Cambridge, 2012

Cambridge in the newly-arrived 2012 looks much as it did in 2011, and largely as it has for hundreds of years.  It's a wonderful thing about this place.

Christmas lights at the Boise botanical garden

I got back a few days ago.  I spent December mostly at home, with short trips to Boise for Christmas with my brother's family + our parents, and to Phoenix to see Stanford football break my heart yet again, this time at the Fiesta Bowl.  The time went far too quickly, but I managed to see some people, go to the SF Symphony's 100th anniversary gala, do some sewing, and bake the traditional Weaver (via Arnold) Christmas cookies with mom.

Since I got back, the weather has been unseasonably warm -- which helped ease the pain of rowing TWICE a day, EVERY day.  I could do without the second one to interrupt my afternoon, but the first part of the day has a nice rhythm to it: get up, go rowing, meet a couple friends for lunch, work together in the college library's toasty-warm reading room.  Then go row again.  Get dinner somewhere and try to stay awake long enough to do more work.  Give up and go to bed.

It's the kind of reasonable pace I wish could sustain itself during the term.  As it is, I'm trying to get all my ducks in a row so that I can start Lent term efficiently -- before it deteriorates, as it must and will.  Projects for this week have been:

1) Write up thoughts on the book I read over Christmas, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity.
2) Prepare syllabus for my Old English student (I get her again this term and next -- fun times!)

View from the boathouse

Next week, I will have to meet with the supervisor and make plans for the rest of the year.  My current plan is to spend this term reading all of a guy named Richard Chenevix Trench.  He was a friend of Kemble's and Tennyson's, and he wrote stuff that's exactly what I need in order to draw the connection between Tennyson and philology.  But I suspect he will be less colorful than Kemble.  :)  Meanwhile, here is yesterday's glorious sunset, which followed a rather bleak morning.