Bring your favorite cheese,

said the hostess of tomorrow's party.

This is a logistical problem. Can you predict the logistical problem?

I thought the St. Andre two days ago.

I broke down and broke into it today.

There is a reason, my friends, that my favorite cheese is not allowed in the house.

Ragweed notwishstanding,

it's really a lovely day out there. The sun is warm on my skin, but the air is dry; the sky bright, clear blue. The grass is saturated green, odd for late August, because of the continuous line of storms that passed over our heads this summer. A few trees are hinting at orange, just at their fingertips. The first few acorns have fallen on the pavement, making for excellent cracking underfoot.

ACHOO.

Sorry, wrong specialty

If I were fluent in Spanish or eager to work with autistic kids, I would totally have an education job by now.

In ____________ We Trust

On Friday I again had occasion to hear someone's offbeat spiritual views. This woman follows Sri Gary Olsen and believes that beings from outer space helped the Mayans create their calendar. I mentioned that I find such beings-from-space theories to be insulting to humankind, as nonjudgmentally as I could, and she replied that 1. humans don't have a monopoly on consciousness (OK, that's fair), and 2. humans could reincarnate on other planets and then travel to Earth to teach humans incarnated here (???). She's an absolutely delightful woman, but OMG.

However, she got me thinking about faith. I am agnostic about celestial beings, God, gods. Because I studied, you know, archaeology and ancient civ, I do not believe that the Mayan calendar does much beyond keeping time, which is a big enough feat in itself. I totally reject the notion that space aliens taught the ancients how to do anything.

A more interesting question might be, In what do I have faith? Dharma. Myself. My husband. My family and friends. I don't possess a religious faith, but rather a deep trust, which is far more real to me. I believe in power of music and dance. Beyond dance, I believe in movement--the power, satisfaction, health, and confidence that comes from using one's body as it was meant to be used, ie, not sitting at a desk all day. I have faith that time is both cyclical and linear.

How about you? In what do you have faith?

A Visit with the Keeper of Bees

My brother-in-law is an apiarist. He lives in the Big Apple, not a great place for bees, and so the hive lives with my father-in-law.

I helped him check on the hive today. It was fun and sort of cosmic, standing in a cloud of bees without fear of being stung.

Of course, we smoked 'em good. (In the photo, the smoker is the aluminum contraption with the yellow bellows hanging off the left of the hive.) The smoke makes their little bee brains think that the hive is on fire, and their little bee bodies react by gorging on honey for the long flight ahead. Except that, oh wait, nrrrrgh, now we're too full to fly much, and kinda drowsy. It's sort of like Bee Thanksgiving.

Live Blogging the Olympics

Ack! Ack! I'm so afraid for Dalhausser and Rogers!

It's OK! It turned out OK!

Best of all, now I can finally go to bed.

Cultivating Patience

I was going to title this post "Frustration," but I decided to put a positive spin instead.

Work is nutso. The deadlines, the pressure...I am putting in ten days' work in one day. I mean, I'm working only about 45 minutes of overtime a day (not that I'm paid overtime), but I am working, near-frantically, every second I'm there. It's relentless, and it looks like this busy spell will be a long one. I don't know when the end will appear. It's difficult to explain how exhausting this is, and how it can cause bouts of what a colleague calls "publishing rage". The silver lining is that all my colleagues are in such dire straits, and hilarious bouts of punchy humor and fits of giggles seize us from time to time.

(Speaking of punchy humor.)

I want more than anything to be whisked away magically to a new job where at least all the aggravations will be new ones, but thus far, no bites on the 10 or so job applications I've sent to the various public school systems of Middlesex County. This causes a sort of relentless disappointment: At the end of each wearying day in the publishing battlegrounds, I hopefully check my cell massages and email, and...silence.

(My parents, lifelong educators, assure me this is pretty normal, that lots of positions are filled the day before school begins. Seems like madness to me.)

We also have a lovely fruitfly infestation in our kitchen. I've become a murderess, gleefully cackling over any little flies caught by their own greed in a poisonous bottle of sudsy water spiked with cider vinegar.