June 1

I think approximately 12 minutes have elapsed since May 31, 2002, but somehow the baby who was born that day is now a college graduate with a fancy new job in a fun city. He came home after finals for a couple of weeks. Yesterday we celebrated his birthday and today he drove off to his empty new apartment.

I asked his girlfriend how she was doing, since they will be dating long-distance. "It's hard to be the one who gets left behind," I said, nodding appreciatively at my own wisdom. And then when he pulled out of the driveway, all of my cheerful enthusiasm evaporated and I started to cry. It IS hard to be the one who gets left behind, my friends; it really is. 

This morning I slumped around feeling sad about how these children keep growing up and leaving me, but this afternoon I went to the climbing gym with Pete and braved the longest routes for the first time in a while. I am out of practice with the mental component of climbing high, but the physical piece of it felt great -- I found myself thinking the very same thoughts I blogged about in this old post. I came home and did some therapeutic gardening, yanking out lily of the valley until I had a colossal heap of it and crescents of dirt under every fingernail. I have been gardening up a storm since the spring semester ended, and I have decreed that the front beds are going to be spare and spacious for a while.

Although it's June now I have not yet finished Hard Times. More than once now, while AMDRALing my way through a Dickens novel, I have discovered that I didn't give it a fair shake the first time I read it. I'm so glad I reread Our Mutual Friend and Martin Chuzzlewit, because I enjoyed them much more the second time through. I'm still waiting for that particular flavor of magic to strike in Hard Times; no dice so far. Nicole the Victorian lit professor and occasional commenter is a Hard Times fan, so perhaps she'll chime in at some point.

This month I will have two weeks in which I am mostly though not entirely off, and two weeks in which I'll be teaching. I'm teaching a long summer class this time around; it will stretch all through July and the beginning of August. We shall see how that schedule works out.

Goals for the month:

1. Blog daily
2. Exercise daily, defining exercise broadly
3. Track produce consumption and see how it feels
4. Write (for work) 4 days a week
5. Finish Hard Times and most of my next Trollope novel