Switching Gears

While Chuck still has exams to give and grade, I am now officially finished with my semester (although my new boss asked me to help run a workshop for FYS profs next week, which may be a taste of things to come as new policies come into being at the Writing Center next year). Even so, I can now switch gears to the two major tasks at hand: putting in the garden (and mourning the loss of our beautiful ash tree, which is diseased and will have to be taken down) and revising my comparative Bible/Qur'an study into a book "of invitation into dialogue" as per my conversation with an editor at the Festival of Faith & Writing. The former task should take about a month by the time I (we) mulch, and the latter far more than the summer. I hope to do two, possibly three chapters (of eight), by the time we greet students again. Ellen's last project for her collections class was to put together a $4000 monopoly money's worth of books on M/C dialogue, but using inter-library loan is free, so I have already pushed that "request item" button about 25 times. Chuck has moved an empty bookcase upstairs so that I don't have to stack all these books on the floor around my chair. After all, one of his huge remaining projects for our house updating project is to paint in that livingroom sometime this summer. (We put the bookcase in Karen's bedroom, which he has already painted.) Let me just say that I love May, not only for the weather but for the time and space and promise it provides for projects such as these.

P.S. Anticipating lots of work ahead, I did read novels greedily the end of last week and can highly recommend Midnight River by Lilian Nattel and Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb, the first set in a Polish shetl and the second going back and forth between an Ethiopian Muslim city (Harar) prior to and during the famines and coups of the 70s and 80s and the London of the late 80s and 90s which "received" the Ethiopian immigrants. With my criticism of how Rushdie conveyed the experiences of such immigrants in Satanic Verses fresh in my mind, I couldn't help but marvel at how well Gibb accomplished the same task.