Still kicking.

Another month: I have wrapped up the honors program; I have read, taught, and graded (and have more reading and grading yet to come); I am registering new Phi Beta Kappa students; I have passed the penultimate stage of the process of becoming a formal student in the order of which the monastery is the center; I am looking ahead to two years of very, very differently apportioned time.

Some of the time, I feel like that frog on the rock: biding my time, looking out over the opportunities coming.

More of the time, these days, I feel a little bit like these two: keeping a very low profile, lest someone see me and offer me some more tasks.

Watching these frogs for an hour or so was one of the highlights of my week, two weeks ago.

Hurrah and huzzah!

By mid-June, I'll be a sister-in-law! And, more importantly, my brother will be a husband!

Visitor.

There was more this week: I took the camera with me more places and, on days when it wasn't torrential, shot lots of pictures. Which I then didn't have time to process and show you. But today, I looked out the window of my study and saw this guy running around the edge of the driveway, eating everything he could. Sometimes a squirrel would run up and spook him. At one point he was standing on his back legs, cleaning the vegetation off of a rosebush (or similar). And so he takes precedence over the week's various bounties.

Getting these pictures made me long for a longer telephoto lens (in particular, I hate that the image above isn't quite as sharply focused as I wish it were). If I'm able to get what I'm working on, gear-wise, I won't even have this much close-up. I'm pondering.

Char and climb.

These days, I feel marginally competent a lot of the time. And then this evening, I check my e-mail and find appended to a student's question a postscript: after class on Friday, J. and I went outside and read the Pater essay out loud to each other, like you suggested. Thanks for the recommendation. And it comes to seem that perhaps things are going better than I fear. 

Today's New York Times magazine has a set of articles that have me afraid to put sugar in my coffee tomorrow (or ever), sure that I should stop sitting down so much, and convinced that I should go to bed by 11 p.m. and sleep until 7 a.m. all week, no matter what.

When the power went out this afternoon--wind, don't you know--I was listening to two of my students sing. I didn't even find out that there had been a reason we'd sat in an unlighted concert hall until I got back to my office and found students in the officehouse who'd been kicked out of the library because of the outage. I read about Hopkins (my heart) for a little while and then headed off to discover that the prairie must have been burned last week after all.

Still, life.