Category: Everyday

Irritable today… after spending too much money on things I don't really want, while feeling pushed from one thing to another – £750 for the privilege of staying in the UK, £440 for new glasses with frames I don't quite like. Phone calls to government agencies and chain stores, lots of voicemail and people apologizing…

The first day with a forecast of 70°, and with the east window thermometer showing 75° (my neighborhood is always warmer than the forecast – I think the weather station must be near the river – though, unhappily, the coming week will drop back down to 59° or so): I laid on a lawn chair…

Five or six days of feeling better. No longer so weak or ill… and it’s spring outside. But not writing. Nor really working, in any way, not even going through old papers to throw them out. Some fragmentary gestures towards completing things. Perhaps if I at least finished writing about my hospital stay: not important,…

It is very late, or very early, depending on your preference – just after six a.m. Sleep is for some reason impossible, I don’t know why. The other day an IKEA catalogue came in the mail, with ‘SPRING’ on the cover. I laughed, hollowly – all right, I didn’t do that, I don’t engage in…

The winter solstice at 6 am today, on the 22nd; a full moon coming (early afternoon on the 24th); a light snow. Though it will be a quiet Christmas, it won’t be I think I bleak one. The house is clean and warm, with plenty of food, even a small panettone; and although my Christmas…

A week of quiet – mostly: Reading Week, the week when we don’t teach classes. I have gotten many small things done, and worked a bit on larger ones. I’ve retrieved a certain calm from the time out – inevitably I’m a bit dismayed to go back to classes and meetings, and especially a research…

The weather has been doing very October-ish things the past few days – windy nights, rainy sidewalks covered with leaves, that kind of thing. This morning there was a bright sunny wash over everything, which was nevertheless golden – exactly like the proper light for late afternoon, but at ten in the morning; it was…

Having wakened with griping gastrointestinals (as has happened most days over the past weeks), and nothing I absolutely had to do at the office (I missed an academic presentation by Spurious – but he’ll forgive me, it’s not as though he won’t have an audience), I spent the day lying around in a work-free environment.…

Patrick has invented a new insult for our age: “He has to pay people to read his blog.” He thinks we need a word for that kind of person, too – blogstitution? no, that’s not it. Perhaps this is in line with Anne’s complaint earlier this evening that her students were unpleasantly startled that she…

A truly beautiful day, a glorious day. There have been many fine days this summer – no question about it, the hottest year in history has given us the summer weather that seems proper to me, a real summer in the seventies Fahrenheit, with sun and breezes and all. I am unfortunately so mechanistic (really:…