"back from recollection's vaults"

I laughed at this from Huck Finn significantly more when I read it this semester than in high school. Hurrah for having taken a Shakespeare course!

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course,
That makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whip and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world,
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,
Is sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery -- go!

It's hopeless.

Realism and naturalism are closely related but disputed terms in American literary history, used interchangeably and also as opposites.
- the Norton Anthology of American literature, p. 569.

I'm really not sure I want to read any further.

One hundred.

I realized yesterday that I will graduate from Wheaton College 100 days from today.
Whoa.

Yesterday I celebrated with Courtney (from miles away) because we will both be going to visit Kate and Garrett in May! We'll overlap for most of our two week visits. Courtney has a count-down going of days til she leaves for Prague, and I did a little subtraction. I'm glad that I can look forward to wonderful things in the future without longing for these days to be over.

It's all about the presentation.

Julianna and Jim have this great blog which is more often than not about wonderful culinary experiences they have. Whenever I read it, I want to become a domestic goddess. So here's a bit about my own bread-making experiences. I hope you're similarly inspired.

The small group that I co-lead with Grace meets at my apartment at 7 on Monday mornings. Last semester we met at that time on Tuesdays, and one of the girls or I had some breakfast food prepared. I always made coffee.

I have a bread maker that I got from Good Will the summer before last, and I decided to experiment with the self-timer this week so that a loaf of fresh bread would be ready at 6:30 this morning. When I woke up, the apartment smelled like fresh bread, and I thought, "It worked!"

And then I opened the bread maker.
We ate omelets in the cafeteria.
This chunk of dense foodstuff was what was left after I dumped an inch or so of flour into the trashcan. Anyone want to come over for tea? I'm sure it'd be great with nutella.

Brisk

I just got back from a not-quite-a-mile walk from the house where I was dog-sitting last night to my apartment. That was after a walk of about the same distance with Becky, the dog. It's a beautiful day - clear blue sky, the sun casting shadows of tree branches across the shining snow. This is the sort of winter day I like, though I felt a bit cold. And then when I got back to my apartment I found the temperature was -6 with a windchill of -18. Oh. That's why.

Mostly Amaryllis

I got back to campus Saturday, just over a week ago, and on Wednesday I picked up my amaryllis from Grace who cared faithfully for it while I was in New Jersey. The delay was caused partially by my own forgetfulness and partially by an unfortunate stomach virus. Now that I have my plants and my health back, I feel almost ready to start the semester that began last Monday. On Friday I dug myself out from under a stack of papers and books that wanted a home, and on Saturday I caught up on [most] of the reading from last week. Hurrah for MLK day off!

I am so delighted by my amaryllis! It's hard to tell in this picture, but there are four enormous flowers that face out from each other. Half of them are fading now, but the other two still look great. These are different blooms from the ones I enjoyed at finals week. I wonder if I can make getting an amaryllis a winterly tradition. Watching this plant grow and blossom has brought me as much joy as my bean plant did freshman year. (Each one of those links is a separate post with a picture of that plant.)

Vinyl

The day I got home for Christmas break was December 16, and I made sure that we celebrated that day (Beethoven's birthday!) by listening to some of his music. The only recordings in the house that I could find were on vinyl. We were able to listen to one side of a record of Beethoven's early piano music for 2 & 4 hands before the belt of the old turntable broke. The next morning, my mother and I both spent time on the Internet researching turntable repair shops in the north Jersey area. They're all out of business for some reason, but she was able to order a replacement belt. It came a few days after we got back from Maryland, and my father repaired the turntable that evening.

Back in high school when I first got on a music history kick, I discovered the record collection and spent one snow day happily rearranging them in chronological order. I hadn't listened to them much since then so this break I particularly enjoyed rediscovering some music, and listening to some recordings new to me.

A sampling:

• Purcell's Music for the Chapel Royal - I don't remember listening to Purcell in high school, but I fell in love with his music when I took a Baroque and Classical Era music history class last semester.
• Winter's Coming Home with the Monks of Weston Priory
• Scotlands Pride: Kenneth McKellar singing such Scots classics as Ae Fond Kiss, Mist Covered Mountains of Home, Rowen Tree, and Bonnie Lass O'Ballochmyle
  
• Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols
  
• Dylan Thomas reading A Child's Christmas in Wales and five of his poems
• Joy is Like the Rain - songs by the Medical Mission Sisters
• Billy Joel - when my dad saw those records pulled out he said, "We didn't buy that!" Apparently one of my sisters was responsible.
  
• Thomas Tomkin's Musica Deo Sacra
  
• Piano Concerti by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Chopin
• Violin Concerti by Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn
• a good number of J.S. Bach cantatas and his Magnificat
  

Christmas 2010

This year we drove down to Maryland the day after Christmas, braving snow and wind, to be with the Zubas. We missed the epic blizzard of 2010 (2 feet of snow!), and there was but a dusting of snow in Maryland. Now I am in the West Orange Public Library, sitting behind the big windows that face Mount Pleasant Avenue and watching some gently falling snow. It's nice to have some fresh snow to cover up what had become grimy.

Soon after we arrived on Sunday evening we opened up Christmas presents.

This is not a posed picture of William. I captured it when

he turned my way as he opened a book from Mary.

And here is a little later, opening a gift from me. He can't manage to be quite as enthusiastic to open another gift that turned out to be a book rather than a truck.

Mary

Laurel! One of my favorite things about her is the way she waves her arms

around when she's happy. It's quite charming.

While we were in Maryland we enjoyed visits from Aunt Mary and Uncle Andy, and the Doerflers. Here's one picture I got from the Doerfler's visit.

We always make a trip to REI when we're in Maryland. It's just a couple blocks away. Here is John, astride his bicycle of choice.

And lastly in memory of Fitz, the best cat I have ever known:

Fitzie died a couple days ago at age 16. I've never known a cat more patient or affectionate. He was part Siamese and part Rag Doll cat, which meant he was very floppy and flexible. Radu used to drape him around his shoulders. I was very allergic to Fitzie, so it seemed to me that he took particular pleasure in climbing on me and purring under my chin. It's hard to turn away a cat that's so happy and comfortable. He became a little less charming on the occasions when he found his way into the bedroom late at night and claimed full possession of the pillow by running his paws through my hair and nibbling on my ear.

Some time last year.

Here are Susanna and Erin sitting together, on the same chair, I believe, in my apartment. The last night before we went home for Christmas, Sus, Erin, Sarah, Robin and I had dinner together and watched a movie. I made waffles.

I like this picture.

Regarding bobbins, mostly

I've read in a good many horse stories that you should never let a horse know that you are afraid of it. If they smell fear on you, they are likely to do all the things you were afraid of that they wouldn't have done otherwise. The same, I think, is true in your relationship with your mother's sewing machine. But I can't be sure, because I can never manage not to be afraid of it.