Now Playing: Howard Shore, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King soundtrack, "The Grey Havens."

First of all: White rabbits.

1 February 2011. Woke up to ice on everything this morning! Ice! This isn’t Oklahoma! But there was a nice slick sheen of ice on everything. Beth and Jason picked me up at nine, as usual, and Beth and I skittered our way to class. The sidewalks on campus weren’t too bad, really. I was so sleepy in class today that I didn’t say anything. 

After class Mary and I went to lunch at Noodle Co. on Kirkwood, which was fun. Good to hang out with her again. We pinged from topic to topic, catching up on almost every part of each other’s lives. After lunch we walked to the IMU together. I checked my e-mail and discovered that G601 had been canceled for this afternoon, so I hurried downtown and caught the noon bus home. 

It was strange to be home in the middle of the day on a Tuesday, and I counted on having a long, quiet afternoon to read and practice my flute. I sat down with a cup of tea and some biscuits (proper McVittie’s biscuits, thanks to Alyson) to read, but at about half two, Lindsay came home, and Laura followed shortly thereafter, both of their offices having been shut down for the day. Not long after that, we got e-mails saying that classes had been canceled, and about an hour after that, Lisa came home—and Peter came over, of course, our “fifth housemate,” ready to be snowed in with us.

By the middle of the afternoon it had started to rain again, freezing rain mixed with ice pellets that accumulated on everything. The clouds were so low and heavy that I couldn’t see campus from my window. Rain and sleet rattled against the windows, drummed on the roof, gummed to every available surface. The pine trees across the street bent whippily, and the deciduous trees creaked and cracked in the wind. I spent the afternoon working on paper ideas for L746, in the course of which I found a fascinating article by Renee Trilling on JSTOR about Anglo-Saxon poetry. I read for L629, too, though by the time I got around to reading Middlemarch itself, I was so sleepy that I could hardly concentrate. 

Downstairs Laura had been baking blueberry muffins and listening to musical soundtracks, and when she finished cooking, Lisa made scrambled eggs with tomatoes, peppers, onions, and cheese in them for all of us for tea. Laura and I sat on the stairs like a pair of vultures, giggling, talking nonsense, humming songs (Laura humming songs, that is), and generally keeping Lisa company while she chopped up vegetables and whipped the eggs. The five of us sat down to eat at about half six and ate massive quantities of eggs and toast, and told ridiculous stories and talked about all sorts of absurd and inappropriate things (thanks to Peter, of course). 

Sitting around the table eating turned into sitting around the table drinking tea, which turned into sitting around the table waiting for a batch of brownies to bake, which turned into all of us settling down to watch Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in the living room. All very cozy, with the trees tipping and moaning outside. 

When the film finished, at about half ten, I washed all the dishes. Everyone hung out for awhile before Peter left to try to make his way home and the rest of us went to bed. Having said good-night to the girls, I’m listening to the end of the ROTK soundtrack. Sleepy, but I’ve got another half-hour before the dishwasher finishes its cycle—I can hear it loud and clear because my bedroom’s vent is right above that part of the kitchen. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow on top of the half-inch-deep layer of ice.

Now Playing: Antonin Dvorak, Serenade for Strings in E Major, "Scherzo: Vivace."

"And besides liberty in this world, there is the liberty of glory, called 'the liberty of the children of God' (Rom. 8:21): the liberty of our bodies from corruption, the glorious liberty in heaven, when we shall be perfectly free. For, alas! in this world we are free to fight, not free from fight. And we are free not from misery but from thraldom to misery. but then we shall be free from the encounter and the encumbrance. 'All tears shall be wiped from our eyes' (Rev. 7:17). We shall be free from all physical pain in sickness and infirmity, and free from all the remainders of sin in our souls. that is perfect liberty, perfect redemption, and perfect adoption, both of body and soul.

"And by the Spirit we have the beginnings of these in this world, too. For, what is peace of conscience and joy in the Holy Ghost? Is it not the beginnings of heaven, a grape of the heavenly Canaan? Is not the Spirit that we have here a pledge of that inheritance? It is an earnest payment, and an earnest is a piece of the bargain. It is never taken away, but is part of the bargain. So the beginnings of grace and comfort given by the Spirit are the beginnings of that glorious liberty. The earnest assures us of that glorious liberty. For God never goes back on the bargain that he makes with his children. Grace, in some sense, is glory, as e see in the next verse (2 Cor. 3:18), because grace is the beginning of glory. It frees the soul from terror and subjection to sin. So the life of glory is begun in grace. We have the life of glory begun by the Spirit, this glorious life."

Richard Sibbes, Glorious Freedom

Now Playing: Pandolfi Violin Sonata, Op. 3, No. 4, "La Castella."

Last night the Cleveland Orchestra performed in the IU auditorium. They played Wagner's "Tannhauser" overture, which was enough to make anyone feel like running out and proclaiming German nationalism to the world, Bartok's second piano concerto, and Strauss's "Ein Heldenleben,"  which had some really nice moments for the woodwind section, not to mention the first-chair violin.

The Bartok was surprisingly discordant, though moments in the second movement were incredible: I've never heard so much control from an orchestra before. The strings were playing pianissimo, but it wasn't a normal pianissimo--they were so quiet that you almost couldn't hear them at all, yet when you stopped to hold your breath, there was the sound, intense, pervasive, shimmering in the air like mist hanging over a lake.

So that's been the highlight of my week so far, aside from the fact that the sun actually came out yesterday, too! But then today we were back to snow flurries and a sky so grey as to be barely distinguishable from the pavement.

Now Playing: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers soundtrack, "Gollum's Song."

Highlights from this week: On Monday cooking a hodgepodge batch of curry that included among other things a very sweet white onion, a couple of dubious potatoes, frozen peas, and tomato soup instead of tomato sauce.

Having the first Bible study of the semester at our house on Wednesday night. Lisa led the study, which was on Philippians 1:18-26, and Mary and Angie came. We burned our fingers on hot popcorn and talked about how the love of Christ controls us.

Feeling as though I might be getting an infinitesimally better grasp of Middle English in class on Thursday--and spending most of Thursday afternoon reading Middlemarch, The Transformation of Virginia, and theory with other first-years in Ballantine while it snowed outside.

Going to see Punch Brothers on Friday night with Lisa, Scott, Eric, Russell, Grant, and a couple of Lisa's friends from the Spanish program. Chris Thile and his new band were playing in Terre Haute, so we had a lively hour-and-a-half of fantastic bluegrass music, complete with a meet-the-band session afterward.

Slogging through pages and pages of Feuerbach this afternoon (well, that wasn't really a highlight technically!) and then translating bits of Layamon's Brut from Middle English tonight after eating Thai food with my lovely housemates (and Peter and Emily, Laura's friend).

So thankful that tomorrow is Sunday!

Now Playing: Brahms, Symphony No. 1 in C minor, "Finale."

Yesterday Lisa and I spent the afternoon at the Hs' house. Amy left Lisa and me to play Monopoly with Anne while she ran errands for most of the afternoon. Anne was fairly subdued at first, but as the afternoon went on, she got wilder and wilder. For awhile there she was talking in about five different accents: her own, a "British" one, something that sounded Indian, something absurdly French, and even something Chinese. And when she'd grown tired of amusing herself with that, she took to making an "evil banker laugh" whenever we needed money from the bank. Between times she was a variety of animals: a frog, a dog, a cat, and maybe a pig? One couldn't ever be sure because she was giggling so hard!

About an hour-and-a-half into the game, I'd lost royally, but Grace had come home from school. She showed me maps of Britland, her personal country, and when Jane woke up from her nap, we sat on the sofa, and she "read" to me. "Reading" is a very relative word when it comes to Jane because she mostly flips through the book looking for illustrations while chirping to herself fragments of whatever conversations she happens to hear going on around her. I must confess I nearly fell asleep.

It would've been appropriate, given the weather we've been having. I rather want to turn my room into a cave and hibernate for the next four months...!

Now Playing: Indelible Grace's version of Psalm 146.

My second official day of class today! The day after our "big snow," so I woke up to a gorgeously silent, white landscape. The white vinyl siding on the townhouses across the street looks cream against the stark whiteness of the snow, the five inches of snow, to be precise. I didn't accomplish much this morning beyond reading some of Middlemarch for L629, the "Middlemarch and Methods" class. It's going to be a good class, I think, but challenging. We spent about forty-five minutes yesterday taking turns reading the first paragraph out loud and talking about it, sentence-by-sentence. Slow reading, close reading, the thing about English literature that turns everyone off but that I love.

The other girls all had class or work earlier in the day, so I was the last to leave the house, at noon. I drove to the church, parked, and walked from the church to Goodbody Hall, which is across from Ballantine. It's a decent half-hour walk in the snow, though by now most of the sidewalks are clear. The 1st Street neighborhoods are even more beautiful in the snow, the postcard-perfect houses snuggled like happy children under their hoods. Snow on every branch, every bush, every leaf and seed-coronet of last summer's flowers still standing in gardens.

Goodbody Hall is one of the older buildings on campus, one of half-a-dozen that forms a quadrangle with Sycamore Hall, where my "Medieval Neighbors" class met last term. All these buildings are difficult to navigate, thanks to a mind-boggling system of narrow hallways and crazy stairwells. Gothic on the outside, Escher-like within. Our classroom is tiny, an apology for a classroom, really.

This is my first seminar class: all 700-level classes carry a 25-page paper assignment at the end (the idea is that it's practice for writing journal articles). Imposing? Indeed. I'm not sure why I'm in the class since it's about book history in America since 1800, both fields I've completely forsworn! There's an MFA student in the class, though, and she and I are the only two odd ducks in a group of mostly Victorianists. To sum up, it may be an interesting class, and it almost certainly will eat my lunch.

After class, walked back to my car. It just so happened that as I was coming up to the church, Bob and Carmen were there, too, collecting some of Bob's tools. Carmen and I stood outside and chatted pleasantly while Bob shoveled snow from the steps. It was the first chance I'd had to talk to her properly since I've been back, and it was very good to get to see them both again.

At home, I noticed as I pulled off my boots in the entryway that Peter and Lindsay were back, as evidenced by the other sets of shoes on the tile. I went up the stairs. There weren't any lights on, and the house was dim. I paused on the landing to say hello--they were both in Lindsay's room, getting ready to watch Lost--but as soon as I appeared in her bedroom doorway, Lindsay freaked out and started to scream. Peter nearly fell off the bed with surprise:

          "Why are you screaming?!"
           Scream,
                    "Because--E-- is--here!"
           scream.

It all dissolved into fits of laughter.

I read for L629 for awhile.When Lisa came home, she, Laura, and I ate together: broccoli-artichoke-chicken casserole. Delicious. After awhile Lisa and I went upstairs to work. Lindsay and Peter came back at about half ten, which coincided conveniently with me finishing the article I was working on. Lindsay, Laura, Peter, and I sat out on the landing; Lisa eventually oozed out of her room and collapsed, exhausted, on the floor. The five of us sat around for awhile, laughing, telling ridiculous stories.

Now Playing: Andrew Peterson, "In the Night My Hope Lives On."

It was a great delight this afternoon to see Bob and Carmen married in the church in Bloomington. Pastor H officiated and did an excellent job, of course, focused on God's glory in marriage, with some humour thrown in for good measure. 

It's good to be back in Bloomington in some ways. Apparently the arctic cold front that's scheduled to overtake Oklahoma this weekend has already done its work here because Lisa and I drove back from the airport through thick flurries last night. This morning only about an inch-and-a-half had accumulated, and the sun came out, so the roads aren't bad. I've spent most of the day indoors, unpacking and cleaning. Laura made blueberry pancakes for the three of us for breakfast, which was delicious.

I do miss everyone in Stillwater, though. The time just wasn't long enough this break, it seemed, and my room here feels very big compared to the little brightly-colored corner of the house in Stillwater. I don't know what it is about travel and being in a different place, but it's so much easier to be completely conquered by fear all over again. Though I may think I rediscover bad habits in Oklahoma, there are plenty of bad habits here that seeped insidiously into my mindset the moment I recrossed the threshold.

This morning during my quiet time, I read Genesis 20-22: Abraham's repeat of his lie about Sarah being his sister because of his fear of being in a new place, and Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac at God's request. Both those chapters beautifully illustrated to me that despite my habitual fears, God will be faithful to me and will provide Himself--He Himself, walking in perfect obedience, has covered those fears with perfect love.

Pastor H read John 17 as the text at Bob and Carmen's wedding, and I was struck again by Christ's prayer that the love the Father has for the Son would be in us, as He Himself is in us. The richness of that promise alone--for Christ as intercessor is granted all His requests by the Father--should be enough to answer my fears. Praying that He will make that more real to me in the days ahead as the semester begins.

Now Playing: Vivaldi, Concerto for Violin in G Major, Op. 6, No. 1.

The second week of Christmas break was exciting at the beginning. We had all the Texas cousins here for a few days, with the fun that inevitably ensues: hikes around the lake for the girls, delicious desserts, football games outside for the boys, a visit to the used bookstore, etc.

On Thursday the cousins left, and I went to Enid with the Fs to help the Bs move. We left at eight in the morning in the big white van, and I got to sit in the front seat and talk to Mr F, which was really encouraging. I've been floundering over the last semester and over break as to whether life in academia is worthwhile for a believer, but he reminded me that the intelligentsia can be among the most difficult people to reach for Christ, reminded me of the value of bringing order and beauty to the world under Christ.

Friday was hard. My grandmother, who had been moved back to Stillwater after significant improvement, went to the emergency room in the middle of the morning, unresponsive. I drove my mother there and waited for a nasty half-hour in the lobby until my father arrived, at which point he and I joined my mother in the ward. Philip, Laura, and Stephen drove over soon after. It seemed as though it took a very long time, but it really wasn't very long at all, really was peaceful, at least for her, I think. For us--not so much.

Then that evening the CY retreat started here in Stillwater. I'd promised to be a chaperon, someone over twenty-one to meet the YMCA's regulations since we were using their building to host the fifty-odd young people who had driven down from Kansas and Colorado. I spent most of the weekend there, barring Saturday afternoon when Missy stopped by for a visit. It was good to hear Pastor R's talks about justification and to spend some quality time with the highschool girls from our church, to reconnect with them.

Today has been a whirlwind of conversations with Mrs P, Anna, and Stephanie, which has been refreshing. In some ways I'd much rather listen to other people's troubles and apply the Gospel to them instead of to myself (lazy!), but these friends go beyond that: in each case we can both talk about what's going on and then apply the Gospel to each other. Thankful for them.

Photos on Facebook here.

Now Playing: The Boston Celtics vs. the Orlando Magic on Philip's laptop.

Philip and I are sitting companionably in his room right now. Sitting, I say, though it's more like perching, above a sea of open suitcase, shoes, clothes, photo frames, iPod, books, backpack, and other random wanted/unwanted pieces of junk. He's busy making a Calvin and Hobbes stencil with an exacto knife, the same knife that gave him the gash on his finger last week--which will hopefully become a scar with a good story, according to him.

Christmas day so far has been fairly pleasant. Laura and I both got up "early" this morning to make breakfast for everyone. She made crepes (vanilla-flavored with orange sauce), while I fried bacon and scrambled eggs. The eggs were actually all yolk, the remnants from yesterday's angel food cake baking experiment. The recipe Laura wanted to use for said cake required sixteen egg whites; hence the very heavy eggs that accompanied our Christmas breakfast.

After breakfast, after my dad had scrubbed the disgusting bacon-and-egg frying pan (courageous man!), we opened presents, just the six of us. My dad's exclamations at our generosity are always gratifying. Somehow opening Christmas presents is so much more fun than opening birthday presents: you don't feel as though you're on the spot, and everyone is enjoying the process together.

As usual, my dad received loads of chocolate. We always have to get creative with my mother's presents since she can't eat chocolate, but Philip solved the problem this year with tea and biscuits. There was the usual round of books (cookbooks), checks for buying new clothes, socks, CDs (for Stephen, the soundtrack guru), etc. Laura wound up with an adorable pair of rain boots, printed with raindrops--"pre-wetted," as my dad and Philip pointed out, like the jeans that are already ripped.

When the detritus of wrapping paper and ribbon had been cleared away, Philip, my mother, and I made sack lunches and drove down to OKC to visit my grandmother in the hospital. The day was overcast, another one of these winter days that looks as though it's come out of the dark end of my mother's box of old pastels--grainy, crumbling at the edges, smudged with snow flurries.

The three of us spent the day in the City until midafternoon. My grandmother was asleep at first, so Philip and I found a quiet corner, where we sat and talked about books and phoned Alyson to say hello. But at about lunchtime, she wanted us to come in, so we did. She's better today, talking more. We ate our lunches in her room while my mother fed her slices of grapefruit. We talked to her when she felt up to it or held her hand while she dozed. 

At about half two we drove home. I'm very sleepy, or was while I was trying to do my quiet time. Laura has probably already started to work on Christmas dinner downstairs.

After the whirlwind of the past few days, today and yesterday have been wonderfully quiet, giving us the chance to do the usual Christmas activities. Yesterday morning, Laura, Stephen, and I decorated the house for Christmas: not very much, but something, at least, to make it more festive. Stephen helped me hang the evergreens over the doorway into the dining room and then handed up ornaments for me to hang on the bristling plastic branches. Ornaments made faithfully for us every year by Grandma, cross-stitched or needlepointed, including the silver angel with her long, slender trumpet that always goes in the middle of the doorway.

This morning Laura and I baked gingerbread, a process that involved a lot more faffing about than was strictly necessary. We always use the Joy of Cooking recipe, but for some reason Laura has never realized that the recipe calls for (what according to her is) a gross amount of flour. That led to a lot of silliness. In the end we got the batter made and the cookies cut out, baked, cooled, and iced, all while listening to The Nutcracker. Now the house smells like cloves, cinnamon, and ginger.

And tonight: Christmas ball in Ponca City! 

Now Playing: Still Foyle's War.

I apologize for leaving this thing to suffer along by itself for so long. Since Thanksgiving, I've been writing furiously: a chapbook for the creative writing (poetry) class, a couple of short introductions and a syllabus for digital humanities, a fifteen page research paper for medieval literature, and a portfolio of poetry and a personal statement for the MFA application.

Once it was all safely turned in on Tuesday, though, I finally surfaced for air. It snowed in Bloomington last weekend, a nice four inches or so. I went downtown on Tuesday to do some Christmas shopping and then walked back to our house in the snow, enjoying the luxury of that rich crunch and slip of crisp new snow underfoot.

On Thursday Russell drove me to the airport in Indy. It took an hour-and-a-half to get there on slushy roads, and thus began the day's travel adventure. I got to Atlanta with a quarter of an hour to run to my connecting flight to Tulsa, only to discover when I reached the gate that the flight had been delayed for an hour... and then another hour... and then another.... At about a quarter to six they canceled the flight for real and put all of us on a quarter to nine flight that night. But at least I wasn't spending the night in Atlanta!

Laura got in last night, too, and we spent the night with Philip. My dad came to take us back to Stillwater today. My mother is down in the City with Grammy, who's very ill. At lunch Laura, Stephen, and I decided to clean the whole house. Stephen had already done most of the upstairs, which left the downstairs to be dusted and vacuumed, the bathrooms cleaned, the laundry done, the sheets changed on beds, etc.

Finished with our work, we're now having a laptop party in the living room while we watch Foyle. No knowing when either one of the parents will be home. The day outside is bleak, drab, dark, overcast.

Now Playing: Foyle's War.

Yesterday while I was sitting in the airport for seven hours thanks to a canceled flight to Oklahoma, I read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. It's a bleak futuristic novel set in a post-nuclear apocalypse North America. I generally don't read science fiction like this, but Dr. S recommended it when I was working on my senior project, so finally thought I'd give it a go.

The book is quite well-written as far as science fiction goes. It takes place in three sections, separated by time, over the course of which the human race repeats is nuclear mistake and blows itself up again. On the whole the book is quite grim. Humans carry not only their individual sins but the sins of the whole human race; the human race is doomed to repeat its futile search for perfection, becoming more and more jaded with the results of the pursuit of wealth and power until it destroys itself and starts over again.

Despite this pessimism, the book has a strong but very complicated thread of Christian theology. Its main characters are monks, dedicated to the preservation of human culture and learning through fallouts, wars, and plagues. Because of that, there's a lot of Latin in the book, and some of the story's most beautiful moments center on Christian imagery of crucifixion and redemption. At one point, the author makes the statement that humans can never be divine: we may have infinite power and wisdom, but we can never have infinite love, the third quality that makes God who He is (thankfully!).

Yet it's hard to know exactly what the author's position is toward Christianity. Does Christianity offer valid hope for a world full of human monsters? Or is it merely foolish idealism in the face of humanity's proven tendency toward evil? What's the use of hope if we're just going to blow ourselves up again anyway? Is the human race worth saving? The story doesn't provide easy answers to any of these questions, and on the whole I was left thoughtful but depressed.

Now Playing: Not much.

Just back from the Indiana University Ballet's production of The Nutcracker, and I must say that it brought the sort of incandescent happiness that is both sheer delight and almost pain. Very simply, the choreography and music were a reminder that there is peace, order, stability, unity beyond the brokenness I see and experience. Perhaps it's overly pessimistic, but at one point I felt a surge of amazement that the dancers weren't knifing each other on stage--or tripping and falling every other beat. That the audience could sit and watch the production as a unified group without any terrible mishaps or outbursts. That the orchestra could produce those incredible, heart-wrenching crescendos without flaw. I know that there's such a thing as "common grace," but it seems to me tonight that that's the wrong word for it. We take it for granted and assume that God will hold under control all of our evilness, when really it's so amazing that there should be any rhythm to the world after the Fall.

And it gets better! One of the dancers didn't quite pull off a landing; a brass player over-blew a note; and I was sitting up in the balcony, watching, not participating actively--but Heaven is coming to earth. Heaven is coming to earth, and when it does, the peace that is only foreshadowed here on earth will flow effortlessly, effervescently from us as we participate actively, flawlessly, in it. It's truly incredible that God would permit us to participate in His glory, but He will there. I love C.S. Lewis's essay "The Weight of Glory," particularly where he talks about how we will perhaps be enabled to enter into nature in some deeper, fuller way, to join its beauty and power as we long to do but cannot do on earth.

Earlier this week I read the end of Ezekiel, where the description of the new Jerusalem is given. On either side of the river flowing from the temple "will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing." As the fruit in Eden was our poison, so the fruit in Heaven will be our feast; as the leaves in Eden were our pitiful attempts to hide our rebellion, so the leaves in Eden will heal us of our brokenness once for all.

It's snowing!

White rabbit!

Now Playing: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers soundtrack by Howard Shore.

Instead of working on my paper for L613, I've been reading people's blogs. It would appear that everyone else has had time to blog around Thanksgiving, too, which is actually pretty amazing, though reading about the things that TU people are doing makes me miss them more! Quelling criminal behavior, buying new doors, and raising one-year-old daughters--fun stuff.

Philip, Stephen, and I are sitting together in the living room right now. All three of us are on our laptops. I've put my portfolio for W513 and syllabus for L501 in good shape, I think, for their due dates. The L501 syllabus is due next Thursday, and though it probably still has plenty of problems, it's at least more organized than it was before. The portfolio needs to be printed off and bound as a chapbook, but I can't do that until the last poem has been workshopped...

... which leaves that L613 paper. Ugh. I've come to dread the process of writing that paper more and more, the end result being that it's going to be harder to write than it really should be. I'm almost at the point at which I can sit down and work out a proper thesis statement and outline, but I forgot to look at one of my resources before I left Bloomington, so that will have to be done on Tuesday. And then it's paper-writing hibernation for me for the next two weeks!

Now Playing: Laura practicing Mozart on the piano.

In honor of the fact that Pastor D is in the hospital in Belfast right now, I'm remembering today three years ago. It was my twenty-first birthday, the first birthday I'd ever spent away from home, and I was worshiping at Trinity RP with Claire W. That was one of the few Sabbath days that Pastor D preached at Trinity while I was in Northern Ireland--this preacher who Pastor H in Bloomington called "one of the greatest preachers in the English language alive today." 

That day at Trinity three years ago, the children's address was about birthdays. Pastor D started off asking the children if they ever got excited about their birthdays and then, turning to the congregation, he said, "And there's someone from America with us right now whose birthday is today. She's sitting right back there...." I'll never forget the feeling of total shock that went through me--and the surprise as throughout the morning after the worship service, member after member of the church came up to me to wish me happy birthday.

Most of the time when people appreciate the church community, it's because of some tragedy that's happened, but that day I was so humbled by and thankful for the care of my family in Christ. Not trying to be fuzzy and sentimental here, but God really does bless us through His people. Yes, we're a group of sinners; nevertheless, Christ shines through.

Now Playing: Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G major, "Allegro."

Arched windows. Dark green awnings

hover over tables, coffee, cigarettes,

acids gritty as newspaper. Maple leaves, red

Hearts and Aces, clatter on the sidewalk.

A bus creaks past, large woman

with a walker, eases to a stop,

inhales half-a-dozen students, sighs,

squeals away. Across the city, chimes

punctuate morning. Echoes gossip. Wall

grey as a wool coat reveals windows

reflecting sky like skin, reflecting tree’s

yellow leaves reverberating under sunshine.

Yellow leaves reverberating under

this this this this this this this

light cavorting, trampling, waltzing, flaying

chloroplasts feather-thin. Pigments explode

as beaten tree unfurls choropleth

topography of summer, ridged, dusty.

Light pummels leaves, leaves flock,

annual loneliness twittering slip jig

in nine-eight time, flutter, sneeze.

This flock alighted under Cygnus. Scared

by Orion, it whirls in concentrics, contour

map across skies winging into severity.  

Now Playing: Lots and none at all.

I've been working all day.... Medieval literature for about four hours, digital humanities for about two-and-a-half hours, and poetry soon. The day has been overcast, but now the sun is setting and making the trees ruddy as copper against a grey sky.

The last few weeks have been rough, admittedly. There have definitely been nights when I've been lying awake, sleepless, trying to pin my mind down for long enough to sing through the Psalms as a way to fall asleep.

On the other hand, it's been really wonderful to watch friendships develop here. This past Friday evening I went to the IU Opera's production of Die Fledermaus with Russell and Mary. I've been spending Friday afternoons at the Hs' house, helping Anne with her reading and playing endless games of Clue and Settlers of Catan with her. Nothing like a giggling seven-year-old to lighten the mood!

Inside a house inside a small green square inside

great black seas inside these longitudes,

a slim gold watch on a bench, ticking.

You’re going through the rooms writing

lists of things to do, hoovering, scrubbing, cooking

potatoes for Daddy when he comes home

wondering when it ends, wondering when

she’ll knead the dough again, wondering

how to scrub the stove-soot she would scrub,

wondering when the plants are watered,

how to mend his shirts, wondering if she’ll step

through her scrawl. I’m sitting here inside

winter woods inside brown valleys inside

evening, wondering when the turn

from indigo to morning white

will come, wondering when these gilt

skeletons against the sky will leaf again.

Now Playing: Tenth Avenue North, "You Are More."

I've been listening to a lot of these guys this week. A lot of them and Bach, which seems like a very odd combination, but I love the complexity of Bach and crave the encouragement of TAN, so let juxtaposition thrive!

Highlights of this week: Looking at the 1550 edition of Piers Plowman in the Lilly yesterday. Visiting the homes of two of my professors. Getting to know my friend Mary, a first-year in English and a Victorianist, much better. Encoding the book I'm working on for Digital Humanities while watching part of The Two Towers extended edition with Laura and Lisa. Sitting out a tornado warning in Starbucks with Mary and Beth on Tuesday morning.

Tonight we turned the heat on for the first time. Today felt like December: flat clouds, strong north wind, bitterly cold after weeks of moderate temperatures and constant sunshine. I'm shivering uncontrollably, even sitting here in the house! Not a good sign for the winter ahead.

Click on this image to enlarge.

I came across this today in the process of working on my L501 project. It's the first page of the Old English poem Genesis from a manuscript in the Oxford University library (Bodleian, to be precise, Junius 11). It's illustrated, not just with fantastic stylized images like the one on this page but with full-scale images to accompany the Biblical stories.

These images are incredible--think cartoon-like sequences of finely-drawn figures narrating events such as the episode with Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah. The pictures have a quality all their own, quite unlike the typical stylized bird-and-beast interlace in other Anglo-Saxon art. We looked at the image for the Abraham and Isaac story in my Bible in English Literature course at Queen's, where we picked apart the symbolism (for instance, Abraham carries a sword, which is right at the centre of the picture, foreshadowing the cross).

I just find this so incredible. It's easy to stereotype the Anglo-Saxons as superstitions medievals, ignorant about basic Christianity. Certainly their attitude toward Scripture was pre-Reformation (by several centuries!), but their love of the Bible is evident, I think, in works of art like these, even if I don't necessarily agree with the use to which these images were put or the theology behind them. 

Now Playing: Pride and Prejudice soundtrack.

Elizabeth and Laura left this morning. We had a delightful time together this week, which included

• Walking to the Farmers' Market on Saturday morning, eating honey sticks, and buying the most delicious red bell pepper ever from an Amish woman
• Visiting Caveat Emptor, the used bookstore downtown, where I bought a version of Pound's Cantos
• Walking again in the afternoon down the Rails-to-Trails path, ceilinged and carpeted with yellow leaves
• Coming downstairs Sabbath morning to find Lisa making French toast in the kitchen--flashback to Sabbath mornings at the McCollums' house!
• Spending two five-hour stretches in church, with a nap in between
• Having my hair cut Monday afternoon by Elizabeth
• Spending about an hour in the children's section in the Monroe County Public Library with Elizabeth and Laura, sitting on the floor reading Eloise and giggling uncontrollably
• Frying up some absolutely fantastic lime-cilantro chicken fajitas with Elizabeth on Monday night for Lisa, Laura, and Lindsay, complemented by Laura-my-sister's homemade tortillas
• Chilling with Laura and Elizabeth Monday night (i.e., giggling for long stretches of time about nothing in particular)

Photos are here.

Now the world is back to normal again. I had class this morning, read excerpts from Foxe's Book of Martyrs for my medieval lit class (including the fascinating accounts of Anne Askew's interrogation, where she makes the most smart-aleck-y comments ever), and tried to sort out what classes to take next term. I ate tea with Lisa and then spent a solid two hours encoding for L501, listening to Indie music from Philip. The savory smell of chocolate-pumpkin muffins wafts upstairs from the kitchen where Lindsay is baking.

Honey sticks from the Farmers' Market. Need I say more?

Photos of trees are here. The colors this autumn are gorgeous.

Text encoding for L501 while watching the extended Fellowship of the Ring with Lisa and Laura. Doesn't get much better!

Reveling in the contrast between a publisher's catalogue from the late 1800s, full of Longfellow and Benjamin Franklin, and Black Riders and mountains.

Now Playing: Howard Shore, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack, "Amon Hen."

As on most Tuesday mornings, this morning I biked over to the coffeeshop by campus to meet Mary and Beth at nine o'clock. We always meet to discuss the weekend's readings for the medieval lit class. Unlike most mornings, though, this morning I got to use my sweet North Face jacket! A thin layer of frost actually lay on the windscreens of cars and the roofs of houses as I worked my way over to campus.

Mary, Beth, and I had an intense discussion about The Sultan of Babylon today--a Middle English Charlemagne romance with lots of feasts in it, so we talked about the feasts for about two hours while we drank coffee, until it was time for class.

I'm enjoying medieval romances much more than I thought I would. Not really sure why. They're like popcorn, or a box of chocolates: you never know what's going to happen next, and weird things keep bouncing to the surface. Magical girdles, fourteen-foot giants' babies, fried snakes, trees with white flowers, and of course plenty of bloody mortal combats.

After class I biked home and spent the afternoon alone in the house. I ate lunch, read our next romance, The Siege of Milan, drank tea, and practiced my flute for an hour. Then--wonder of wonders, wonder worthy of a romance all its own!--I rang Anna, and she actually answered the phone! We've been playing phone tag for over a month now.

So I went for a long walk for an hour-and-a-half while I talked to her. Maples blazed against the late afternoon sky. I walked through a neighborhood full of young maples, many of them crimson, and then I walked down into some woods behind one of the apartment complexes, where I sat under a sweetgum tree in a clearing--in a clearing on a crunchy carpet of yellow leaves, with a yellow ceiling. Walked down to a dry creek on deep drifts of yellow leaves, and then back up through a hillside full of Johnson grass and asters.

After I said good-bye to Anna, Lisa, Laura, and I went over to campus to pick Lindsay up from class, and then the four of us went for our housemates' night out: to the mall.

The food court was our first stop, Chick-Fil-A, to be precise. While we ate Lindsay told us about a "robot study" she participated in today. We devoured our lemonade and waffle fries and then shopped for awhile: American Eagle, Payless, Target. Lisa and I both bought jeans, and we left Target richer by a welcome mat and a bag of animal crackers.

At home the girls settled down to watch two episodes of Friends. I slogged through writing a poem while listening to FOTR. My candle burns on my desk. Lisa and Lindsay are both working now, too, and I can hear Laura talking on the phone downstairs.

Now Playing: Bach, B Minor Mass, "Confiteor unum baptisma...."

Life is very normal right now. I've been trying to work/not work all day today, and even though I have a list of things to do, and most of it is done, it's been hard to focus. My thoughts keep jumping ahead to the big papers and projects lurking at the end of the semester as I wonder whether I'll be able to pass muster as a "real" grad student.

For some reason fall is one of the hardest times of year for me. I just realize how much time I spend being unhappy. It's really ridiculous. The voice inside my head mutters away all day about how meaningless reading psychoanalytic theory and Chaucer is, how foolish other people must think me, how guilty I am before God because of all my sins....

One morning last week I was sitting on my floor, doing my quiet time, and I happened to look up and see the plant sitting in the windowsill. One leaf was illuminated by the sun, a long bright green arc. Somehow God displays His glory there, in how perfectly calibrated leaf and light are to each other, and as He provides sunshine for that plant and keeps all its cells fine-tuned, enabled to do their work.

It's humbling, but that's what my attitude needs to be, too. Live like a plant. Simply for God's glory, simply enabled by His grace. I want to have learned the lesson and be done with it, be able to live life effortlessly in His love.

But God is a God who "waits to be gracious to you," who "exalts Himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all who wait for Him." Always thought I was a patient person, but I'm really not at all--I want to be happy and full of God's love now. Perhaps this is what it means to exercise faith.

White rabbit!

Now Playing: Cherish the Ladies, "Woman of the House", "Sweet Thames Flow Softly."

I'm procrastinating on going to sleep right now, so here's what I did this past weekend. I drove to Nashville and visited Syneva! I could rattle off a list of all the things we did: shopped at a flea market, visited the library, walked around downtown, walked around a lake, went out for Italian food, went to City Church, cooked food, watched a DVD.

Scratch that. Sounds like a to-do list. Try some snapshots instead.

On Friday evening, we drove through a sudden thunderstorm to get frozen yogurt. Oblongs of yellow light through glass doors in the mansions along Belmont Boulevard glowed like the facets of a chandelier. We listened to Brahms's sonata for clarinet and piano, and the sky was green with lightning.

Saturday afternoon we spent hours sifting through trays of tarnished jewelery and crumbling postcards, piles of kitchenware, and old furniture at the flea market. Syneva bought a flour sifter, and I bought a silver ring for three dollars.

That night we had the house to ourselves and made Mexican food. I made tortillas for the first time ever, rolling extremely sticky balls of dough in piles of flour while we talked about North and South and Foyle's War.

Sabbath morning we sat on the front porch, drinking spiced black tea, eating pumpkin bread with dried dates and walnuts, and talking about Shostakovich.

When I drove back to Indiana through Kentucky, the forests were beginning to be veined with warm colors, copper flowing up through the dark green trees. In Indiana all the pumpkin patches and corn mazes were open for business.

Since I came back, it's been work as usual, though the weather has finally cooled off here, and I had to wear a hoodie when I ran this morning.

Photos from Nashville, TN here.

Now Playing: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack, Track 15, "The Great River."

A few photos from today are here.

It's been a long week. The saga of computer problems never seems to end! Last Wednesday, I locked myself out of my computer, launching my dad and me into a labyrinth of computer programming questions. We both spent what seemed like hours poking around on the internet and fiddling with my laptop. Finally, on Saturday night, with the help of Lindsay's old laptop and a blank CD, I managed to burn a program to solve the problem. My dad walked me through the process on the phone. Saturday night I went to bed with a functional computer, a slightly better knowledge of how it works, and a deeper appreciation for my dad's patience!

Then on Wednesday we woke up and the internet was mysteriously not working. I spent some time that afternoon trying to coax the router to work and ended up calling AT&T, but they were unhelpful. It took Laura an hour on Thursday night to get the thing fixed. In the meantime, I was biking around campus with my laptop, notebook, and Norton anthologies or Riverside Chaucer in my bag! Either helped my stamina or ruined my shoulders; I'm not sure which yet.

Computer issues aside, good things have happened this week, too. Lindsay and I both registered for library cards on Thursday, and on Friday I checked out a glorious stack of Bach and Brahms CDs that I've never listened to before. Friday was also the day I ate lunch with Cindy at the Runcible Spoon, and we spent a delightful couple of hours talking about Europe.

Last night Lisa and I were left to our own devices, Lindsay and Laura both having gone on short weekend trips. We worked dutifully (mostly dutifully, anyway) until nine o'clock, when we took a break to eat ice cream and watch Letters to Juliet. Chick flick, anyone? It was amusing. This afternoon we joined some people from the RPC on a short hike--more like a walk through the woods--at a state park an hour away from Bloomington. It was pleasant to be outside, walking under the tall oak trees, and laughing at all the wee kids scampering about.

Lisa is baking chocolate cake and lemon bars for Fireside Chat tomorrow night.

All things considered, I'm very thankful that tomorrow is the Sabbath.

Now Playing: Brahms, Piano Concerto No. 2 in B Flat.

In the post just below this there's a link to some photos from the past two weekends as well as of our wee house. On Saturday Lindsay and Lisa, who are beasts, hauled in Laura's tiny pickup truck an almost new blue plush sofa from a family about twenty minutes away. They got it out of the truck and into our living room, rearranged the furniture, hung pictures on the walls, and generally made the living space downstairs look like home. My heart gives a little patter of happy surprise every time I go down there now.

Today while poking around on the internet for Digital Humanities, I found some gorgeous photos from the Staffordshire Hoard, a collection of Anglo-Saxon objects from the 5th-7th centuries (roughly). The hoard was only just discovered in 2009, so many of the objects haven't been catalogued or fully cleaned yet, but their website has some stunning images. Here are a couple:














One of these is broken gold with fish and eagle details. The other is a gold strip with a verse from Numbers etched onto it in Latin, calling God to arise and scatter His enemies. Today I spent two hours in Dr. M's office with three other students as we discussed our projects for this class. I think that some how Dr. M talked me into putting together a sort of annotated bibliography of digital resources to use for teaching and researching, though I initially wanted to try for a syllabus. We'll see. The idea of trying to put together a syllabus daunts me, which is partly why I want to try it. But either way the work will be useful later on.

Photos from the last week or so are here.

Very thankful right now: My computer is fixed! Hooray! My dad is amazing, and so are my housemates.

Now Playing: Bach, Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543.

Tonight I've been revising poetry. At some point the words start to swim on the screen, and then it's time to stop and just print it off, whether it sounds good or not.

This week in Bloomington got off to a good start, or at least last week ended well. Rachel drove over from Illinois for a visit on Saturday morning. We went downtown to the arts festival on Saturday afternoon and spent a happy couple of hours wandering up and down the street among the pavilions.

Now, that image perhaps isn't precise enough. When we reached Fourth Street, we found ourselves looking up a long, gentle hill running up to the university gates. On either side of the street are international restaurants and Asian grocers, set back from the road. Trees, gold and green, overhang the road, and under them were the white roofs of the booths. But the street itself was completely invisible, hidden by a mass of people. Rachel and I had to push our way up toward the university through the crowd like salmon up a river.

On Sunday I made a happy discovery after evening worship: Cindy, the library sciences student who sat in the pew behind us, knows Syneva!

Sunday evening the "fireside chats" started at the Hs' house. About fifteen students, mostly grad students, met at their house, and Amy H fed us enchiladas, and we sat on their screened-in back deck and talked until it was dark outside. Then we gathered inside, and Pastor H led us in an introductory study designed to resume their progress through the Westminster Confession.

Yesterday, like good little grad students, Rachel and I studied in the morning and then went downtown to poke around the bookshops. We made tea together, the first meal I've made here that actually tasted good, and then she went back to Illinois.

Today I had another pleasant experience, that of beginning to form friendships with my fellow grad students. I met a couple of other first-years, Beth and Mary, at a coffee shop by campus to discuss the week's readings before class. Sitting at the table, I was very distracted by the windows: Broad, floor-to-ceiling arched panes, framing crowded sidewalk, full bike rack, busy one-way street, leaves yellow with sunshine, green lawn, and grey stone building. All very close, immediate, like a postcard illustration.

Tonight Lisa's parents were in town and took us out to eat pizza. As we were making our way through the crowded restaurant, I glanced to one side, and there was Katie! It was a bit surreal; I felt as though my frame of reference had tipped. She's in town to visit the art history department, and we had a nice chat.

Tomorrow will be busy: Song School (Middle English reading group), a professor's office hours, a lecture, poetry class.

Now Playing: Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 5 in E minor.

As of today I have finally had all my classes. “All” seems like an overstatement since I’m only taking three. It’s a weird schedule: class Wednesday night, Thursday night, and then for an hour on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

Medieval literature so far has proved to be the most inscrutable of the three. The professors (it’s team-taught) are both lovely, but the critical literary theory we’ve been reading is like deep, dark mud. The vocabulary is nearly impenetrable, and as far as I can tell the ideas are rather divorced from reality. Nonetheless, we had a good discussion in class today about the reading. There’s a definite satisfaction to be had from struggling through a text and beginning to understand what it says. I will be quite thankful when we move on to Chaucer, though!

Creative writing is probably going to be similar to most of the other poetry classes I’ve taken. We’re starting out by reading W.H. Auden, who seems tame compared to some of the contemporary stuff Dr. J assigned in that senior-level poetry class! But I’m happy to be writing poetry again.

Digital Humanities promises to be quite the experience. It’s also team-taught, but by four people. Apparently there’s a whole world of resources out on the internet waiting to be used. This evening I discovered Early English Books Online as well as a database that lets you search the whole Old English corpus! Pretty amazing. The class will be quite practical and so involve a lot of work. We’re supposed to be helping out with encoding texts into digital archives. And now cue all those snide jokes about the awful grunt work grad students are given….

Think it will be a decent term, once I figure out where everything will fall. Having so many open hours during the day feels very strange.