Busy past few days! Haven’t had time to write much, so much has been going on.
The minute I sat down to the computer this morning, Gerardo showed up. His “8:00 a.m.” usually means “10:00 a.m.,” so I’d imagined plenty of time to get a few things done before I started to prune the roses, a chore I’ve put off now for three or four weeks. Today was my chance: get him to haul the clawed debris from the man-eating plants, instead of me having to chuff it into the garbage bins in back.
But nooooo…. Before I could even bolt down breakfast, he was on the phone, on the way casa mia. So while he and his sidekick did battle with the rest of the yard, I cut back eight roses. Then for reasons unknown he decided nothing would do but I had to meet him at M’hijito’s house (why??), so here I am, in front of a strange computer.
Probably was a wise thing. I see the lime and lemon trees were hard-hit by the frost. The lime was OK where I was able to pin sheets around it, but I’m just not big enough to sling frost covering over the top of it, so about a third of its canopy is frizzled. The lemon tree, too, oddly enough, suffered some serious frost damage. Usually lemons and grapefruit are the toughest of the citrus. Anyway, I’ll have to ask Gerardo to trim back the limbs that are obviously dead.
Yesterday I became so engaged in a client’s project I utterly forgot the evening Bach concert for which I had tickets. Recalled it about 4:00 this morning. {sigh}
A choir member gave away three tickets to Bach Festival performances. I was thrilled to get all three of them, and really looked forward to going. So was mightily disappointed when I realized that, once again, because it wasn’t written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror I lost track of it. Old age is the pits.
Sunday, though, was a full day of glorious music. We sang, of course, in the morning, which is always fun, but much more to the point, the chamber choir, which is mostly composed of music professionals and graduate students, put on THE most incredible performance. One of the pieces was just ethereal, it was so beautiful. As his finale, choir director Scott Youngs, a superb organist, played an astonishingly complex piece, the kind of thing that leaves you in awe of what the human mind and body can do. In the afternoon was the Bach concert, four sonatas played by violinist Stephen Redfield and harpsichordist Kathleen McIntosh. It was very fine. From there it was back to All Saints to join the chant choir for evensong, and that was very pleasant. At the end of the evening, Scott performed yet another amazing piece, dark, complex and noumenal. Did you know an organ can make a delicate sound like chimes? I had no idea… It can. And the effect, in a piece of music that already evoked the the other-worldly, was spine-tingling.
Monday I made a conscious decision to stay away from the computer and clean my filthy house. Actually, I intended to get to the roses that day also, but the housekeeping expanded to consume the entire day. I’ve never been fond of cleaning. It’s such an exercise in futility: the minute you finish, it needs to be done again. Didn’t do the greatest job yesterday, but at least I finally, very belatedly cleaned and oiled the kitchen cabinets and scrubbed the dirt off the floors.
The magazine article writing course is not making, and so I asked the chair for another comp course. He said he would try to arrange that, but so far no word on what will come down. Whatever, you can be sure he’ll hand it to me at the very last minute. If it’s anything other than a 16-week Eng. 102 section or a 5-week 101 section, I won’t be prepared. So I determined that I need to at least draft course outlines for a 16-week 101, a new 8-week 101, and a new 8-week 102, each incorporating my latest pedagogical strategy. Writing any of those will take two or three full days. Setting up three of them so they’re ready to go at a moment’s notice represents about a week of unrelenting work. Ugh.
Of course, I should have done this over the winter break. But really, I wasn’t kidding when I said I needed a real, extended break from the 7-day-a-week, 14-hour-a-day work schedule. Nor was I kidding about bringing a halt to the unpaid labor. It’s taken almost the entire month to unwind and get back to feeling more or less normal. I could do with another two to four weeks away from the grind, to tell the truth. Next summer, maybe.
So, nothing much of import here, except for the ongoing buzz over the Tucson shootings
Turns out the deranged perpetrator had been arrested for drug use, apparently had contact with the police more than once, evinced symptoms of madness at not one but two institutions of our fine education system…and still he could freely walk into Sportsman’s Warehouse and buy a 9-mm semiautomatic pistol. Nothing like your handy-dandy Glock for picking off doves, eh?
And of course, since Arizona has done away with all concealed-carry regulation, he could have walked through the Safeway with the thing tucked into his belt. Because in Arizona it’s perfectly legal to carry a concealed weapon in your vehicle, after he was stopped for running a red light on the day of the shooting, he just went on about his murderous business.
What a place!
A new set of crazies is set to descend on us, and they are SO wacked that the viciousness has even penetrated our thick-skulled legislators’ notice. A bunch of nut cases from Kansas’s Westboro Baptist Church (“church”!) announced their plan to raise hell at the funeral of the nine-year-old girl who was assassinated. They’ve already circulated hate material to the effect that Catholicism is not a real religion, that the ceremony is devil-worship, and on and on, and they’ve made known their intention to yell this hateful garbage at the grieving family and friends burying their child. The legislature promptly passed a measure blocking protesters from approaching funerals any closer than 300 feet. But 300 feet is within yelling distance. At any rate, it was a positive sign, to see Arizona’s legislators make a move in the direction of common decency.
Let’s hope they hold that thought.
Images:
Frost on a Nettle (Netherlands). Vincent van Zeijst. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Johann Sebastian Bach im Alter von 61 Jahren. Elias Gottlob Haussmann. Public domain.
Broom, Sponge, and Towel. Chuck Marean. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Compact Glock 19 in 9x19mm Parabellum. Vladimir Dudak. Released under the GNU Free Documentation license.
Førde kyrkje ein kald vinterdag, 2000. Roy Henning Helle. Public Domain
