Everything else I did this weekend, just 'cause I'm feeling chatty
Having already written my "sci-fi television this weekend" post, I can now fill in the various ways I managed to fill the rest of my time this weekend, so as not to actually have to work on my dissertation until today.
I have to confess that I completely blew off Saturday morning and the early part of the afternoon by re-reading a couple of Georgette Heyer novels that I impulsively dug out of my collection earlier in the week (I'd started with THE TOLL GATE and THE QUIET GENTLEMAN early in the week, both of which were much better than I'd remembered, and then finished THE UNKNOWN AJAX and THE RELUCTANT WIDOW on Saturday, being two more of the relatively few Heyer novels I hadn't liked well enough as a teenager to re-read, and so they were actually a pleasant surprise to read now, some 25 years later -- even apart from the thrill of finding echoes of the dynamic between young Miles Vorkosigan and his grandfather Piotr between the pages of THE UNKNOWN AJAX, yet another reminder of Lois McMaster Bujold's fondness for Heyer).
I had to hustle a bit on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, then, in order to get my sermon into good shape for preaching to a slightly-larger-than-usual congregation (and since it was the church near my apartment where I normally worship when I don't have a preaching job on Sunday, I REALLY didn't want to mess it up and have to feel embarrassed when next I attend church there). A couple of the people afterwards told me I'd preached a "kick-butt" sermon and entreated me to come back and do it again as soon as possible, so I guess it went pretty well, in spite of my deliberate laziness the day before.
Then, Sunday afternoon, I'd promised to make a dessert for the annual Fall gathering of religion students and faculty from the university at which I adjunct teach, which was being held outside, in the picnic shelter of a park just a few blocks from my apartment. Every other year before this the Fall fellowship meal was held in the home of the Dean of the School of Religion, but since the new Dean's house is much further away than the previous Dean's, and since the gathering's been getting bigger and bigger each year, they decided to try it as a picnic this year, hoping more people would come and bring their whole families.
It wasn't entirely successful, since a lot of students apparently left their studying and paper-writing until Sunday afternoon (hardly a shock, to those of us who remember our own undergraduate days, or who still do that today), and so didn't feel they could spare the time to come. Previously, the gathering had been held on a Friday evening, usually, when you can kid yourself that you have the whole weekend ahead in which to study, and so why not relax a little? But Sunday afternoon is a whole different matter, homework-wise.
Also, the invitation said that the gathering was from 3 PM to 6:51 PM (a half hour after sunset, by which time it would be too dark to throw a frisbee), but though the actual supper food was delivered from the barbecue place at 3:30 PM (faculty were asked, as usual, to provide home-made desserts, but the barbecued beef and pork, bread, potato salad, coleslaw, chips, and beverages were delivered from a local barbecue chain restaurant) and immediately set out, we didn't start eating until nearly 5 PM. While a few of the students were happily engaged in throwing a frisbee around during all that time, and the small children enjoyed the playground equipment, most of us just sat around in the picnic shelter, making conversation with (in my case) near-total strangers and casting occasional glances at the food table, wondering when we were supposed to eat. As you may guess from my obsessive account of the delay, I had skipped lunch entirely in order to be able to eat in the middle of the afternoon, and so found the wait particularly unwelcome.
I made an apple-cranberry crisp, for my contribution (since apples were on sale last week, and I had several bags of cranberries in the freezer from last November), and since I had enough experience of church picnics to bring my own serving spoon with me, my dessert turned out to be the most "user-friendly" of the lot (not a two-handed job, like peeling the lid off a container of brownies or trying to dish up a serving of pie using nothing but a plastic fork!). That meant that, in spite of the small turn-out, I only had to take home about a fourth of the dessert I'd brought, once the bugs finally got a bit much for me and sent me packing at nearly 6 PM, while too many other people's pies and cookies went largely untouched. That reconciled me, somewhat, to the whole experience, since finding the time to bake between church and the picnic had been a struggle, and to go through all of that stress and twiddling my thumbs in the picnic shelter and THEN have to suffer the ignominy of nobody wanting to eat my dessert, on top of everything else, would have been just too much!
I apparently did such a thorough job at the publishing house last week, that they hadn't yet accumulated any more work for me to do this week, so I was able to spend all day today working at home, getting things organized and prepared for my class tonight, and working on the latest revisions to my dissertation stuff. Lucky for me that they didn't need me to work today, or I'd have been sorely pressed to come up with any kind of an orderly, accessible introduction to the gospel of Matthew tonight.
Tomorrow, I work all day on my dissertation . . . or wash dishes. Or maybe both. We'll see.
I have to confess that I completely blew off Saturday morning and the early part of the afternoon by re-reading a couple of Georgette Heyer novels that I impulsively dug out of my collection earlier in the week (I'd started with THE TOLL GATE and THE QUIET GENTLEMAN early in the week, both of which were much better than I'd remembered, and then finished THE UNKNOWN AJAX and THE RELUCTANT WIDOW on Saturday, being two more of the relatively few Heyer novels I hadn't liked well enough as a teenager to re-read, and so they were actually a pleasant surprise to read now, some 25 years later -- even apart from the thrill of finding echoes of the dynamic between young Miles Vorkosigan and his grandfather Piotr between the pages of THE UNKNOWN AJAX, yet another reminder of Lois McMaster Bujold's fondness for Heyer).
I had to hustle a bit on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, then, in order to get my sermon into good shape for preaching to a slightly-larger-than-usual congregation (and since it was the church near my apartment where I normally worship when I don't have a preaching job on Sunday, I REALLY didn't want to mess it up and have to feel embarrassed when next I attend church there). A couple of the people afterwards told me I'd preached a "kick-butt" sermon and entreated me to come back and do it again as soon as possible, so I guess it went pretty well, in spite of my deliberate laziness the day before.
Then, Sunday afternoon, I'd promised to make a dessert for the annual Fall gathering of religion students and faculty from the university at which I adjunct teach, which was being held outside, in the picnic shelter of a park just a few blocks from my apartment. Every other year before this the Fall fellowship meal was held in the home of the Dean of the School of Religion, but since the new Dean's house is much further away than the previous Dean's, and since the gathering's been getting bigger and bigger each year, they decided to try it as a picnic this year, hoping more people would come and bring their whole families.
It wasn't entirely successful, since a lot of students apparently left their studying and paper-writing until Sunday afternoon (hardly a shock, to those of us who remember our own undergraduate days, or who still do that today), and so didn't feel they could spare the time to come. Previously, the gathering had been held on a Friday evening, usually, when you can kid yourself that you have the whole weekend ahead in which to study, and so why not relax a little? But Sunday afternoon is a whole different matter, homework-wise.
Also, the invitation said that the gathering was from 3 PM to 6:51 PM (a half hour after sunset, by which time it would be too dark to throw a frisbee), but though the actual supper food was delivered from the barbecue place at 3:30 PM (faculty were asked, as usual, to provide home-made desserts, but the barbecued beef and pork, bread, potato salad, coleslaw, chips, and beverages were delivered from a local barbecue chain restaurant) and immediately set out, we didn't start eating until nearly 5 PM. While a few of the students were happily engaged in throwing a frisbee around during all that time, and the small children enjoyed the playground equipment, most of us just sat around in the picnic shelter, making conversation with (in my case) near-total strangers and casting occasional glances at the food table, wondering when we were supposed to eat. As you may guess from my obsessive account of the delay, I had skipped lunch entirely in order to be able to eat in the middle of the afternoon, and so found the wait particularly unwelcome.
I made an apple-cranberry crisp, for my contribution (since apples were on sale last week, and I had several bags of cranberries in the freezer from last November), and since I had enough experience of church picnics to bring my own serving spoon with me, my dessert turned out to be the most "user-friendly" of the lot (not a two-handed job, like peeling the lid off a container of brownies or trying to dish up a serving of pie using nothing but a plastic fork!). That meant that, in spite of the small turn-out, I only had to take home about a fourth of the dessert I'd brought, once the bugs finally got a bit much for me and sent me packing at nearly 6 PM, while too many other people's pies and cookies went largely untouched. That reconciled me, somewhat, to the whole experience, since finding the time to bake between church and the picnic had been a struggle, and to go through all of that stress and twiddling my thumbs in the picnic shelter and THEN have to suffer the ignominy of nobody wanting to eat my dessert, on top of everything else, would have been just too much!
I apparently did such a thorough job at the publishing house last week, that they hadn't yet accumulated any more work for me to do this week, so I was able to spend all day today working at home, getting things organized and prepared for my class tonight, and working on the latest revisions to my dissertation stuff. Lucky for me that they didn't need me to work today, or I'd have been sorely pressed to come up with any kind of an orderly, accessible introduction to the gospel of Matthew tonight.
Tomorrow, I work all day on my dissertation . . . or wash dishes. Or maybe both. We'll see.