the indomitable lake

i haven't been posting much, as you may well have realized.
life seems to hold so much else at the moment, and my daily structures keep changing and melting into new patterns that don't include energy to blog. instead, i bake cookies, clean, read about medieval literature trends, go to class, memorize arabic flashcards, make lattes, host out-of-town guests and see friends. mental energy is spent on a myriad of personal adjustments and some effort to get my thesis into a feasible structure so that i may begin writing.

but there are so many streams of ideas that feed into the lake called "thesis" that it would take forever to explore them all. so i have to choose one, or two. oh, but which one? and what if i choose one that is so small it is down to a mere trickle? or crazier yet, what if it were a stream that is only a figment of my imagination? hmmm. right now i am at the shore of the thesis lake, toes mucking about the sandy bottom where a little stream trickles into it, forming a narrow delta. it's about time to dive in!

walking in my new neighborhood

I smile when I pass by the local daycare center in the afternoons as I return from town.  Gore-tex clad in coveralls and colorful caps, little people scramble through the leafless branches of playground bushes, pat the ground with their plastic shovels and teeter around on toddler legs.  Who knows what goes through the minds of little ones at play.  I do remember that the world looks incredibly large when you're that small, and the possibilities for the transformation of one little pine cone or empty cardboard box into a pet or a house are limitless.  

Leaves are falling.  Most of the red ones from our front bushes are gone and yellow ones still cling to the birches around the neighborhood.  The past weeks have consisted of gorgeous days with little rain and cloudless skies to frame the hues of autumn that have taken over the trees and earth.  My new backyard is composed of sea and forest and plenty of trails that allow you to enjoy the scenery!  Sonja found a public sauna right near the sea and we have made plans to make use of it for winter swimming!

Logistically, I've learned what buses to take and the schedule of the metro, and how much earlier I need to leave the house if I absolutely don't want to be late for class. The smell of the sewer as I cross under the bridge is now an expected part of my morning walk. It actually takes me back to my childhood, when we used to have an open sewer behind our house at one point.  Sometimes we'd catch guppies in it, and sometimes we'd just try to jump it (and we didn't have gore-tex coveralls).