Sunday, October 31, 2004
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Countdown
Ahhh... that's better. I have scrambled over scrubby hill and slippery dale to find my cosy spot in front of a roaring fire, hot chocolate in hand, dog's nose resting on my leg. There are all kinds of sounds in fire, wild whooshes and pops and every once so often a fragile sound like glass breaking. Come on Winter! Do you worst. I am perfectly happy to hibernate till, well, at least until November 3rd.
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Hot Chocolate, Figuratively
After tossing and turning and worrying about the fate of the world and, tangentially, the ways in which proximate cause can be proven in a negligence claim, this article by way of Kevin cheered me immensely.
Of course, my second hot chocolate, literally, is doing much to smooth over any lingering malaise.
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Okay, even I am frightened by this.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Plum-dendum
Today was a cocoa-mocha-cocoa (grande, tall, tall, respectively) day. Forget toothpicks, I'm going to start needing steel girders to prop up my eyelids.
And in a testament to my prescience, my professor did in fact call on me Monday. There's nothing like a preemptory voice saying "Miss Willy" to get the adrenaline shooting through my veins. Happily, I had woken up at three to do the reading.
On a final note, in a glorious twist of registraral clemency, Tuesday nights mark the mid-point of my week, so sleep is in my sights. I love how the weekends are never far. Oh yes! And another debate! Yummy...
Sunday, October 03, 2004
More on Plums
I sat down at the kitchen table with a pot of Cinnamon Plum tea today to do my reading. It was a beautifully classic moment of October with the sun coming in cheerfully through the windows and Dante blending into the floor at my feet.
And then I decided, in honor of that lovely, autumnal moment, I'd remove to the couch and read the Atlantic instead.
For my pains I was rewarded with this:
Sinners Welcome
I opened up my shirt to show this man
the flaming heart he lit in me, and I was scooped up
like a lamb and carried to the dim warm.
I who should have been kneeling
was knelt to by one whose face
should be emblazoned on every coin and diadem:
no bare-chested boy, but Ulysses,
with arms thick from the hard-hauled ropes.
He'd sailed past the clay gods
and the singing girls who might have made of him
a swine. That the world could arrive at me
with him in it, after so much longing—
impossible. He enters me and joy
sprouts from us as from a split seed.
by Mary Karr
There was also an article on P.G. Wodehouse.
Ah to sin against the stern, scholastic gods and be rewarded for sin... These are ripe, plummy days indeed.
(Of course, this little indiscretion seals my fate tomorrow, as I will most certainly be called upon.)
Friday, October 01, 2004
Plum Pudding
Timothy Garton Ash, an international relations expert at Oxford University, drew rueful chuckles the other day at a panel discussion here when he dubbed Prime Minister Tony Blair's approach to the Bush administration "the inimitable Jeeves school of foreign policy."
Britain, Ash said, "is the wise old butler who stands behind this idiot nincompoop in the White House and is impeccably loyal in public but in private whispers in his ear: 'Is that wise, sir? Do you really want to invade Iraq?'
Full Washington Post article here.
P.G. Wodehouse and trenchant political commentary-- be still my heart!