benefit of having accumulated a library. I needed some specific, detailed information about the development of the myth of Pandora across the centuries, and I had just the book to pull off the shelf: Pandora's Box by Dora and Erwin Panofsky. I remember buying this book during graduate school, and at the time it didn't speak as directly as I had hoped to the Pandora-related issues I was working on. But I'm glad I kept it, because today it answered all my new Pandora-related questions promptly and perfectly.

6/25: moon and June cake

In June of 1992 (the first summer Chris and I spent together), we found this poem by Christina Rossetti:

The days are clear,

Day after day,

When April's here

That leads to May,

And June

Must follow soon:

Stay, June, stay!--

If only we could stop the moon

And June!

On one particularly lovely June evening in 1992, we made and decorated a cake in honor of this poem. And every June since we've made a "moon and June" cake at some point during the month. We decided that today is this year's moon and June day, so it's cake for dinner tonight!

6/24: a no-car day

This may seem like a silly "good thing," but against the background of a lot of recent errand-running around town I think it's good. I didn't drive anywhere today.