Darn those pesky tsetse flies!

As usual on Mondays, I am barely conscious, owing to a weekend of staying out late and waking up early, since you're supposed to sleep best if you wake up at the same time every morning and I like to get my weekend chores - marketing and bread baking - done by noon. Normally I have class on Monday afternoons, but today I did not, since my prof is out of town, and so I napped all through the time I would've had class. I did, however, go into the office this morning (what a grownup turn of phrase! And it's true: I went into my very own office, despite the presence of The Werewolf, my scary officemate) and turn out another draft of my analyticity paper. It is now in a form which could be turned in, should I slip into a coma until Wednesday afternoon, and this is comforting, though I will diligently continue to tweak it until the buzzer sounds.

Perhaps I should elaborate on that allusion to The Werewolf. He's writing a dissertation on Kierkegaard (amazingly the Blogger spellcheck has no problem with "Kierkegaard" so maybe someday when I'm a famous philosopher it will stop telling me my last name is "Neutered" or perhaps I meant "Neuterers" which is a new one) and is in the office ALL THE TIME, and never says a word, and every time I go in there I want to announce, "My name is on the door!" because I feel like I'm intruding. But it is silly and babyish to be afraid of my own office, so I'm sucking it up.

Oh, and I call him the Werewolf because he kind of looks like a blend of Oz-from-Buffy combined with my mental image of a young Remus Lupin (i.e. not like this). Plus he's just kind of lupine. (His girlfriend Kari is very cool and gave me a ride once.)

Um. Where was I? I just finished The Orange Tree, by Mildred Walker, which was pretty good - it is apparently kind of a modernization of Chekhov's Three Sisters and it's published by Nebraska University Press, which perhaps partially explains its occasionally jarringly bad editing. To be fair, the editor was trying to reconcile several different versions, as Walker apparently kept fiddling with it for years and years after it was rejected, but since this editor didn't feel any compunctions about inserting references to an orange tree so the title would make sense, you'd think she could've somehow smoothed some of those scene changes. I was constantly thinking I'd skipped a page.

And it's Columbus Day, which, despite its dubious political correctness, I kind of love, because when I was little, my grandparents would take me and Floss and our cousins on an outing every Columbus Day. We'd go to an orchard and each pick one apple, have lunch at a hotdog stand, go to this beach with lots of neat rocks and interesting driftwood and debris, and then on the way home stop at the Dollar Store, where we were each allowed to choose any item to buy. It was super great. (I've just dashed off a letter to them, since this made me think of it, so no need to tell me.)