For real, yo.

I feel pretty certain that my life could be labeled "Workshop" right now, and it wouldn't be a misnomer. Or perhaps "Woman at Work." The past month has seen me turning from task to task.  Most, to be sure, have been joyfully undertaken and even more joyfully experienced.  There was the writing of a major speech and the delivery of said speech; there were audience members (my parents included) who cried; there were students who graduated, and we all cried; there was grading, which went from nonstop to completed in an unthinkably short time; there was the two-day drive back to the monastery and the three days of total silence; there was the two-day drive home and the return to the lovely site of my graduate career; there was the writing workshop that went better than any of us had even dared to hope it could; there was the visit of dear friends and a small person godbaby; there is now the preparation for yet another trip, this one to the other side of the country, from where I hope to write more of substance than I've been able to summon up of late.

Interlock.

But...two whole weeks?

Yep.  It's like that here. 

(For the record, this little drawing is one of my favorite public art interventions in my little town right now, but I sure wish the not-so-clever graffiti artist who annotated it had spelled "psych!" correctly.)

How whole weeks disappear.

Look, if I knew how whole weeks disappear before I have a chance to tell you anything about them, then I would be able to do more about it.

Now, the chestnut candles are out in force and we're urging ourselves ever-forward to the end of the semester.  In celebration, this morning the dog found a mouse somewhere in the house while I was away giving a campus tour to a job candidate.  When I came home, he dodged me insistently for a few minutes, keeping his mouth closed the whole time, before finally opening his jaws and dropping a still-quivering carcass on the floor.  Before I could stop him, he picked it up again, returning it to its concealment within his jaws (none of this hanging-a-mouse-out-of-one's-mouth nonsense for my dog).  I still don't know whether he swallowed it whole once I put him outside or whether he dropped it on the ground in the backyard, having had his fun with it. 

Fortunately the day got way, way better after that.

Twin triumph.

This weekend, I received the official call telling me that I have officially been awarded tenure.  And then, not 24 hours later, students dear to my heart received highest and high honors on their senior theses in my department.  And thus it was a good weekend.