Now Playing: Laura and Stephen on the piano, "Prometheus" overture by Beethoven. (And me sitting on the sofa, miming furiously. Sandy is sitting on a chair with her chin on her paws, pretending not to be terrified. The piece changed key, randomly--just for fun, of course.)

Rachel was up before me this morning, as usual. Now I know how Emmaline must have felt, except that Rachel doesn't usually throw a pillow at me and then slam the door. Rachel was just leaving to help out at a debate tournament on campus as I was coming staggering out of our room.

I dressed and ate breakfast and worked on my ENGL 4973 preliminary bibliography. The difficulty is that the project is still so nebulous that I can't really judge what to add to the bibliography and what not to add. So I sifted through a stack of tomes of Beowulf. The morning was grey and tired. After I washed my dishes, I hauled my backpack, wee suitcase, and dirty clothes hamper down to the Tank, loaded up, and drove to Stillwater.

The drive was interesting. It poured rain on the interstate. Samuel Morrison, Matthew Curry, and Simon Curry could have thrown water-containing objects at my car to their heart's desire, and I wouldn't have noticed at all. I listened to one of my father's Sabbath school lessons on Leviticus, the first of a two-part series on the Sabbath day, the seven-year Sabbath, and the year of Jubilee.

In Stillwater, the rain had become a modest downpour. At my house, everything was green and dripping. My father was the only one home, with the cats to keep him company. Laura and Stephen were out helping their robotics team sell concessions at the OSU football game, and my mother was grocery shopping.

So I sat and chatted with my father for a little while. He asked if Logan was coming with me to Edmond to visit Phil Alcorn, who's over from Northern Ireland visiting a friend at Oklahoma Christian University. I accordingly got on Skype and invited Logan to come along. I went over to his house and picked him up at a quarter past eleven or so, and we set off on the drive to Edmond, on the north side of Oklahoma City.

Edmond is the "fancy shmancy" part of OKC, huge gated communities scattered among thick woods and big broad boulevards through newly-built shopping areas. We met Phil at Starbucks near OCU. It was brilliant to see him again.

None of us had eaten lunch, so we drove round for ages looking for somewhere to eat. We ended up at a Quizno's (funnily enough, as Phil pointed out, because there's a Quizno's in Botanic--and he had thought the same thing about that Quizno's as I had originally thought about the one in Stillwater, that it was just a wee local shop--both of us have since been disillusioned). For most of the afternoon, a straight steady rain fell, so we ended up sitting in the restaurant for three or four hours, talking about everything--Renwick, small group weekend, films, music, jobs, tornadoes and hurricanes, the States, politics....

After awhile, we drove back to the OCU campus. It was raining again, steadily, and I was chilled to the bone. The campus is fairly new. Sturdy brick buildings, plantings of marigolds and ornamental pear trees and crepe myrtle bushes. We ended up sitting under a huge awning, a giant pavillion covering a concrete platform with picnic tables on it. We just chatted there for awhile, laughing.

At about five o'clock we left Phil off at Starbucks again so that he could buy a chai vanilla latte. Said good-bye in the rain. "It was good to hear a Northern Irish accent again! Keep well! Cheerio!" he said.

Logan and I drove back to Stillwater. We were back in Stillwater in time for tea, and though my family had already sat down to eat, we joined them for the meal and the usual "Three Stooges" episode afterward. Outside, the sun was setting through a rift in the clouds and made a rainbow, the first one I've seen here, very faintly, across the eastern sky.

I drove Logan back to his house at eight o'clock or so. We said good-night. I drove back to the house, listening to the end of my father's sermon, watching the livid light fade in the west. My father was reading Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis to my mother and Stephen in the living room. Laura bounced downstairs and brought out the guinea pig and fed it carrots. We had family worship. Philip rang, and Laura, my parents, and I took turns talking to him. Now my mother and I are sitting in the living room, having a drawn-out and difficult discussion about the future.

Crickets chirp outside, and the ceiling fan whirls overhead.

Next question: Do I go to sleep now, or stay up revising for another hour?

(N.B., just for you, Rosemary, since you said you wanted a glossary for all my big words:
"Preliminary" means "the first one, usually a bad copy".
A "bibliography" is something you put at the end of a whopping long paper to tell all the people who have nothing better to do what books you read.
"Fancy shmancy" means posh.
"Lunch" is the meal before tea in the middle of the day, skipped if you have a) been driving for a long time or b) haven't had time between lectures.
And, one last definition for you. "Rain" is the cold, wet stuff that falls out of the sky, usually only in Northern Ireland, and that tends to flood motorways and things, and has come over here just to make Phil feel at home.)