A set of ceramic bowls made by the Artgirl as a college freshman. She was a tiny baby ceramicist back then, but I will always love these.
Chatting with the Texasgirl about an article in First Things, whose author I think I met on a trip to Houston in 2019. The burden of this article is to urge humanities PhDs to consider --- and even intend --- taking jobs in classical schools. You know why, of course. PhD programs pump people out, and there aren't any university-level jobs, especially for men. The scene out there isn't great for women, either, but I'd theorize, because I'm still drinking my coffee and don't have numbers in front of me, that it's marginally less difficult for a woman with a PhD to land a job in higher education than it is for a man.
This means that the secondary-school market, currently, and even the pre-secondary-school market, i.e. middle school, is flooded with men with PhDs. Often enough they knock out of the running the very people who traditionally would have had those jobs: women with teaching experience, often extensive, but no PhD. The Texasgirl, who belongs to that last category, finds this maddening, and I don't really blame her. Of course, I also don't blame people with PhDs who choose job security over the long, unstable, no-benefits purgatory of the adjunct and "visiting" professor. We've been there. It's no way to live, especially if you want, or (as in our case) already have, a family. The only way we survived was family support, and not everybody has a family willing or able to help keep them afloat until something better comes along. Ours was a bizarrely precarious yet privileged situation. Most people's is just precarious, full stop.
Today is the day the Texasgirl's husband finds out how he did on the LSAT, the standardized test for law school admissions. His sister --- not the sister who is the Fire Son's light of love, but another sister --- took it at the same time, so I guess everybody gets to find out today what they've got going into a second test sitting on September 10. Next year, potentially, people could be doing something really different from what they're doing right now, which is kind of exciting. I guess what happens with the chickens, among many other things, hinges on these scores.
In other news, I have choir practice Friday night for the Diocesan Eucharistic Congress, which is somehow suddenly not this weekend but the next. I mean, instead of weeks and months away, it's suddenly almost here. We're singing Louis Vierne's Tantum Ergo, which I love and haven't sung since Cambridge, plus some Charles Wood, whom I also love --- I don't recall ever singing his God Omnipotent Reigneth, but hooray for a 20th-century English composer! Lots of standard hymns, always fun. I missed singing for ordinations this year, because we were in Norway, so I'm looking forward to this choral outing.
And I'm going to New York! Voluntarily, on purpose, this time! Wiseblood Books is sending me to read at the Catholic Center at NYU toward the end of September. It'll probably be a fly-in, fly-out overnight kind of thing, but should be fun. This fall just keeps getting crazier with each passing day, and it's not even here yet.
Eating some more refrigerator oatmeal --- it's just old-fashioned oats (though I guess you could do steel-cut) and some chia seeds, soaked overnight in kefir, with a little honey. Yesterday I had figs; today I do not have figs, so I'm just eating it plain, but it's still good.
On today's agenda:
*walk the dog
*look over these lines I'm writing, which so far are not adding up to much, but you never know
*answer various emails, and maybe touch base with my MFA student
*exercise
*make a feint at planning my next Homeschool Connections class, because now I know how much work it is to put one of these courses together, and it's not like I'm going to have oceans of time in September and October.
*Write something on John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud"
*Do some research toward writing on Sonnez Les Matines --- I need to know more than I do about Rabelais, for instance, because what I know now is basically nothing.
But first I think I'll get dressed.
Maggie B joins Audrey, Fiona, Sierra, and Willow in the August 4-wears club. I think I'll probably wear Brooklyn for our pub night tomorrow, so that'll finish out the month. This isn't bad innings for any of these dresses. I did outbox the Pact cotton dress, though I haven't yet put it up on Poshmark, which leaves me eight dresses to wear in a fairly even rotation. Even the dresses I've worn less this month --- Camellia and teal Maggie --- will have been worn three times each, so there's nothing in my core wardrobe that I'm not reaching for.
Meanwhile, although I love this dress, you can see my quandary in being stuck between sizes. The shoulder seams in this medium hit just outside the point of my shoulders. Right where my shoulder joint bends, I can pinch a good bit of fabric. You can see that there's just a little extra fabric through the neckline and bust.
From behind, you can see that there's a bit extra under the arms. Up top --- though I'm not swimming in it, by any means --- it's just a hair too big.
Meanwhile, my teal Maggie is a small. Here's a recent photo:
The fit through the neck, shoulders, and bust seems better. The seams sit right at the ends of my shoulders, which are admittedly narrow for my build. It's not tight under the arms, but it fits much more closely.
But through the hips the fit is a hair small, just enough to make the pockets more visible than I absolutely love. It's not bad, and she does tend to loosen up with wear.
Still . . . that's the one thing that makes me hesitate to want another dress in this style, even though I love it. I know that sounds weird. I'm really not rationalizing these dresses to myself, because obviously I wear them regularly and enjoy them. I also could easily have today's blue Maggie tailored to fit, but that seems like a lot of trouble somehow.
Also: good thing I wasn't going to buy a dress right now anyway, which renders all these considerations academic, nothing more.
So here we are. I love the ease of this dress, even with a little extra fabric. She's cool and basic and simple, but the fabric is so beautiful and shimmery. And I love the floaty feeling --- I can drift through my day feeling dressed, but in an airy, unfussy way.
Also wearing my default purple Birk Rosemeads, the all-day, go-everywhere house slipper.
The high today is only 80F, although the humidity's at 97%. I don't anticipate feeling exactly a snap in the air --- more like the sound of somebody farting in a vat of jello. I mean, that's crass, but I can't think of another way to express this unique quality of almost-autumnal air in the American South. Everybody else is rushing the season with their pumpkin-spice lattes --- I'd eat a pumpkin popsicle, maybe.
LATER:
*Short walk with the dog, only about 20 minutes, though we played ball in the backyard after lunch for about 10, with a lot of running (her, not me).
*Went down an hour-long Rabelais rabbit trail.
*Ate two boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cooked in the air fryer with salt and pepper and drizzled with coconut aminoes, for lunch.
*Read some of Helbeck of Bannisdale, by Mrs. Humphrey (a.k.a. Mary) Ward.
*Wrote some more lines and started to see where I might go with them.
*Did 10 minutes of aerobics plus about 10 minutes of beginner pilates moves with and without stretch bands. No weights today.
Now I'm drinking some lemon water and taking a rest, but then I might look at the Donne poem again. Or, while Dora's having her nap, I might take a bath, since I'm both very sweaty and kind of sore.
Later on I need to go pick up a prescription for the Viking and put it in the mail.
EVENING UPDATE:
*It's raining!
*I've got soup simmering: cannelini and northern beans, diced sweet potato, garden peppers and chard, a little quinoa, all in chicken bone broth with Cajun seasonings and a little extra smoked paprika.
*I didn't write on Donne, but I did write on James Thomson (1700-1748), most famously the author of "Rule Britannia."
*I took a package the Artgirl had had sent here by mistake to the UPS store for a return --- it was school stuff, and she needed it faster than I could easily send it, so she'd just reordered it.
*Picked up the Viking Son's prescription, packed it up, slapped a print-out mailing label on it, and it's on the mailbox ready to be picked up in the morning. Team Executive Function for the win, babes. Also: the postal service's Click-N-Ship function is a life-changer.
*Dog is in her crate with her supper, table is set, soup is simmering but ready to eat any time. I can't believe I feel like eating hot soup, but the rain is falling, the evening is cool, and it's time to get that soup thing on.
*I don't know why I'm talking like this, even in writing. I don't usually call people babes. It's these long days alone with a dog and a set of resistance bands . . . I'm not unhappy, but I lose all sense of proportion and balance after a while. My social skills don't exactly disappear, but they do start to warp in strange ways. Oh well. Again, I'm not unhappy. I'm actually quite content. Just weird.
Anyway . . .
It's good to have lots of dishes to make creative place settings with. This tablecloth began its life as the shower curtain in the guest room at my mother's old house. It's that Garnet Hill Zinnia print that I'm not sure they make anymore, but she had this, and a comforter cover, and pillow shams in that room. We have the comforter cover, too, now, but I don't use it as a tablecloth.