Picture pages
What is it about spring that makes me want to do nothing but take photos? Perhaps it's the loveliness of these buds that appeared on my next door neighbor's tree, seemingly bursting into being sometime between last night and this morning. Our hawthorn tree has been slowly putting out leaves for weeks now, but the tree next door was utterly dormant until it was suddenly covered in these pink buds.
Or maybe it's the lightness of sitting around the house right now in bare feet and a linen t-shirt--finally free of all the winter layers. Or the lightness I feel knowing that tomorrow I will teach my last class of the semester. After that, I'll just have to wrap up the grading and then I'm done. Although I've been frustrated at times by the irregular schedule of this class, I've enjoyed it more than any other teaching gig I've had. I'll be glad to be done for the summer, sure, but I feel so much less end-of-semester burnout than I've ever felt before. But it will be good to be done--I've almost entirely shelved my own writing while I've been teaching, so it's time to start getting back to that.
Or maybe it's this little bit of loveliness: new leaves I spotted today on a plant I had given up for dead.
I'm still reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. Right now I'm mostly interested in the way the book traces patterns of behavior over the long stretches of people's lives, showing how the actions and decisions of twenty or thirty years ago, and the relationships formed then, still echo in the present. I'm also amazed at the way Franzen somehow manages to make this painful and uncomfortable story into something so readable. It's the closest I've come in ages to that you-can't-put-it-down feeling. Every night I read it before bed, and end up getting to sleep later than I had planned!
Remember the mirror I painted last week? Well, now I have finished painting the matching bookshelf, bringing my study one step closer to being "finished." Here's the newly-painted bookshelf:
The White Sox have been playing terribly. They got off to a very bad start last year as well, but managed to pull out of it and were in contention for most of the season, which I guess means that all is not lost yet. But I'm getting sick of these awful starts! This is not a pattern I want to see.
And that's all for now, I think.