Now Playing: Seabird, “Rocks into Rivers”.

Walking the streets here has been an adventure. Last night I went for a long walk around the area where we live, which isn’t the most scenic but yielded a couple of oddities: an apartment complex named Stonehenge, dressed with those atrocious wooden shingles and a long, low roof that made it look like a hood rat, and the back of Bloomington Hospital, where an enormous chimney rising into the air reminded me of City Hospital by the train station in Belfast—all sorts of sinister mental images of ominous “biohazard” bags being burned, especially since the parking spot right next to it was reserved for the coroner!

This morning I parked by the RP church on First Street and walked down First Street to Ballantine Street, and so up to campus. It was a lovely walk. The neighborhoods around campus are full of old, well-cared for houses with lush gardens. Jasmine grew on a wrought iron fence; naked ladies poked out of deep green grass; riotous zinnias exploded around front porches.

Despite the classy Better Homes and Gardens appearance of the neighborhood, I did notice one strange phenomenon. Someone seems to have a penchant for throwing shoes up onto electrical lines so that they dangle by their laces—one stretch of electrical line was as thick with pairs of shoes as it would be in Oklahoma right now with migrating starlings.

The crowning pleasure of the day, aside from talking to Sarah, my mother, and Stephen on the phone, was discovering that the Lilly Library will be hosting an exhibition of its medieval manuscripts and incunabula in October! Can’t wait. To whet my appetite, today they had on display, among others, a copy of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene with annotations by J.R.R. Tolkien himself. :o)