Three and a half babies

I had a dream last night, very vivid... I dreamt of travelling, and I was in Africa. I was at the base of a mountain, in a clearing. It was a sunny, warm winter day. I witnessed a wild, dark brown, shiny horse in the throes of labor, and she finally, explosively, gave birth to a foal. Then she ran off as if spooked, or in a hurry. I searched to see if the foal followed her in the trail of dust she kicked up in running, but I couldn't see the foal. I feared she hadn't made it. I can't remember for sure if I finally found the foal or not.

Shortly thereafter I witnessed an elephant giving birth as well, in the same clearing, in the same place. Her birth was slower and seemed more comfortable--not like the wild and writhing foal's birth. Also, while the wold horse gave birth in the sunlight, the elephant was slightly closer to me in the clearing, in the shade of a tree, although it was still plainly daylight. After the baby elephant was born, she and her mother sauntered off together. They seemed private and shy.

I then witnessed a rhinoceros give birth. Her body completely contorted, expanded, and contracted again as her baby emerged. When the baby was out, she seemed to be the mother's twin. They departed, intertwined souls, together.

Finally, after the three intense birth experiences I saw at the foot of the mountain, I found myself suddenly inside a midnight blue hospital room with three women lined up in beds against the wall, close together. One of them was Oprah, and she was also having a baby. She was in labor, and was covering and uncovering her head with a hospital gown. It looked sort of like a burkah. She seemed uncomfortable, but not uncontrollably so. She was still smiling, but she wasn't speaking. Kirstie Alley was in the bed beside her, writhing and whining and complaining.

Then I woke up.

Twas a three birth night. Wonder what it means?

Anything new with you? ¿Que te pasa?

marriedtothesea.com

What will those crazy techies think up next?

This is one of the crazier things I've seen lately. Every time I think I can sort of envision the path technology will take, my inklings are completely blown out of the water! I am totally amazed by this. Check it out:

http://www.vonage.com/vonagevphone/#

I think traditional land line phones will be virtually extinct in the next 50 years. We have already eliminated public land line pay phones. Many people use their cell phone as their main personal line--and quite a few of them don't even have a landline in addition to their cell. Most larger companies and institutions have inegrated their phone systems with their internet systems, and they all have DSL. USB online phones seem like the next logical step for the consumer...

Although, all this switch to high-speed info makes the necessity of more fiber optic cable laying an absolute necessity. How are we to manage the increased traffic and utilization of this fantastic technology without supporting it with more infrastructure?

Anyhoo. How cool is Vonage?

Why I'm Thankful

1. My family
2. School
3. People who care
4. Love
5. Holy people
6. Hybrid cars
7. Tofurkey
8. Christmas
9. Intelligence
10. Human communion
11. Scientists
12. Public Radio
13. Artists
14. Anthropology
15. Music
16. Animals
17. Gardens
18. The sky
19. Travel
20. Friends
21. Books
22. Humour
23. Miracles
24. Popular uprising
25. YouTube

Besides number 1, which is obviously most important, numbers 2 - 25 are in no particular order. I couldn't possibly order them; they are all essential, and essential to my life. For all these things (and many more), I am reminded to give thanks especially on this day.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

PS. You will perhaps note that I posted a new quote on the left column, under "Quotes Favoritos". Here it is again, just in case you missed it:

"The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you. They are unique manifestations of the human spirit." - Wade Davis (anthropologist and ethnobotanist)

I also added a new favourite link, "Seasoned in Hell." It is the blog of my husband, and I highly encourage you to read it, as it's quite well-written and thoughtful. (Not that I'm in any way biased, mind you.) Right then. See you!

Breastfeeding International Icon

Vote for your favourite international (universal) icon for breastfeeding. Mothering Magazine is holding this contest. Check it out!
This is the abstract of the contest: http://www.mothering.com/sections/action_alerts/icon-contest.html


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Dia de los Muertos / Day of the Dead

I haven't been around much in the month of October, but here are some recent pictures. Día de los Muertos was today, and I built two altares; one to Elvis, and one to Santiago de Compostela. We showed them at the Day of the Dead celebration on campus today. It was great fun, apparently, but I missed all but set-up and take-down, since I had to study for a test, take a test, and attend a class. But I digress.

Here are a few pics.

Dostoevsky

This is the first draft of a poem I wrote this morning while reading Anthropology homework and thinking about why I act the way I do. Post comments and tell me what you think (and what you think needs changing).

working title:
Approaching whole mind

from my mother, the gift of candid speech
of laying one’s heart at the feet of another
and trusting that they will pick it up, hold it, and hand it back
rather than step on it and squish it to oblivion.

from my father, the gift of rhetoric
of building an argument
of clarity of logic, thought expressed eloquently
of the ability to turn heads with words.

I married them: the heart and the head
And I use the tools of each one (of each hemisphere)
I build towers of logic and gardens of feeling
With my mother’s purity and my father’s strength.

In the words I speak, and in the ones I write
I look for the hem of the line, the body callosum
Where the fabric of feeling and the fabric of reason
Are met, and marry and intertwine.

Ireland, ourstyle

The following pictures are:
Thomas and me at the Clonakilty Post Office, which is inside a former church. The people of Clonakilty are pretty sure that theirs is the only post office in the world that is housed in a former church. It's quite interesting; a beautiful old church building, which on the inside has a queue and plexiglass with tellers behind it, and a drop box!





Thomas with a bust of Barry McGovern as Vladimir from Waiting for Godot, taken on our visit to the Dublin Writers Museum.







Us with Nick Harper! Holy Cheese. We gave him a present, which he wore the night he played with his dad. We felt very honoured. The gift was a T-shirt with an Alex Ross painting on it of George Bush as a vampire, sucking the neck of the Statue of Liberty. tee hee. (pictured here)







.

Glocality

I'm feeling very technologically interconnected at the moment. I'm sitting in locally owned Sunergos Coffee on Preston (full o' people right now, by the way--cheers to college kids and Christians, the principal occupants of said shop!). It's 10:15 in the ayem, and I'm using my trusty little Apple iBook, mooching Sunergos' electricity to power the thing, sipping Guatemalan blend coffee, listening to someone else's music library on iTunes--someone who must also be in the coffeeshop. There is a band in their collection called the Appleseed Cast, and they are pretty supercool. (Like, I think I'll buy an album kind of cool.) Meantime, I'm reading Elizabeth's blog all the way from Boston and simultaneously chatting with folks on campus and around the country through Gmail and Facebook.

How glocal! (as in global and local at the same time.... It's an anthropology/economics term I learned. Doesn't roll off the tongue well, but it's linguistically interesting).

It all seemed so 21st century to me... and I mean that in a futuristic sense. Sometimes the feeling of living in the future now comes upon me with overwhelming clarity. Timelines, notions of "progress" and "civilization," fold and compress before me, around me, and I get a glimpse of what it must have been like to be Philip K. Dick. In the book VALIS he posits that time actually ended in 79 AD and that this 'modern' world is laid over it, and obscures that reality. I don't subscribe to that particular manifestation of the notion that time is illusory, but I do believe in that general idea. Time as an external, measured and measurable reality is a false notion. Time exists insofar as we create it and then observe (and obey) our creation, but it doesn't exist in some Platonic, empirical, objective, progressive kind of way. And all this intellectual theorizing is tangible for me when I have these moments of supreme surreality, when facets of what we in this culture, day and age call "reality" bends, shifts, or disappears completely, and one can see the pattern of all of it. I guess it sounds a bit like the Matrix, eh? But it is what I experience.

Sometimes I can look through this hazy distracting veil of habit and structure and have these peircing moments of true clarity, when I can see the world full-on, not sideways or peripherally. It's breathtaking, and exhiliarating, and terrible.

So, enough of that. I hope you're all keeping up with Elizabeth's blog, A Room Full of Books , because it is hilarious, and poignant, and insightful, and lovely. Please do yourselves a favor and read it.

And speaking of blogs, sorry I've not been 'round much. The semester is eating me from the outside in. I'm holding off the attacks for now, but it has been disheartening and frustrating and draining in many ways. In equally many ways it's been a grand and worthwhile adventure, full of new and fascinating people, places, ideas, experience and feelings. In all ways it has been taxing. I look forward to rest and press on to the next project.

P.S. I have asked Jimmy and Thomas if I may post pictures of them from the Ireland trip, and they are fine with it, so expect more Ireland pictures SOON! Love and learning to each of you.

Autumn becomes me

Hace casi un mes que no estoy aquí en la red, en la blog. I haven't been on my blog in almost one month. And what a month! I had some pretty desperate moments of wanting to drop out of school as I attempted to negotiate my time, balancing between three executive boards, classes, work, and home--what with Thomas being ill and all. But he's on the mend now, happy to say. It was a long six weeks, worrying about him and having the added stress of a sick husband. And I am quite enjoying my semester, although I often think I have more to do than is possible to do in 24 hour days. C'est la vie.

In any case, I didn't come on here tonight to write about any mundane goings-on; rather, I wanted to post a poem I wrote a few weeks back when I had been mentally railing against the ridiculous Louisville weather as I drove home on a particularly sticky evening. I watched the sky turn from bright blue to pink and orange, not able to enjoy the colours for the heat. The beauty of the sunset was pushed back from my consciousness, as if I were appreciating a painting through a periscope, though, and I suddenly realized as I felt the heat and all the people enjoying it, how futile it was for me to pretend that hot weather is a thing I enjoy. I also realized, in a moment, how silly it is, more generally, to consider the weather we have in Louisville between May and September to be the thing called "summer"; it is not. Furthermore, it is an implied lament that I don't leave in a place where September is more autumn than summer. To have the stifling heat of the summer survive into September... it's just not fair. This poem is an expressed feeling about what a Louisville autumn really is: a disgustingly unpleasant period of time, free from breezes, cool rains, pleasant smells, or shade. It's hot and oppressive and dangerous and exhausting. And silly. So here it is.

Kentucky's Ohio

and what is autumn
anyway
in this stygian pocket
of the river’s ridge
the heat and damp
swallowing the spine of
this twisted river body.
We’re tucked in:
Ken-tucked
in this Ohio Valley summer
where the moisture hangs
and the mosquitoes multiply.

Is it October yet?

Facebook innovates again

I wanted to see if this would work. It's a Facebook "badge." Not sure exactly how it will be useful to me, but I was curious to see what happened. Hmmm.... Curiouser and curiouser.

¡Qué maravilla el internet!

In other news, the first two days of school are enjoyable thus far. I've only had one actual class so far, but have been keeping quite busy with Honors Student Council. I am looking forward to posting more pics from Ireland, but in the meantime I am feeling more placid than last semester, trying to be more organized and hopeful. This plan is going well so far; for instance, I have planned out all the dinner meals for the week. Yesterday was pesto pasta, the day before was beef stew, and tonight will be polenta cakes. I have revoked my veganism and feel quite good about it. My body feels more grounded, in a good way. Nourished, not schizophrenic. We'll see how it goes.

Overseas and into the heart

I've just come back down after an exhiliarating (and sometimes tense) vacation. Ireland for a week was amazing. The absolute best vacation ever. It felt so good to travel with my husband, to brbing together my love of travel with my true love. We stayed mostly in County Cork, and a few days in Dublin. I'll hopefully post a more detailed account of the trip, but for now, here's a picture or two of some of my favourite things on the trip.


a pretty cottage on Clonakilty Bay, West Cork.











me, taking advantage of a photo op at the Clonakilty Model Railway Village.












Nick Harper, playing his show at deBarra's Folk Club in Clonakilty, August 2nd. It was a spiritual experience....












This is a sheela-na-gig on the side of a 16th century castle. Sheelas were pagan goddesses carved into the sides of churches and castles to protect them from invaders. These sheelas were hags, or wisewomen, with hideous faces, who exposed their genitals, the source of their protective power.
















:)

Swear Eternal Friendship to Beauty

"In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that."

-- George Santayana

This is the way to always love people: to see the good in them and believe in that goodness. I love this quote because it is such a perfect crystallization of why and how I seem to enjoy almost everyone's company, and why it's possible to be an optimist. It's an interesting meditation, especially when one forces oneself to find and see the beauty in others normally considered anathemic to oneself. Such as George W. Bush.

But when one can look and see the beauty in any one person, one never wants for compliments, or hope, or allies, or friends.

JK (kidding, not Rowling)

This post was intended for my birthday, but I had some technical difficulties. Thanks for your patience with my spotty appearances, and I hope all is right with you and yours. And now, unfettered and unindulged, in its original text, my post from two days ago....

Hi again, Mouseketeers! July has flown by in a gust of productivity and contentment (and a certian measure of worry and stress, of course, I must admit). I've checked many things of the "I desire to do" list, such as: see the movie A Scanner Darkly, get stuff for Honors Student Council rolling, visit the Anthropology Department, attend the birth of the baby K (name omitted for privacy's sake), watch lots and lots of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and NYPD Blue, love on my husband, bake things (eg banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, birthday brownies, curried rice).

And so, although I've been absent here, I've been trying to be more present elsewhere. I feel that my attempts to attract the good and repel the bad are having tangible repercussions, the most disturbing of which is that as I feel the bad energy draining from me, I am pretty sure that I'm being attacked by dark energies from the outside. Odd things keep happening, namely the deaths of pets of my family (first, my sister-in-law's bunny, then my mom's loyal dog, then another bunny of my sister-in-law's). Then, my computer broke and was away being fixed for two weeks, in a bid to deter me from being efficient. Littler things, like inexplicable bruises and pains in my body, along with a flat tire, all sort of converged this month, communicating to me that the process of trying to think positively is an arduous and sometimes dangerous task. But I feel determined. I want to be a hopeful person again, a peaceful and understanding person. I want to stop being "right" and start being helpful. I'm sick of my beliefs and my judgments and biases. I want to clean my heart of resentment. This is difficult, but it is worth the effort, I think.

And today is my birthday, happy auspices already received. I turned on the radio this morning while making lunches, and the first song I heard was "Hounds of Love" by Kate Bush, one of my favourites of all time and on my birthday mix this year. Odd coincidence, eh? And then, when I got in the car to drive the kids to daycamp, "Funkytown" by Lipps, Inc. followed by Prince's "Kiss"--great songs to hear on one's birthday. As I've mentioned on the blog before, each year on my birthday, I make a compilation CD of important songs for me that year. Here is this year's list, which I will burn a bit later on today, and enjoy for time immemorial: (and with this list, I give my leave. Until soon!)

What's My Age Again? by Blink 182
Wild Witch Lady by Donovan
It's Not the Fall That Hurts by the Caesars
Never Been to Spain by Three Dog Night
Hounds of Love by Kate Bush
Psycho Killer by the Talking Heads
Town Called Malice by the Jam
Down by Nothing Error
Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush
Hey Rose by Girlyman
Bilingual Girl by Yerba Buena
Everlasting Sea by Donovan
Treasure Island by Nick Harper
Maori by Girlyman
Roun' the Globe by Nappy Roots
You Have Killed Me by Morrissey
I Am Here to Break Your Heart by Nothing Error
You Show Me Yours (And I'll Show You Mine) by Kris Kristofferson
One Night in Bangkok by Murray Head
Frankly, Mr. Shankly by the Smiths
Cosmic Dancer by T.Rex

In with the new, out with the pink

I haven't been around much on my blog this summer, and for this I am sorry. Me lamento la falta de estar presente en la red. I've been occupied loving my husband and trying to foster closeness with him. I have also been working hard on stuff for Honors Student Council and BirthCare Network. And I have two birth clients whose due dates are about to collide with each other! (One is late in coming, and I have a feeling the other will come early....)

You might also notice that my blog looks different, and has a different name. This change is meant to reflect a turn in the road for me; I am reconceptualizing my creative space as a reflection of the process of reconceptualizing that I am doing in my life. Please let me know what you think. As a last note, this new template does not allow links, so here, inside the post, are links to my favourite sites:

• A Room Full of Books


• La Busqueda: Sarah Ruzic in Guatemala


• National Public Radio


• Word Reference: online dictionary


• BirthCare Network of Kentuckiana

Happy reading! May the road rise to meet you, etc.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's ME! ...or not.

I am apparently Supergirl. Take this superhero quiz to find out who YOU are:

http://www.seabreezecomputers.com/superhero/

My results:
Your results:
You are Supergirl

Supergirl 85% Spider-Man 80% Wonder Woman 80% Iron Man 80% Superman 75% Hulk 75% Green Lantern 70% Batman 45% Robin 40% The Flash 40% Catwoman 40%

Lean, muscular and feminine. Honest and a defender of the innocent.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test


Link to my results:
http://www.seabreezecomputers.com/superhero/result.htm?a=75&b=80&c=45&d=85&e=80&f=40&g=75&h=40&i=70&j=40&k=80

Making Up For Lost Time... No te preocupas.

I have taken a proverbial page out of the blog of my good friend Elizabeth (see new link to the right) and have happened upon--albeit "sin querer" (unintentionally)--my own "FreeWill Astrology" horoscope o'the week. And Elizabeth certainly has a page to spare for me; her new blog is called "A Room Full of Books," and all I needed was the one page.... Elizabeth's blog is the absolute authority on all things literary. At least, in my world, it is. Elizabeth is my biblio-beacon, illuminating for me her opinions of her favourite tomes, and giving me ideas for great picks and must-have items. Go check out her blog. She is the most amazing rising Reference librarian EVER! She will someday rule the written wor(l)d!!!!

To get back to it, ahem, here is my horoscope from FreeWill:
"My life is about finding time to dream," M. Night Shyamalan has said. I urge you to make that your motto, Leo. The progress of your most practical ambitions later in 2006 will depend on whether or not you spend the next few weeks tapping into information that's available through fantasies, meditations, dreams and other altered states."

Now, to some who read this blog, perhaps my finding credence in astrology is akin to listening to demonic spirits. For me, however, I feel like it's affirmation from the cosmos that I'm heading in the right direction. For the past year or two even, I've been adrift in the metaphysical sea, with no dogma to guide my path--except the belief that belief systems as a rule are flawed and even deceptive and that the people who stand atop them and wave their banners are, at best, inconsistent but well-intentioned, and at worse, malevolent liars.

This belief in "no belief system" is the most dangerous kind of metaphysical existence. I have felt the lack of true and sincere belief in my heart very acutely for some time now. I have sought to fill that gap in all manner of ways (med school? smoking? partying? grade-consciousness? scholarship? agnosticism? money?), but what it's come down to is that I have to remove the impediments in the path to that lacking. I had blocked my open heart with rationalization, anger, disappointment, skepticism. Now I am trying to uncover those layers that have been blocking my ability to commune with the metaphysical part of myself.

(At least) one of my family members is worried that I am opening myself up to evil forces if I open myself up to "positive energy" of the random and unidentified variety. I understand what she means, because I saw her go through the same dark path for several years. But I feel like I've already been on that path; that when I stopped listening to my heart and started listening to my ego instead, I allowed those darker forces to wheedle their logic into me. I know what darkness feels like and looks like; I know well how I behave when in their sphere of influence. And what I'm trying to do now is push them back and out of me, and fill that part again with goodness and hope. But I'm not, at this point, ready to name the positive force to which I am praying, because I still feel like that inherently puts spirituality into a man-made box and creates more room for anxiety and anger to reign in me. Nevertheless, this force is, intuitively the same as that which I've always appealed to, but which at some point I decided was indifferent to me and possibly non-existent. It's easy to see now that this force never changed; only I did.

So I'm trying to change back. "...At this point a new story begins, the story of a [wo]man's gradual renewal, her gradual rebirth, her gradual transition from one world to another, of her growing acquaintance with a new...reality." (Dostoevsky, the second to last sentence in Crime & Punishment)

And the horoscope in LEO encourages me; that is all. And as far as its advice goes, I have been paying special attention to my dreams of late, as they seem to be imbued with transcendent meaning, full of vivid images and memorable phrases. I have begun writing poetry again (most of it, as yet, horrible--case in point in last entry); I am drawing a bit; I am trying to dig back into my memories, in order to remember the magic of children's thinking. I am looking for the divine instead of the man-made; I welcome the supernatural, the creative and the unifying.

We'll see how it goes.... !

Things Are Intense--but Good. (What Else Is New?)

This is flippin' ridiculous. It's been over two weeks since my last, pathetic post. Inexcusable!

And yet, I have some excuses. For example: I have been a busy bee! in such pursuits as Birth in the Bluegrass (still wrapping up the loose ends from that one), Freshman Orientation at UofL (ongoing), creating a myspace account (yes, I'm officially addicted to the internet), Facebooking, reading, having some intense interaction with my husband (not like that, you perv). I also just got hired as a Spanish and Italian tutor for REACH (free tutoring provided by UofL). Oh, yeah, and one other little detail:

I GOT A FULL TUITION "ETSCORN" SCHOLARSHIP FROM THE HONORS PROGRAM FOR THE 2006-07 SCHOOL YEAR!!!!

Bwahahahahaha. I am so very happy not to have money troubles for the foreseeable future. Aaahhhhh..... I also have started doing yoga in my backyard (weather permitting) which has made me feel better physically. Spiritually I seem to be going through some kind of passage.... the immateria and the holy are calling to me. I am beginning to seek to answer that call once more. I have started trying to meditate and pray (on purpose) again. I'm not sure who I'm praying to except that I want to channel the forces of peace and good and power bigger than myself. --I think I've been trying to rely too much on myself for answers, instead of just letting them fall upon me, as they used to. Too much seeking, not enough finding. I need more stillness to find, I think.

Anyhoo. As part of my re-invigorated "Slow down, you move too fast; you gotta make the moment last" mantra, I have written my first poem in more than two years, in an attempt to get the creative juices reciculating through my soul. I share it here with you now, simply to demonstrate that I am rusty, but I am trying to reconnect with that part of me. Here it is:

I never noticed, till now
how the clouds resemble bones
A front of sirrus whisps
lined up
like a column of crooked vertebrae
with good bone density
...no celestial kyphoplastys on this front.

There, after the spine,
a single, trailing hyoid circle
of a cloud
smeared by the wind
--Someone must've smashed the throat.

These cloud x-rays float beyond my roof
toward that gibbon of a moon:
waxing, the densest bit of bone mass in the evening sky.

Yeah, it's weird. Sorry. As an aside in case you're curious, a kyphoplasty is an outpatient surgery performed by a neurosurgeon or orthopoedic surgeon wherein a collapsed spinal vertebra has a needle inserted into it with a balloon on the end; the balloon is blown up to resotre the vertebra to its original height, and special cement is inserted to fill the balloon and recreate the density and structure of the vertebra to its original state. In addition, in case you are burning to know, the hyoid bone is the only bone in the body that is not articulated (does not connect) to any other bone. It's high in the throat and helps the tongue navigate its intricacies. It's cool to look at on an x-ray because it appears to be floating in the throat, different than the stacked architecture of the spine, shoulders, ribs, et al. Here's a representation of it in the body, relative to the cervical spine and skull:



Here is a short pictorial representation of the main parts of a kyphoplasty procedure:

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Spanish phrase o'the day: Amas de Casa Desesperadas (Desperate Housewives)

I have only the energy to post this quote, which Elizabeth so fortuitously sent me. It's sort of a snapshot summary of all my feelings about the nature of reality, and the constant and on-going thought process I have regarding the seeming reality that "truth is stranger than fiction." Here's the quote.

"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the
laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to
chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences...but it is
right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life."
(Milan Kundera, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

One Night In Bangkok

THOSE IN LOUISVILLE:

Birth the Play at Actor's Theatre: Friday, June 2 and Saturday, June 3 at 8pm. tickets $15; $12 for students & seniors. (502) 584-1205 for more info.

4th annual "Birth in the Bluegrass" Childbirth Conference June 3 at Executive Inn West in Louisville KY, 10am - 2pm. This year's theme: "Achieving Balance in Childbirth." see link to Birth Care Network on the right side of this blog for more info. www.birthcarenetwork.com

PLEASE BE THERE! You are supporting choice in childbirth for birthing families!!!!!

Right. Sorry about the week gap in writing here, but I've been horribly productive doing other things. It's quite brilliant, actually. Although I've been pretty bitchy much of the week (either due to PMS, echoes of Mother's Day, or my husband's stress level, what with the end of the school year upon us and all), I have gotten lots done, for myself and for my satellite interests. For example, I've done loads of things to get ready for the Birth in the Bluegrass Conference week after next!!! I'm in charge of the Silent Auction, and have been colelcting plenty of lovely items and services to auction. I've also made calls to prospective vendors and have tied up other Birth Care Network loose ends. I even got myself a lovely massage on Wednesday and lunched with Andrew the Lovely Medievalist. We had a civilized chat over salads and soups about some viking named Something-wulf cleaving people in two. Quite civilized, I assure you. Especially the cleaving.

And my beautiful Elizabeth moves! She migrates north for the summer, and then back to MASS. Interestingly and by coincidence (as usual), this morning I was talking to one of my many bosses at the Honors House (Tony), who purports that all people from Boston are mean. I disagreed with him, saying that my experience in Boston had been quite lovely--especially the North Quarter--and he replied by saying, "they don't call them MASSholes for nothing." I thought that was pretty funny, although I disagreed, obviously. tee hee.

In other news, I've begun my summer job at school. I'm in training this week so that we can begin advising freshmen during orientation next week! Exciting times! My kids end school this week as well, and my sister's in town visiting, too! All kinds of things happening, and yet I'm a bit melancholy to be out of my routine of visiting friends from school. They've scattered to the four winds for summertime, understandably. And I've got plenty on the docket, what with the play and the conference and working and the end of school etc., but I still miss seeing my "peeps" (which I must always say with a bit of irony...).

PS. The title refers to the song I've been listening to incessantly for the past week. It's from a Tim Rice musical called "Chess."