A poem for me!

aome has written me my very own poem!

*falls over laughing* Thanks, aome. What a lovely way to start the day.

In other news, yesterday was my fourth anniversary on LiveJournal.

kijjohnson, this one's for you!

Because we've been talking so much lately about the need for both of us to introduce play into our lives.

Fox on trampoline.

[Error: unknown template 'video']

Thanks to juliansingerfor the link.

100-mile diet

My goodness, I'm really spamming LiveJournal today.

My new community discovery is daily_granola ("Finding your Inner Hippy One Day at a Time") where members post about trying to make one small lifestyle change each day in order to support the liberal agenda. One recent post mentioned the 100-Mile Diet. The idea is to draw a 100-mile radius around your home and eat only what you can get from that area. (A group doing this in San Francisco is trying a month-long Eat Local Challenge during the month of May).

If it were up to me, I would try this. But I have a family of extremely temperamental eaters, and I think it would be quite difficult for our family to do. Still, I'm intrigued. It would be interesting to do just one day of eating locally, and try to work up to a week. It is worth thinking about.

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Inspired by my new CD When Love Speaks, which I have been playing on endless repeat ever since I got it, I have been reading Shakespeare's Sonnets on this website. I have taught Shakespeare at the college level. I have read many of the sonnets before, and memorized some of them, and I am probably much more familiar than most Americans with the plays; I was in a Shakespeare reading group that met every other week for years to read his plays aloud.

But although I have studied the sonnet form and I knew about the Youth and the Dark Lady, I have never sat down and read all the sonnets one after another in sequence before. I'm up through Sonnet 60 or so. I am finding it fascinating (and I like the commentary on this site). I did not realize that such a large proportion of the sonnets were about the youth, rather than the lady. I knew that many of them were bawdy, but did not realize how many of them were specifically homosexually bawdy. And I had not realized quite clearly that they are not discrete poems, but interlocking, some following in story sequence one after the other, telling a larger tale of several relationships, with careful attention to numerology. I am learning a lot. And I am ashamed of how little I knew about this.

Huh. It's never too late to learn.

In other reading notes: also reading scott_lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora, which is sucking me right in. And am listening to Jim Dale read the Harry Potter books as I work on Quicken to enter my financial accounts, stopping to take notes on any passages having to do with memory, in preparation for the paper I am to write for Lumos.