Light and Momentary

Seven Quick Takes: Nom Nom Nom Edition

1. I am typing this post with a cup of coffee at my elbow. Not just any cup of coffee, though -- a madeleinian cup of coffee. We're out of milk and cream, so I popped open a can of evaporated milk. The taste and the mouthfeel take me right back to my grandmother's kitchen. I can hear her saying, "Would you like a little Pet milk for your coffee?" to my mother and my aunts in the tone of someone proffering a special treat. I am remembering the coziness of her kitchen and a feeling of satisfaction at being big enough to sit with the grownups.

Maybe by the bottom of the cup I will remember what color the curtains were.

2. It's Thursday as I'm typing this, and dinner is almost ready. In the oven there's a beet-green quiche, made with not quite enough eggs and a blend of sour cream and evaporated milk. I do not expect it to be a hit. It's time to go to the grocery store.

3. On the stove I have a pot of delicious soup which I will never make again. Once for Christmas my MIL gave me a book called Master Chefs and Their Crazypants Recipes, or something like that. Each recipe had at least 20 ingredients, to be combined in a dizzying sequence of steps. Any cookbook that has me making praline powder in step one and moving on to the complicated stuff from there is above my pay grade. But do you know, if I were to write up the recipe for this soup it might almost fit in. A slacker's crazypants recipe, or something.

4. The soup is only accidentally complicated, made of beets and carrots that I roasted on Christmas Eve and gussied up on Christmas Day. It wasn't hard to chop an onion coarsely and fry it up with some garlic and ginger. After that I just had to tip in the leftover veggies, add a splash of apple juice and enough stock to make it look like soup, and hit it with a plop of sour cream and an immersion blender. If I wrote it all down -- "first, prepare the Roasted Beets With Saffron Cream, followed by the Blanched Tamari-Roasted Carrots Accented With Butter and Orange" --  it would sound fancypants rather than seat-of-the-pants, which it actually was. It makes me wonder how many of those crazypants recipes came from people scavenging in the back of the fridge, thinking, "Better use this up before it goes bad." I bet it's easier to recreate an accidental success if you have a sous-chef to do the heavy lifting.

Maybe I need a sous-chef.

5. It's Friday now, feast of the Holy Family and my firstborn's 15th birthday. I've been waiting for this day, when my children would be 3, 6, 9, 12, and 15. Doesn't that sound orderly? He told me he'd be happy with any kind of cake I wanted to make, and so I am going to try my hand at a Swiss roll: devil's food cake, whipped cream filling. If the rolling is a disaster, I'll turn it into a trifle and pretend that was my plan all along.

6. The reason I had that pretentious-sounding Saffron Cream for my beets was actually a children's book -- Tomie de Paola's Jingle the Christmas Clown. Years ago the kids and I made the delicious cookies it describes, covered with sunny saffron icing. On Christmas Day the kids were happily rolling out cookies. (Does that sound very domestic of us? It was not. I had made the cookie dough on the 22nd or 23rd, but I just couldn't get it together to bake them until Christmas.) I let them eat the whole first tray, thinking they'd make a second batch that we could ice for the grandparents to enjoy after Christmas dinner. I let a pinch of saffron steep in a little dish of milk until they announced that they didn't want to make more cookies. I'm too cheap to throw out saffron, so into the beets it went. I think we might try iced cookies again this afternoon.

7. New Year's resolution? At the top of the list: more veggies, less sugar.

More quick takes at Conversion Diary.

It's a sweater pattern

This is a sweater made for my daughter's Poppy doll, whose neck is only 4 inches around. It is based loosely on this cardigan. I used 30g of Aran weight wool, worked on size 10 needles at 4 stitches to the inch. I planned from the beginning to work in the round and steek the front, but you could certainly knit back and forth instead.

Cast on 20 stitches. If you are going to work in the round, distribute them among your needles and join. You'll keep the first two stitches and the last two stitches of the round in plain stockinette for your steek. If you are going to knit flat, then you'll keep the first two stitches and the last two stitches in seed stitch all the way down the sweater. Whichever you're doing, work three rounds or rows in seed stitch and one round/row in stockinette.

Next, you'll begin the raglan increases for the sleeves. Work the first two stitches as established (stockinette if working in the round, seed stitch if working flat), knit one, place a marker in the next stitch and increase on each side of it, knit three, place a marker in the next stitch and increase on each side of it, knit four, place a marker in the next stitch and increase on each side of it, knit three, place a marker in the next stitch and increase on each side of it, knit one, work the last two stitches as established. Work the next round/row in plain stockinette.

Continue as you've begun: work to a marked stitch and increase on each side of it, and then work even for the next round/row. Keep going until the sweater is armpit length for your dolly. (For me that was 4 increase rounds.) On the next round/row, work as established up to the first marked stitch (don't increase before it, though), and put that stitch plus all the stitches up to and including the next marked stitch on waste yarn. If you've done four increase rounds, that will be 13 stitches. Cast on three and knit across to the next marker. Again, put the sleeve stitches on the waste yarn. Cast on three and work to the end. From here you'll work in plain stockinette, with seed stitch borders if you're knitting flat, until your sweater is almost as long as you'd like it to be. Work three rounds/rows of seed stitch, keeping your steek stitches in stockinette if you're steeking. Cast off in pattern.

Put one set of sleeve stitches on the needles. Join the yarn, leaving a longish tail so you can use it to close any gaps later, and knit around. Pick up and knit three stitches at the underarm; mark the center stitch. Join to work in the round. On the next round, decrease on each side of the marked stitch. Continue to work in stockinette, decreasing every fourth round until the sleeves are a hair short of the right length. Work three rounds of seed stitch and cast off in pattern. Repeat for second sleeve.

If you were knitting in the round for the sweater body, this is where you whip out the scissors. Laugh maniacally and cut right down the middle. (I did not reinforce because I was using nice sticky wool. Also because I like to live on the edge. Google "Eunny Jang steek" if you want directions on reinforcing.) Pick up three stitches for every four rows and make yourself a buttonband (this one is 3 rows of seed stitch, bound off in pattern); repeat on the other side for a buttonhole band. I actually didn't make buttonholes, because with small buttons and big yarn you can just ease the buttons in.

Give to the little girl whose dolly you have been surreptitiously measuring (as you can see in the picture, I neglected to weave in the ends first), and bask in her smile.

Messy

I have a complicated sister-in-law.

She has been complicated for a long time, but the level of complicated increased exponentially last summer, when she found herself pregnant, single, and unemployed. The baby's due in a little over 3 weeks.

Her parents persuaded her to leave the West Coast, where she was pretty much alone, and stay with them instead. There's been a lot of drama this week surrounding her attempts to get on a train to the Midwest, and it has made me keenly aware of my shortcomings as a Christian.

I was trying to tamp down my unwelcoming feelings when it looked like she would be here for Christmas. "Excuse me?" I said to myself. "What kind of Christian would even contemplate turning away a pregnant woman on Christmas??" I will spare you the blow-by-blow on her changing travel plans and my roiling inner landscape; suffice it to say that it's been frustrating.

She was due in today. Her parents called to check on her and she said she was very sick. Headache. So congested she couldn't breathe. Very swollen hands and feet. Felt so bad she couldn't walk. They should find her a wheelchair for when she got off the train. I was not filled with compassion when I heard this litany of complaints. I thought, "Oh, honestly."

Not long afterward, I took three of my boys ice-skating with their cousin, my other SIL and her husband, that SIL's best friend, and the friend's daughter. On the drive to the ice rink the litany of woe rearranged itself in my brain: Headache. Very swollen. Felt so bad she couldn't walk. Older mom. First pregnancy. What's it spell? Pre-eclampsia. Louder? Pre-eclampsia.

Just typing that brings back the frisson of horror I felt in the van. Here I had been rolling my eyes inwardly at what I thought was more drama. What if she was seriously sick? I know a woman who had fulminant pre-eclampsia, who went from feeling fine to death's door in no time flat. I know many other women who have had a slower-developing form of pre-eclampsia, and another tendril of fear snaked around my heart when I remembered my MIL saying that she had missed her last few prenatal appointments.

We got to the skating rink and I talked it over with my other SIL and her friend. We tried to call Anne. No answer. We texted her, saying, "Please respond -- we are very concerned about you." Nothing. The friend tried to contact her OB's office for advice. Nobody picked up. We were all terribly worried.

I called my MIL, who had been planning to take Anne straight home for a nap. I said, "I'm worried about pre-eclampsia. If she still has a headache when she gets off the train, she should go immediately and get checked out. This can be really serious. It can even be fatal. In fact, we should ask if she's been having vision changes, because if that's the case maybe she should get off the train wherever she is and go to the hospital instead of staying where there's no medical care." I told her that she should call someone who knew more than I did to find out what questions to ask, and we talked about some possibilities.

She hung up the phone and said, "Anne's going to die."

My husband was with her and did his best to get her calmed down. After talking to the local L&D unit, they agreed to pick her up at the train station in town as planned. They took her straight to L&D, where the staff immediately checked her blood pressure and her urine and determined that it wasn't pre-eclampsia. They wanted her to wait until a doctor could check her out, which took some time once it was established that she wasn't an obstetric emergency. There was further drama; there was tearing off of fetal monitor belts.

She came home a few hours later, highly displeased with my meddling. "They didn't do anything," she said scornfully. And I stepped out of the kitchen and into a quiet corner, where I started to cry. My MIL and my other SIL spotted me, though, and were very kind -- so kind. My husband, who hates unnecessary fuss, also tells me that he thinks my reaction was reasonable. But I am still feeling sad and weighed down.

I have expended a lot of emotional energy on Anne over the past week: fretting and trying not to fret, chewing on her past visits and trying to let go of those old frustrations, praying for grace and trying to muster more compassion, mentally revising plans and re-revising them when she missed another train. And then there was today, when we didn't know for a while if she wasn't answering the phone because she was busy having an eclamptic seizure in her sleeper compartment. I've been hoping that I could show the love of Christ to her (or hey -- at least not provide further evidence to support her contention that Catholics are hypocrites), and instead I just made her mad.

So I am thinking about Christmas trees. My husband and I are real Christmas tree people, even though they shed needles and need watering and poke small children who get too close. Every year when I see the needles on the floor I tell myself, "Life is messy." You can have a tree that doesn't shed or need watering or poke small children, but it won't be real. And there's much to be said for real.

In the same way, I think, love is messy. You could live a life, maybe, where you never had to deal with prickly people and the stuff they strew across your life, but God calls us to love the prickly. On the long drive home I was trying to pray through my frustrations. In response I felt a wordless surge of loving tenderness from the Lord -- a momentary assurance that I didn't need to berate myself for being wrong about Anne's health. I hope she can find that same tenderness, somehow. I'd appreciate your prayers for her and her baby.

Seven Quick Takes: Birthday Edition

1. Today is my daughter's third birthday. Can you believe it? Three years ago I was still feeling a little stunned: I had an actual daughter, and she had arrived before Christmas. On the afternoon of the 22nd I was scrubbing blind slats with a toothbrush, expecting to be pregnant until the 28th. Or, you know, the end of time. And then -- kaboom! -- at 1am I had a real live baby in my arms.

2. This morning I told her she could pick any kind of cake she wanted. "Would you like a chocolate cake? or a yellow cake? or maybe a carrot cake?" "Red," she answered. Red velvet cake it was. I used the Pioneer Woman's recipe, mostly, except I subbed in a half-cup of cocoa for a half-cup of flour (because what good is a teaspoon and a half of cocoa?) and I used less food coloring because (a) that's all I had and (b) I was a La Leche League Leader for ten years and I didn't want the ghost of Edwina Froelich to visit me tonight, intoning, "...as close to their natural state as possible." Stella couldn't quite get the candles blown out but she had four willing helpers who pitched in to get the job done.

3. Something I want to remember about my daughter at exactly three: she loves to sing. She sings to herself every day and she carries a tune pretty well. None of the boys have been especially interested in music and so it warms my cockles to hear her singing while she goes about her business.

4. Another little quirk of hers: she says "dinder" and "doughndits" for "dinner" and "doughnuts." Are there other words with the structure /dVnV.../? She's been saying "doughndits" for a while but I just noticed "dinder" tonight. I'm curious about whether it's a phonological rule for her or just a fluke.

5. Remember the sweater saga, where I made her a sweater with the yarn she loved and she declined to wear it? I decided I would knit the same sweater for the dolly I made her last year. She thought this was cool enough that she agreed to put on the sweater briefly. I was going to post the pattern for the dolly sweater, but I am out of minutes to write it up. (It's really easy. I can probably get it done tomorrow. I should do it soon before I forget it.) I was looking for a dolly sweater pattern and found a simple little doll-sized raglan on Ravelry -- selling for $10. Ten dollars? For a doll's sweater? Nope. You can have my pattern for free.

6. My parents sent a dollhouse especially for her birthday. I am so glad they did -- a December 23 birthday gets short shrift. She's too little to care, but I'm happy that she had something special to open tonight. And she could not have been more excited to play with it. Still smiling about that one.

7. She gave me two gifts today: she slept through the night in her own bed for the first time, and she went to sleep peacefully at a reasonable hour. There are many many things I love about my daughter, but she is unquestionably the worst sleeper of the five kids. And none of them would have won any sleep prizes. When the boy who used to be the worst sleeper was a toddler I would tell myself, "Of all the things a kid could be bad at, sleeping is a pretty good choice." I am less philosophical about it these days and OH it was lovely to have an uninterrupted night. I'm not going to count on two in a row, so I'll bid you good night.

Find more quick takes here.

Update on the biting dog

Thanks, everybody, for your concern. It turns out that animal control in our town is really just focused on the public health aspect of a dog bite. This dog's rabies vaccinations are up to date, so they're requiring a ten-day quarantine (I use the term with reservations -- it's an honor system sort of quarantine, in which the owner agrees to keep the dog away from other people and animals) and before-and-after vet visits. They said, "We don't do the safety angle -- that's up to the police and the legal department."

That is not an adequate response, so we called the police tonight to report the incident.

Elwood wanted to talk to the neighbor before we called the police. He said the guy was very apologetic, but also a little evasive about what exactly would keep this from happening in the future. (Just typing that, I can feel my blood pressure rising. Makes me want to say, "I'll tell you what will keep this from happening in the future: a little oxycontin HAMBURGER, that's what.")

The police also talked to the neighbor after they talked to us. He told the police that it's a breed-related thing: the dog is a border collie, so he engages in herding behavior. Little nips, you know. Unfortunately, the police officer had just been at our house, viewing my husband's shredded jeans and the photos of his injured leg from last night and this morning. (The bruises that sprang up overnight! Ai yi yi, the bruises.) A herding dog that acted toward the herd like this dog acted toward my husband would quickly be a herding dog with a bullet in its head.

There will be an assessment of the dog to look for behavioral red flags. You would think that attacking a pedestrian would be red flag enough, wouldn't you? The owner told the police he was willing to keep the dog muzzled when it was outside. 

That doesn't really do it for me.

Elwood says he'll go to the doctor if his leg gets infected, a decision that so incensed my mother that she called him at work to read him the riot act and called my mother-in-law so she could harangue him as well. Then she and my sister called again tonight to tell me I should take him to the doctor myself. "Tell him you're taking him for ice cream," they enjoined me, "and then pull up at the clinic instead." Alas, he doesn't like ice cream. He is a grown man, and an extraordinarily stubborn grown man to boot, so I think I'll just keep asking him to show me that it's not warm. Or red. Or streaky. Or pustulent. My mother thinks his decision is not just stubborn but another word that starts with stu--. If he winds up needing treatment over the weekend, I'll be inclined to agree.

Mom might bite dog

My husband was attacked by a dog tonight.

He's fine, mostly. He was walking home after an evening out, just strolling down the sidewalk when the dog at the end of the block went after him. He has a large and nasty bite on his thigh and his pants are destroyed. Not destroyed as in there's a little hole. Destroyed as in shredded.

He is freakishly calm about the whole thing. I am ready to go out there with a hammer.

This dog has always been territorial -- he's barked at us a million times. I'm not sure what happened -- did they just give him more room to run tonight? -- but he was able to get to the sidewalk and unleash his ire on that dangerous intruder, Elwood P. Gladly.

My kids walk by that house to get to and from school.

I can't stop thinking that the bite on Elwood's leg is at throat height for Stella. It's not, of course, as if she goes wandering the neighborhood alone, but she loves to get just a little bit ahead of me. I'm not going to let my brain go there right now.

The police offered to send someone out to take a report but Elwood said he'd prefer to call animal control in the morning. He says the owner was there and seemed unruffled by the whole incident. He offered to replace Elwood's pants. That's it.

So let us hope that animal control responds instantly and aggressively. I'll set aside my musings about vigilante justice while I wait to see what they say. Or at least I'll try.

Later, part 2

I don't think I ever told you: I applied for a tenure-track job. My department was looking for a tenure-track person in the area I've been covering. I applied.

They said no.

Actually, they said the very kindest "probably not" that they could possibly say. They took great pains to be nice about it. But it still smarts a bit.

The chair came to my office yesterday and asked if I had a minute. She said she wanted to talk to me in person about it. And I was doing my best to be brisk and professional about the situation, but there was a lump in my throat anyway. I was remembering all of that miserable uncertainty last year -- applying for adjunct positions and never hearing anything, trying to wait and trust and fail-fail-failing.

I didn't want to do that again.

But it turns out that it's very likely I can keep doing what I'm doing. They think I'm doing a good job, and they want me to stay. They have some applicants for the tenure-track job whose research areas are much closer to the focus of the job posting.

Even in the middle of the conversation, I felt relieved. I've been stewing about how I could possibly handle more responsibility than I'm currently handling without adverse consequences for my kids. (And let us not speak of the effects on my housekeeping.) No need to stew, it turns out. (I guess there's never a need to stew. One of these years I really will take that to heart.)

I think especially in the humanities you can get tarred with a "non-tenure-track" brush that makes it harder to get a tenure-track job, but the nice thing about being in a discipline with a critical shortage of PhD's is that there's more flexibility. My chair was encouraging about the future -- there will likely be another search next year or the year after that.

As I was walking home my stiff upper lip wilted and I shed a few tears. I'm a little embarrassed about the fact that I submitted an application that made them say "Nope, not you," even if it's solely because my research to date focuses on the wrong end of the lifespan (from the perspective of the people who wrote the posting).

But I also remembered those experiences from 1995: sometimes "No" does't mean "No" forever. Sometimes it just means "Later."

Later

When we were engaged and newly married, my husband and I were involved with a fantastic retreat program.  In the summer of 1995 I applied to be lay director for one of the retreats that next academic year. I wasn't chosen. When I got the call I hung up the phone and cried for a minute -- I trusted the team's discernment, but I was disappointed and I couldn't help feeling rejected.

A couple of months later they called me back. The guy who was slated to lead the November retreat was facing a huge family crisis and needed to step down. Could I fill in? I could. I did. It was a terrific (though trying) experience and I still think that the talk I gave to the participants on Sunday afternoon was one of the finest hours of my life so far.

Also in the summer of 1995, I miscarried my first baby. Losing that baby wrecked me: I'd never grieved like that. I'd never pleaded with God as earnestly as I did for the life of my baby, and he said no. I was still limping in November. I think that was part of why my talk resonated with the participants; I think they could hear the heartbreak and the sincerity in my voice when I told them that sometimes you implore God to spare you the outcome you dread, and he says no, and he is still good -- always good.

For complicated reasons I was convinced I wouldn't be able to get pregnant again, and in fact it was more than eight months after the miscarriage, in the spring of 1996, when I learned we were expecting Alex. Today I have been thinking about the little burst of hope I felt when I got the call about directing the retreat. I had applied because I'd felt called to the position, and then I was sad and a little embarrassed when they chose other candidates instead. As it turned out, God wasn't saying no; he was saying, "Later." Maybe he was also saying "Later" about the call to motherhood. Maybe someday I would have a baby to hold.

I wish I could tell my 1995 self that she really could look forward to the future -- that she wouldn't just have a baby to hold, that she would have five children and that they would be her favorite people in the world.

Why am I thinking about this today? Tune in tomorrow and I'll tell you why.

Phew

I

have finished

the grading.

Finished!

[angels sing] Finished!!

And now

I am going

to the post office

with the niece/nephew/goddaughter packages.

And then

I will fold

all of the laundry.

And then

I will go to bed early

and not dream about my classes

(if I can manage it).

It was a tough semester.

Mother Power

I spent about a month avoiding Coriolanus, because Acts I and II are not what you'd call transcendent. In fact, I have a note in the margin somewhere in Act II that says something like, "This is like watching CHEESE MELT in iambic pentameter" -- it was that dull. (Remember my post about notes in the margins? Did you think they were clever notes, like "lovely chiasmus!" or "echoes of Ovid"? Because they are not.) But I am here to tell you that it gets much better after Act II has dragged to its soporific close.

From the get-go, Coriolanus has no truck with the commoners. When he returns victorious from battle he is supposed to let them admire him so he can be consul, but he just can't hack it. One of his companions extracts a promise from him to try it again, mildly, but a few dozen lines later Coriolanus is howling. "Nay, temperately, your promise," urges Menenius. Coriolanus spits back: "The fires i' the lowest Hell fold in the people."

Not so much with the populism. In consequence he is exiled. In a twist whose plausibility I am still debating, he surfaces next at his arch-enemy's house and says, "Hey! How about if I help you conquer Rome?" The arch-enemy thinks this is an awesome idea. They march on Rome.

The most interesting character in the play is Volumnia, Coriolanus' mother. She is a force to be reckoned with: "Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me," she tells him. (A little-known advantage of breastfeeding.) When the enemy army is at the gates of Rome and Menenius has been unable to dissuade Coriolanus from proceeding with the attack, she goes out with his wife and son. He had steeled himself against their supplication but he cannot resist. "I prate, / And the most noble mother of the world / Leave unsaluted," Coriolanus says as he kneels before his mother and reneges on his promise to fight with the Volsces. He was willing to abandon his obligations as a Roman citizen and soldier, but not his obligations as a son. I'm still chewing on that one.

I'm also launching into Timon of Athens, which Wikipedia tells me is "generally regarded as one of his most obscure and difficult works." Onward.

Heaping Pile of Random

Oh my GOODNESS, the grading. You would not BELIEVE the grading. I finished a batch of assignments this afternoon and I am so looking forward to a day without grading. Of course on Monday I'll give a final and on Tuesday I'll get 50 10-12 page papers to grade, but tomorrow I will not grade a thing. Huzzah!

I was doing better than usual with the seasonal blues until about a week ago, and I've been fighting off The Crazy since then. Less than two weeks until the days start getting longer. At least my children make me laugh. Conversation from this morning with my boy who is whip-smart but gets lost in his own neighborhood:

"Are we near the soccer fields?"

    "No. We're miles north of the soccer fields."

"Oh, there's a fence like that near the soccer fields."

    "That's the problem with navigating by landmarks."

"Navigating by landmarks -- that's what I do. Except for the navigating part."

It's interesting to see the contrast between him and a sibling who has a knack for remembering locations and giving directions. Brains and genes are a curious mix.

End of the semester is playing hob with my Shakespeare reading schedule, but I am going to go and finish Venus and Adonis. I'm enjoying it more than I expected. Also, I retract my complaints about Coriolanus. I'll see if I can get a post up about it tomorrow.

In Praise of Snow

1. It sparkles!
2. It reflects the limited sunlight so that life seems less bleak and dreary.
3. It creates all kinds of opportunities for fun: sledding, skiing, snow angels. (I have consoled too many teary little boys who've just taken a snowball in the face for me to include snowballs on this list, but I'll allow as to how some people think that's fun.)
4. It blankets the drab garden and encourages the wilted remains of last year's veggies to turn into new soil for next year's.
5. Every seemingly homogenous snowbank is made up of uncountable tiny individual elements, each distinctively beautiful and improbably unique. It would be pretty Hallmark-y for me to say "Kind of like life," but that's what I'm thinking anyway.

It's always magical when the first flakes start falling. Somebody remind me of this post in March, when I'm well and truly sick of the stuff, all right?

A very silly video post

The best thing about NaBloPoMo was that it reminded me how much fun it can be to fling up a quick unpolished post instead of leaving it to molder in the drafts folder. So here I go, flinging up a quick unpolished post. This is take 2, which is why the 12yo asked me if I was ranting again; take 1 was recorded by a different boy, whose aim with the viewfinder was even more erratic. (The dizzy-making part settles down about 20 seconds in, I think.

Here's the song that prompted my idea for a growly altos Pandora station (that link skips over the long soundtrack-y beginning); here's the KT Tunstall song I was in the mood for last night. And here I am being a goof:

 

In case you would like to sing along these are the lyrics: "I like your avocado dryer, / and your fridge of harvest gold. And your bell bottoms -- they are wide enough / to shelter us when we get old."

Is this an omen?

I ought to be grading papers and balancing the checkbook while Stella is napping, but I took a minute to add up the number of lines of Shakespeare I'd need to read between now and December 31 to finish my project. It's just about 20,000, which means that I can finish if I read 666 lines per day.

That's doable, if I keep at it. But -- does it bode ill for the Crazy Shakespeare Project if my daily allotment is the number of the Beast?

Hey, look, I am posting on December 1 after all

I am still holding out hope that I will finish my Crazy Shakespeare Project by year's end, but it will take some determination. I have 4.7 plays and a couple of the longer poems to go.

I've been stuck on Coriolanus -- by far my least favorite of the plays I've read so far this year. The thing about Shakespeare is that you have to keep moving forward through the parts you don't like. They never last all that long, and if you set it aside to come back to it later, you have to retrace your steps through those parts so you can remember what was happening. This is a lesson I first learned in 2004 while reading Merry Wives of Windsor, which might be Item #1 on the List of Works Demonstrating That Sometimes Shakespeare Totally Phoned It In. Maybe not #1. But it surely did feel that way in 2004.

Anyway, I am plowing through Coriolanus. I am finding, as I had hoped, that Shakespeare becomes easier reading the more Shakespeare I read. Whether or not I finish the complete works this year, Coriolanus will be the dozenth play I've read in 2011. It was a fun idea, even if it takes me until 2012 to accomplish.