intertext

I salute you! There is nothing I can give you which you have not;
but there is much, that, while I cannot give, you can take.
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today.
Take Heaven.
No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant.
Take Peace.
The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.
Take Joy.
And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you, with the prayer that for you,
now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.

--Fra Giovanni, 1513

I awoke early this morning and went out for a walk with my friend Jen from work. She's someone from the DE side of my work rather than the English side of things, and it's refreshing to talk about that side of things for a change. She loves dogs and gardening and computers - my kind of person!!

THEN after spending the morning actually sort of vaguely doing work related things, I went downtown and had a lovely lunch with superfoo and lidocafe at a Thai restaurant. Conversation was books and movies and just stuff and was fun. I learned that lidocafe watches Jeopardy and The Gilmore Girls, which pleased me no end because I always think of her as terribly serious and only watching Important Things like Nature and David Suzuki and The Passionate Eye (though I know her to be a rabid ER fan, like myself). It was great to see superfoo - I hope that she will keep in touch when she has gone on to Great Things at the University and left our Little College behind...

After lunch, we parted company, and I went in search of the Thursday market stall and discovered that it is necessary to go there Early if you want anything Really Good, although I did get some Morels and some Spring Greens and a beautiful butter lettuce. Then I went to Chapters Bookstore (selling out to the fleshpots, I know - and must have just missed superfoo) and got - yay - Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Jose Saramago Blindness and a book called Getting Started With Camera Raw which sounds terribly kinky if you are not a digital photographer, but you'll know what it's about if you are. So here's what's on my "to read" list for the rest of the summer:

The Things They Carried
Blindness
The Accidental Ali Smith
Rainbow's End Vernor Vinge
Saturday Ian McEwan
The Naming of the Dead Ian Rankin
The Consolations of Philosophy Alain de Botton

... and no doubt various lighter and junkier things as they become available. There is that new Potter book, of course, which I do have on order from Amazon...

And, as mentioned in my last post, I also took the time to buy a permanent account in LJ, which really does make me feel good. So there we are.

Happy Solstice, everyone!