Friday, Sweet Friday

It's Friday evening and I'm sitting on the couch at home with young Avery Jane next to me. The smells of dinner are wafting in from the kitchen and I can hear Suzanne discussing the merits of bangs with Maryn. (Maryn wants them, Avery doesn't. Avery will probably get them, Maryn probably won't.) Parker is asleep in her room.

The sun has been shining quite a bit this week and it's been nice. The days have been getting incrementally longer and even though we're still in the middle of frozen cornfields, I feel spring slowly approaching. Like a train you can see from a long way off, it's slowly coming along.

Monday I get my first big load of papers. It's been all small assignments, quizzes, one page write-ups, etc. so far but Monday and Tuesday I'll be be collecting eighty-something papers from my students. Sigh. Hopefully, all the work we've been doing and all the groundwork we've laid together will make for a less-painful reading process. We shall see.

The new episodes of Lost have been pretty satisfying so far. Terry O'Quinn deserves all sorts of awards for his performance as old Locke, sideways Locke, and Flocke (Fake Locke). He's just really impressive in his portrayal of three different characters that are all the same person and yet not. Like springtime, I feel the answers to the big questions of Lost somewhere near on the horizon.

I've been working on a document for my dissertation committee - kind of a pre-prospectus thing - and it's killing me. It's hard to stop thinking about school or whatever else and focus on writing. My brain is in teacher mode most of the time, not student mode, and it's hard to get it pointed in that direction. I need to though. I'm already a month and a half into the semester and I need to start producing something concrete. I've read a couple of books about independent American cinema and they've been enlightening, giving me a little bit more of a vocabulary and sense of context for placing Richard Dutcher's films in that world. But there's lots more I need to read.

Anyway, all of that business aside, there are more interesting and important things in the world. Like this:



How awesome is that? What you're looking at is 16 pounds of pure baby goodness. She's rolly-poly, smiley, and generally hilarious. She's good to have around. I have decided to name her plush, fuzzy blanket "Anna" which is short for anesthesia because it puts her to sleep. I crack myself up.