Two-Minute Post

... because that's how long I have before bed time, and I want to check off "blog" on the things-to-do-each-day chart I made earlier this week.

For two months now, I've been doing the XBX Simple Fitness workout. It's a program the RCAF (yes, the Royal Canadian Air Force) designed 20 or 30 years ago, and I like it quite a lot. I can do it at home, without special equipment, in 15 minutes or less each day, and it's a decently comprehensive workout.

My favorite thing about this program is the way it gradually builds up strength and stamina. There are 5 major levels of activity, and within each level there are about 15 "rungs." On your first day or two, you do a really simple workout -- only 2 or 3 repetitions of each exercise -- and you build up a little at a time from there. I'm somewhere around rung 25 right now. For the first time in many years, I can do 20 pushups -- girly knee pushups, it's true, but on the other hand I don't think there's been a week in my life when I've done 20 pushups a day for 4 or 5 days in a row. It's the small victories.

This week I am really missing the mental and physical workout of my riding lesson. The barn where I ride has a mysterious health issue -- they have it under control now, but had to put down 3 of the school horses, and they're keeping the barns quarantined until they get to the bottom of it. Sad. Still, they're being very thorough and responsible and friendly about the whole thing.

And this is for Anonymous

Or at least he-who-may-wish-to-remain-anonymous.

Once the Prophet was asked, “What person can be the best friend?” “He who helps you remember Allah, and reminds you when you forget Him,” he counselled.

I have a friend who rarely talks about God with me, partly because it's not in either of our natures, and partly because we don't want to end up in a fight. And last night, when I was upset and looking for comfort, this friend reminded me that I should trust in God to take care of me. This wasn't completely unexpected, but it certainly made me stop and think. He is, indeed, a best friend.

I am neither pleased nor proud that I've spent so much time lately being frustrated and angry at the world over smallish things. On the other hand, the more I think about it, the more amazed I am at the way I'm being handed arms' lengths and fathoms of support in my struggle toward a grown-up, well-considered, solid kind of faith.

I am as My servant thinks I am. I am with him when he makes mention of Me. If he makes mention of Me to himself, I make mention of him to Myself; and if he makes mention of Me in an assembly, I make mention of him in an assembly better than it. And if he draws near to Me a hand's span, I draw near to him an arm's length; and if he draws near to Me an arm's length, I draw near to him a fathom's length. And if he comes to Me walking, I go to him at speed.

(Both quoted passages above were drawn from a slightly, but not entirely, unlikely source: the brochures at http://www.youngmuslims.ca/publications/.)

This is for Adam

I'm re-reading the fifth Harry Potter book, and I thought you might appreciate this:

'Harry, you're worse than Ron ... well, no, you're not,' she sighed, as Ron himself came stumping into the Hall splattered with mud and looking grumpy. 'Look -- you upset Cho when you said you were going to meet me, so she tried to make you jealous. It was her way of trying to find out how much you liked her.'

'Is that what she was doing?' said Harry, as Ron dropped on to the bench opposite them and pulled every dish within reach towards him. 'Well, wouldn't it have been easier if she'd just asked me whether I liked her better than you?'

'Girls don't often ask questions like that,' said Hermione.

'Well, they should!' said Harry forcefully. 'Then I could've just told her I fancy her, and she wouldn't have had to get herself all worked up again about Cedric dying!'

---

I was going to finish up this post with a photo of the extremely cute Easter Bilby Adam brought me from Adelaide, but Flickr doesn't love me anymore. Sigh. To get the general idea, just imagine a grey Easter bunny with a very pointy nose...

I exist!

A man said to the Universe, "Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."

-- Stephen Crane

Narcissism of the Day:

About a week ago, I sent a friend on a wild goose chase, trying to find this blog.* He found it after less than a day of searching, and left a comment to demonstrate his success. I'd thought I was writing more obscurely than that...

Now I've had my first evidence of a "real" visitor -- someone I didn't send here. The talented Amira stopped by and said hello. I can't seem to rewrite this paragraph in any way that doesn't sound like overblown flattery, but seriously, I'm very flattered that someone as thoughtful and interesting as Amira sees this place with such generous optimism.**

Thanks!


* The more I read the word "blog," the uglier it looks and sounds, but I really can't think of a synonym I like better. At least it's efficient, being so short.

** The links in this sentence were selected more or less at random. But they are thoughtful, interesting, and Amira!

Where's that darn wagon?

Fell off the daily-blogging wagon again. In my defense, my laptop crashed spectacularly over the weekend, taking my half-finished math homework (for two different classes) down with it.

Notes to self:

• Back up data regularly -- possibly daily.
  
• Keep ahead of schedule with homework.
  
• Do homework by hand (or at least write notes by hand before typing it).
  
• Similarly, make sure to print out the assignment itself before starting.
  
• When traveling with a half-empty suitcase, consider using some of that extra space for textbooks!
  
• Don't be such a slacker.
  

Grey day

Not sure what to write about today. I've hardly done any math since Wednesday, and I tend to feel guilty about doing brain-intensive stuff that's not math when I have math to do, so I can feel my brain beginning to atrophy. I spent most (or at least too much) of the day yesterday thinking about clothes -- what to pack to go home, whether I should get rid of this or that. Then I was in the airport for hours. I saw Adam, which was wonderful and wonderful, and I read quite a lot of The Fellowship of the Ring, so overall it was good; but it was very late at night before I got home, and travel always gives me that surreal outside-the-flow-of-time feeling, which doesn't make homework seem exactly urgent. Today I spent the morning shopping with my mom for Easter dinner, and so far this afternoon I've mostly been web surfing. I want to do my stats homework by hand, but I'm going to be gone Monday, so I suppose I have to type it. I'd better go work on that, before my brain really does starve to death.

Oh, to be less easily distracted!

A Secondary Emotion

This caught my eye in a comment by The Wiz at FMH:

Anger is usually a 'secondary' emotion, a manifestation of a different emotion, often fear. When you feel angry, it's a good idea to ask yourself what you're "really" feeling.

I'm bringing it back here as a reminder to myself. I get frustrated and angry too easily, and I'm trying to find that space, that pause button, between stimulus and response. Maybe this will help.

(Edit: I also like Janey's comment on the same post: "Thanks goodness God gives us enough time to grow up.")

Back at the ranch...

FInally another riding lesson tonight, after being (theoretically) in England last week and just thoroughly spacing out the week before.

Not so much of interest to report this week, but I do want to keep track of my progress. Some highlights:

We had a visitor from the new Monday night class. She was actually impressed by how well we kept together and kept trotting. I was not especially impressed with us, so it's good to have a reminder that we have learned and progressed.

Mindy was in a horrible mood tonight, twitching and tossing and looking for excuses to kick or bite; but when we started working she got a bit distracted and responded really well. I'm learning the leg aids, especially for turning, because she responds to them much better than she does to the rein aids. I do not feel like I'm learning the sitting trot, but maybe I'm absorbing something anyway. Posting is finally automatic -- even when I've been gone for two weeks, my legs know just what to do. And my posture was mostly good, although I have a slight tendency to lean forward and/or post on my toes.

I was also reminded tonight of one of the main reasons I'm taking riding lessons: to build my own character. Horses are big and tall and strong, and therefore a bit scary. I'm already developing the confidence -- mostly physical confidence -- that I need to ride them, but I have a lot to learn on the ground. When Mindy tosses her head and snaps, I flinch, and it would help if I could learn not to do that, to be calmly in charge instead of afraid of her.

At the same time, I'm learning to work with the horses, even though I'm not yet very good at communicating with them. Most of all, I'm learning patience. Victor is calm and confident with the horses and patient with his students, so he's a good model for me. Still, patience doesn't come easily; I don't have much patience with myself, and I certainly don't have much patience with Mindy in the moments when she's acting fussy and beginning to frighten me. But I'm learning to calm myself down, because I know my only way of calming her down is to be calm and speak soothingly and make things OK. This will be a useful lesson when I have small children, and I get to learn it with no strings attached -- no responsibility for shaping a little human, and only an hour of work each week!

Coincidences

Just as I thought of checking on the status of Adam's flights home from Australia, he was taking off from Adelaide.

Lost in the Noise

The lost lesson of Terri Schiavo.

From Abstract Appeal's info page:

After this case gained national attention in 2003, Gary Fox, the lawyer who represented Terri and Michael in that suit, wrote a stirring column concerning Terri's bulimia and how the tragic effects of that disease have been lost in the hoopla surrounding this case. The St. Pete Times still has that column online, and you can read it here.

Home

This morning, Glen's away message says:

No set of walls, no bed, no coffee maker, no dinner table, no pillow, no house is my home. I am not homeless, yet I have no keys to my home... My home is in laughing eyes, smiling times, and the utter comfort of someone's calming presence... I want to go home.

Yeah.

A Photogenic Life

If only I'd had a camera on my drive home today... I saw a pair of dogs the size of horses, and a real horse -- a shaggy pony, anyway -- pulling a cart with two men in it on Charles Street.

Also the dear darling anti-abortion demonstrators are back. People, I'm Catholic, and I still don't see how it helps your cause any to put up pictures of bloody aborted babies.

Eight feet high.

On busy public streets.

For everyone's little children to see and have nightmares.

I just don't get it. I know the arguments, but I just don't get it.

On a happier note, Emily's pictures from England are up. I thought computer geeks were supposed to be an ugly bunch, but my groups of friends seem to contradict this principle. My Nebraska geek-friends and my Maryland geek-friends and the old and new geek-friends I went to England with all seem to be of average, and often above-average, attractiveness. Of course, we all take our share of dorky grimacing pictures, but when we're smiling, we're pretty people. Are my perceptions warped because I like these people? Or are we just an anomalous sample?

Of course, we're not as photogenic as this:



Or this:



But then, who is?

Banned books meme

According to Shobha, "You're supposed to copy-paste the list, bold (bolden? embolden?) the books you've read through, italicize those you've read part of, and underline those you'd like to read..."

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Kapital by Karl Marx
#37 Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Self-Discipline

In a comment on TulipGirl's site, I mentioned that I haven't yet developed the self-discipline to blog every day. I do want to keep working on that, though -- I love being able to look back at old journals and remember what I was doing and thinking at some point in the past, and the semi-public nature of a blog keeps me from descending into worry and whining all the time, which makes those re-reads less embarrassing. (I suspect, actually, that I have a terminal case of nostalgia -- Amira's post on Scents of the Middle East really hit home for me. But that's a topic for another time.)

Self-discipline is an area where I'm constantly trying to improve -- not just in blogging, of course, but in all sorts of things, like doing my school work while I'm at school so that I have time to read and relax when I get home. My thought for today comes from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families; I feel a bit self-conscious for reading it, as if I'm supposed to be reading something deeper, or more career-oriented (I'm not even married!), but it's good for me nevertheless.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space.

In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.

In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

I'm not quite sure how to do it, but I intend to start working on finding that space. Any ideas?

Luck o' the Irish

All right, it's been a long time since I've updated here. I was busy getting ready to go to England, and going to England, and being in England, and figuring out how to get back from England early.

Now I am "home". I am back in America and back in my own apartment and my own office. And life is very good. Maybe it's because of my Irish luck that I have such excellent friends and family to help me figure things out and to enjoy life with me.

And now to work!

Goodness, it's Tuesday already?

This week, Adam is not having a Monday; Monday all happened while he was in the air on the way to Australia. He is safely there -- ooh, as I type I've gotten my second e-mail from him!

All is well, it seems. The coffee Adam drinks is a "long black" in Australia. He managed to drive to his hotel, with jet lag, on the "wrong" side of the road, and not injure anyone. Life is good.

My life is good, too. My iPod came today! I'm frustrated with some of its features, and frustrated that I ordered the wrong size case for it, but those shouldn't be big deals.

It's long past bed time now. G'night, everyone.

Memes and melancholy

First, another silly meme, to push the forthcoming whining down the page a bit:

---

bold the states you've been to, underline the states you've lived in and italicize the state you're in now...

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

---

I just took Adam to the airport -- he's flying to Australia for two and half weeks for work. The night he comes back, I'm leaving to go home for Easter -- we're hoping his plane is on time, so that we can meet up for a few minutes in the airport. So it will be 3 weeks until we really get to spend time together again.

I'm sadder and more scared than I expected to be. I mean, we spent most of last school year apart, and this is a short separation by last year's standards. I feel guilty that we've spent some time fighting in the last week or two -- we've both been sad and nervous and so we've been sensitive. We even fought a little in the airport because I got so mad when the check-in people sent us to the back of the line because of their mistake.

It's definitely harder to be alone in Maryland, without Adam or my parents, than to be alone in Lincoln, where my parents are really still close by. I do have friends here, of course; most of the ones I do things with socially are people I know through Adam, but they are my friends too. Other-Adam and Anna and Sreeja are meeting me for lunch before I go to the airport to go to England next Saturday. But I planned this week for work and packing -- the work I've been putting off because Adam was leaving so soon, and packing for my own trip -- and so it's not likely to be the whirl of gaiety we've been having the last few weeks, with lots of friends getting together. And the next three weekends I'll be out of town!

I'm really really lonely, but I should probably stop thinking about it. It's a beautiful day out -- I think I'll go for a walk.

Take good care of yourself, Adam. Come back to me soon, safe and happy.

Propagating a meme

OK, in penance for not writing yesterday, I'm going to help propagate the following meme, which has been making its way around the web:

1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog, along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it. Just grab what is closest!

Yesterday I found this meme-recipe, but I was too dignified to participate. If I had, though, here's what the answer would have been:

"From the preceding definition, the variance of X is the average value of the squared deviation of X from its mean. If X has units of meters, for example, the variance has units of meters squared, and the standard deviation has units of meters. Although we are often interested ultimately in the standard deviation rather than the variance, it is usually easier to find the variance first and then take the square root."

My desk-mess has shifted, so today the answer is:

" 'My plan was to leave the Shire secretly, and make my way to Rivendell; but now my footsteps are dogged, before ever I get to Buckland.'

'I think you should still follow that plan,' said Gildor. 'I do not think the Road will prove too hard for your courage.' "

One of these days I will finish reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Pretty smells and pretty toys

I had a very nice riding lesson tonight. The past couple weeks have gone very well, actually.

Last week I rode Mindy. She is a little touchy, especially when you adjust her tack and when other horses get too close, and she has a mind of her own (like most horses), but mostly she is good. Last week, though, Victor (my riding teacher) warned me that she had rolled in the previous class, and I should watch out in case she tried it again. It wouldn't be dangerous -- she'd go down real slow, and I'd just kick my feet out of the stirrups and get out of the way -- but I should try to keep her from even thinking of it, mostly by not letting her stop for too long. Near the end of the lesson, though, she kept dipping her legs, and Victor noticed she was trying to paw at her belly, which can be a sign of colic. She seemed pretty much OK once I dismounted, but Victor had me just walk her for the rest of the lesson. It was nice and calming, actually, and gave my legs a good stretch after the stiffness of riding. She's still out this week, Victor thinks, but he didn't know what turned out to be wrong.

This week I rode Jerome. Apparently he also has space issues, but overall he's a very good horse. Victor's daughter won her first ribbon on him. He most definitely knew that he knows more than I do about riding, and he very much wanted to be in the more advanced lesson where they were cantering. When I got him to stop trotting out when I wanted him to walk or halt, he decided to get me back by doing the world's slowest walks and trots. Still, he was a good horse overall; he was a good balance of easy and difficult, so I learned something. His mouth is sensitive -- he uses a rubber bit -- so I tended to let him make more of the decisions than I really should have, because I didn't want to pull on his mouth.

Stephanie and I both got good lessons from our horses (with Victor's help) on how one is supposed to ask a horse to halt. We were both leaning forward into it, which confused the horse and unbalanced us. It wasn't as easy to learn as I would've expected, but once I figured it out, I could feel that it made a lot more sense to lean back into the halt. My balance felt a lot better.

I'm working on endurance with my posture -- I know how to sit up straight, but I get tired and lazy and slouchy. We also did steering exercises today -- figure eights around a pair of jumping standards. Jerome was very sensitive to my leads, and responsive, even when he argued a bit, and he trotted very nicely around the sharp turns. I discovered that, as long as I'm paying attention, it's really easy for me to switch diagonals in the center of a figure eight; the problem is that I don't necessarily start the exercise on the right diagonal! With all the switching, once I'm wrong I tend to stay wrong until somebody points out the problem.

===========================================================

And now for the less horsey part of the post -- the part that goes with the title.

First of all, I learned tonight that Maryland doesn't always smell horrible. As I led Jerome back to the stable, he was sniffing at the cold clear air, so I sniffed too. It smelled lovely, like open fields and hay and a little dust, the way fall and winter smelled in Nebraska when we drove out to the edge of the country and parked on a dark road and piled out to look up at the stars. Maybe I'll go live in the barn.

And the pretty toys? Well, for reasons completely unknown to me (not that I'm questioning them!), my mother decided to pay for half of an iPod for me to take along to England when I go in a week or two. I'm debating the relative merits of the iPod Mini and the iPod Photo. I'm leaning heavily toward the Photo; it's just that it costs so much more! We'll see. I'd better go work on making a decision so I can eventually get to bed. A brief mention of the evening's other pretty toys: Adam got his iPod Photo yesterday, so he let me poke at it tonight to see if it helped my decision, and he cooked the most wonderful tender juicy spiced chicken for dinner tonight. Mmmmmm...

More mathemagic

OK, one more thing before I go to do my math (no, really, I swear...)

Buddhabrot is a variation on the well-known fractals based on the Mandelbrot set. I haven't spent much time looking at the mathematics behind it, but the pictures it makes are lovely (and a striking coincidence).

The other side

OK, perhaps that last bit was unnecessarily pessimistic.

AC-S has already pointed out that although he is going far away to Australia to have fun without me, I also get to go far away to England to have fun without him. Not for as long, but in theory I don't have to work at all while I'm there, whereas his trip is for business.

Likewise, the fact that I have double grading this week is directly related to the fact that I had no grading at all last weekend (because of the same mistake I mentioned before).

I've been [re]reading Orson Scott Card's Leah and Rachel. I like the "Women of Genesis" books quite a lot; they do a good job (in my opinion) of charting the characters' struggle to be good people in spite of their instincts. The characters tend to be simple, honest, and open to the point of being a little childish, but they still seem real -- at least to me, because I'm often childish in a less pleasant way, and to be like these people would likely be a step up for me. Not everyone will like the Women of Genesis books, of course; to some, they may seem preachy. But they suit me, at least. I'm planning to reread The Red Tent next, because it's another of my favorite retellings of this same story.

Leah, in Card's vision, is rather like me: nearsighted and cranky. Last night, I copied out a passage that it might serve me well to remember:

Leah's first thought was to say, No, you hate me and I don't have to associate with people who hate me.

Then she thought, I don't have to be angry. And in just the moment it took her to think of it, the first hot spark of anger faded.

"I'm not angry now," Leah said, a little surprised.

"Thank you," said Bilhah. "Let me serve you."

Of course, Bilhah is already Leah's handmaid (although she is not precisely a servant). Certainly I don't expect all my friends to start waiting on me because I'm not horrible to them! But that's not really the point. It would do me good to remember that pouncing on that first spark of anger will make everyone, including me, more cheerful, and then we'll also be more willing to help each other be happy.

Malcontented musings

I just noticed that the last two postings are both double-M phrases. That's an accident.

Today it's sunny and gorgeous and I really can't bear to be inside staring at a computer screen (or grading or doing statistics). The problem is that it's awfully cold out there. I tried to go for a walk earlier and ended up burying myself in the stacks at the library. No fresh air or sunshine there either, of course, and I was flagrantly unproductive to boot.

I don't know what's going on with me this week. I've been whining at AC-S about his trip to Australia, and I'm having a terrible time getting myself to do any work. My statistics exam this morning went pretty well, I think (modulo whatever stupid arithmetic errors I made), and I finished the last graph theory problem just in time to hand in the assignment; but I meant to get ahead last weekend when I had some extra time. I've got double grading this week, because a professor I grade for lost last week's assignments and asked the students to hand in new copies this week. CEP is also going to Australia and points east, for rather longer than AC-S, and since I theoretically have a *class* with him, things are going to get interesting; even now that I'm registered for credit for my CEP research, I'm having a hard time remembering that it's also Something I Have to Do.

Whine.

OK, I'm going to do some statistics homework. It's got to be better than grading.

Mathematical manipulatives

Wow. There is somebody out there who not only has the patience to knit a Moebius strip; who not only has the patience to knit more than one Moebius strip; but who even has the patience to knit a Moebius strip with K6 embedded in it!

Actually, she's done quite a bit of mathematical knitting. It's rather amazing stuff.