View from my dorm studio's kitchen window. It's raining this morning. Hope it stops before time to walk to Mass.
Here's today's Camellia iteration: dressed up for Mass with my blue marl longline cardigan (one of my last real fast-fashion purchases, but worn constantly, with a commitment to wear it for years), and thrifted Old Navy fisherman's sandal clogs. I'm in my dorm studio, trying to get a shot with my laptop webcam and the old PhotoBooth application. These are not quality photographs, to put it mildly, so I am filtering them up a bit in an attempt at least to look kind of artistic. Bear with me.
A longish shot in the kitchen doorway. I don't ever really have time to arrange much of a pose:
And a close-up (dum-de-dum, trying to act natural, dum-de-dum):
Got up this morning to drink coffee, eat yogurt with a banana, pray Morning Prayer, then write. I am hammering out the last scene of my novel,which has never been quite right; the editorial feedback I've received over the last week has given me much greater clarity of vision, and to a huge extent, the writing and revision I've done hasn't felt nearly as torturous as I was afraid it would. It's hard work, and I'm wiped out when I finish, but in a good way, as if I'd been climbing a mountain, as opposed to the kind of exhaustion you feel when you've been, say, doing the taxes all day.
Anyway, I've knocked off for now and am just hanging about until time to walk over to meet my children in the basilica. One of the things I most like about being in residence on this college-campus-with-Benedictine-monastery is that I can walk to the Conventual Mass every morning, then to the Adoration chapel in the afternoon when I finish work. Hardly anybody is about; I can go whole days without speaking to another person. Though my husband was worried that I'd feel isolated, I find that all this solitude doesn't bother me much. But I was glad to go home on Friday for my son's birthday, and I'm looking forward to taking both children-still-home out to lunch after Mass today. My husband is off to a conference himself this week, so they are holding the fort at home: quite competently, as befits young adults, I am certain. As much as I miss having little children (do you ever get over that?), there are definite benefits to having grown children.
On the other hand, grown children look at you funny and say, "Really. You're going to wear the same dress for a hundred days. You'll be wearing that dress when you drop us off at college. Uh, okay." I can see them steeling themselvse not to be embarrassed, though really: nobody else will know.
And that's the day. Tune in tomorrow for another episode of whatever exactly this is.