Life

Hi again, all! Thanks for the welcomes to the blogging world. Had a little time to put in another post, since I recently turned in the teaching applications I had been working on for next school year. The applications were more complicated than past years because, in addition to the usual teaching as a course assistant and as an instructor for the writing program, I'm also applying to be a teaching assistant/program planner for University London program in the fall, and pitching my first self designed stand alone course for winter or spring. I may not get either of these fine things, of course, but even the tenuous possibilities of getting paid to teach in London or getting to teach my dream course on Renaissance Lit. and Art are exciting to think about.

Today was a beautiful lazy California day. My mum and I went down the coast to the local yarn store, which is something I love to do. There's something magical about all those walls and walls of different colors, it's like being inside the most amazing artist's palate imaginable. You get to go about exploring the different shades and textures and weights of the yarns: soft clouds of blue/grey angora, thin shiny strands of red-gold ribbon yarn, thick and substantial mahogony coloured wool, variegated silks with a luxurious price tag...and there's this great sense of potential everywhere you look as you imagine all the thousands of things you could make with this lovely stuff. My mum treated me to a beautiful new murino wool/angora blend yarn as an early birthday present. I got it in nine different colors to make a fair isle sweater, and I'm looking forward to getting my graph paper out to design the pattern.

In the afternoon I took a long walk along the beach where the surf was unusually high--some looked between 15 and 20 feet, and they were intensely dramatic, with huge glistening crests and masses of pounding choppy foam. Waves like that are compellingly beautiful, and yet deeply frightening. There were a couple of insanely talented--and also just plain insane--surfers braving them. It did look amazing when one of them got going on a wave that size, but the wipe outs looked pretty dangerous. From the vantage of the beach, though the water was magnificent, and all sorts of interesting things washed up on shore. The sand was closely set with shells like the tesserae of a mosaic, and huge piles of wood had been pushed up to the high tide line, which people had used to build an assortment of impromptu structures and sculptures. As always after a storm or high surf there were countless long shoots of bamboo everywhere. As a child I always imagined they had floated here all the way across the pacific from China. As an adult this seems more improbable to me, but not necessarily impossible, since I haven't a clue where these huge masses of bamboo come from.

So those are the highlights of my day, which was, as I said at the start, a blissfully lazy Saturday. I spent part of the evening putting together a shadow box with the bars, medals and other regalia of my grandfather's navel uniform along with a picture of him to hang next to his dress sword in the study, and I had a great meal of tacos. Not a particularly busy or productive day, but there's something deeply satisfying about a day in which there isn't any sort of drama or duty going on. There should be more celebrations of the do nothing day and its pastoral charms.

Lest people get too terribly bored with the above ramblings, I'm putting up a second post of a sonnet I did awhile back in parody of one by Wyatt. I figured it was in keeping with my Renaissance Woman theme.