10/31: deciding
...not to start schoolwork until the evening in an effort to honor and observe the weekend as a needed break from work. So in the morning I shopped for longboards online with Chris then went for a walk, and in the afternoon I baked cookies (Earl Grey with lavender) and then made arancini for dinner. Luckily, the grading I had set myself went more smoothly than I had anticipated, so I won't be "paying" for my decision tomorrow.
10/30: cleaning
...one of our screened-in porches with Chris as part of our Saturday cleaning plan. The floor really needed to be not only swept but also washed. It looks so much better now that the built-up gunk is gone. And Tilde the Cat had very much taken over the chair where I usually sit when I'm only the porch--which meant that its cushion was covered with cat hair. That's gone now, too, and I'll cover the cushion with a towel for her in the future. Now I'm ready to spend some time out on the porch, enjoying the autumn air.
10/29: felt-tip markers
At the start of the semester my co-teacher and I did an activity with our first-year students that involved giving each of them 4 felt-tip markers of different colors. When the activity was over, we told them they could keep the markers if they wanted. Most of them did. Today in the same class I noticed that one student had all 4 of his markers out on his desk and used them to mark up a hand-out we were talking about. It made me so happy to see.
10/26: some student-related things
One of my students in Myth last week queried the description of Persephone as "slender-ankled." It got me thinking about feet and movement in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter over the past few days, and today I followed up and shared my thoughts with the class. It ended up being kind of relevant to an image we discussed at the start of class, a 2017 etching by Marian Maguire of Demeter and Persephone (visible here). The students seemed to dig into this image, and that felt good. I only recently came across it, and I was excited to show it to them. We then discussed the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and that went well: I think the poems have been a good change of pace.
Last Tuesday I visited a colleague's class to do an upcycled notebook activity with her first-year students. Today one of them came by to follow up with me about it and tell me how much she enjoyed it. Another one told my colleague that she was also grateful for it, though she realized that she might not have registered the gratitude fully in the moment. That seemed like a very thoughtful, self-aware thing for someone to say, and I was grateful to my colleague for passing it along to me.
10/25: a nice man
...who owns a pizza place in Delaware. He talked with me on the phone this evening when it became clear that someone used my name to order a pizza for delivery there. That whole situation isn't a good thing, obviously, but it was nice to talk to someone who was trying to be helpful. He even called the Delaware police to ask them what to do, and he was very concerned that I look at my credit report this evening and start the reports for identity theft.
10/24: gathering
...seeds for Chris on my morning walk. It turns out that they might not have been the right ones. I also used the old Tupperware container I was carrying the seeds in to collect colorful fallen leaves as well, and that made me feel like a kid in a Pennsylvania autumn again. Except now I don't worry about whether a particular leaf is "perfect" or not. They all are.
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