9/30: two reminders

...of my father in the mail today:  an article from the NYTimes (about Kathleen Ryan's fruit sculptures) that reminded my mother of him, and a note from one of his Fine Arts departmental colleagues (thanking me for a pamphlet I sent her).  Of course he's never really far from mind, but these seemed like especially sweet ways to remember him.

9/29: catching up

...with Simon and Baz, the main characters in Rainbow Rowell's Carry On, which I read as a lark four years ago.  A sequel just came out, and it was good company while I was in bed sick.

9/27: getting ready to sleep alone

Usually it's Chris, me, and two of the four cats sleeping in or on the bed, but I hardly slept yesterday night so Chris and the cats moved to the futon in my office for tonight so that I can get some rest.

9/27: round robin

In one of my classes today we finished our unit on Greek drama.  I asked the students to write down three things that they were especially glad they encountered, explored, or did during our time together.  Then I asked them to share one of those things with the group.  Both their sharing and their written lists were so nice!

9/26: better

The vegan cookies I thought hadn't turned out so well last night seemed better this morning.  I'll be taking them, plus two batches of other kinds I made this evening, to school tomorrow, and I hope the students will like them.

9/25: a variety

Feeling at ease with my beginning Latin class.

Having some good office hour meetings.

Writing to an alum with a question and hearing back from him almost immediately.

Drafting an email that I've been thinking about for almost a week.

Meeting with a friend to do some planning for a possible trip with students.

Making two different kinds of vegan cookies.  (With mixed success, but it was still good to do.)

Receiving a note from a publisher of chapbooks and artist books who just received some of my pamphlets and had nice things to say about them.

9/24: Hawthorne

In the 3rd-semester Latin class we try to give students a taste of the various kinds of activities that Classicists do.  Today we did a little reception studies work, with the students looking at the conflation of Eve and Pandora in Hawthorne's Wonder Book.  What goodness that book has brought into my life over the past decade!

9/23: class planning

I liked one of the activities I planned for (and did in) today's Latin class:  generating a set of simple sentences that used the same basic vocabulary to illustrate all the syntactic phenomena we've covered so far.

I had a sweet lesson planned for my Ancient & Modern Drama course, but it involved watching a short video, and the speakers in the classroom didn't work.  Ugh!  But luckily I had over-prepared for class and so had some back-up questions we could pursue instead.  Hopefully on Wednesday we'll get to watch and discuss the video.