Crystal math

Not long ago, I thought flocked Christmas trees were meant to simulate snow on branches. (Just yesterday, to be truthful.) Today I know more precisely: it's hoarfrost, because today it's all around.

These are not Moscow trees, only their cousins somewhere.

Only a little frost lit on the grass this morning, but the trees were thick with it, and a cold fog blurred the town below us as I walked the campus. When I emerged from my math final (triumphant :), the trees were even whiter than before. What do you know? I've seen ice storms settle on trees, glorious and destructive, but not this. Oregon's fogs are cuddly compared to this winter's-breath.
 

Did I mention I like it here?

Bagel stew

Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8 to 3:30 I stand behind a till and take orders at the bagel shop on campus. It's an inviting spot full of windows floor to ceiling. On a day like today the sun's brilliant in there.Sometimes it slants across the till's computer screen and for a while, all we can see is dust, not words. Oh well.

Einstein Bros Bagels is behind all the golden glowy windows, bottom left, in the Commons.

  All day long I look into people's eyes and ask what I can get for them. I write that down and somebody else gets it while I take money and make change, except when it's credit. (People use credit for the tiniest charges, like a coffee refill--$1.05.)

After four days off of work, it can be a bit of a shock to the system to interact with dozens and dozens of people in a day, as attentively yet efficiently as possible, especially since Ben and I tend to cocoon over the weekend. Often we only emerge from the flat to go to church, and Winco after that, then it's back home to hibernate; study, read or goof off online some more.

Sometimes I think of Jesus serving people. Not bagels, but, you know. (Although we did have those episodes where He passed out bread and fish, on the house.) I'm glad that when I say, What can I do for you?, folks take it in context instead of asking me to heal their fractured elbows or suchlike.

Of course, unlike me, He could do that. What I do think I share with Him now, or at least understand better, is the state of feeling saturated in people. Giving  so much focused attention, and in His case, power, can leave you rather a puddle, lapping into other lives which swirl into yours. You take off your apron and stumble off to some mountaintop nook, try to remember who you are and how to wait on the presence of God. Get reshaped as a solo human being, restocked with breath and perspective.

Yah, we're in a Body, we Christians, and I wouldn't want it otherwise. But as distinct parts, joined or jointed...not in a stockpot melting into goulash. :)

Free time

Inevitably when it's been a long time between posts, I feel the need to dazzle. To make up for the delay. Not gonna happen, though: more likely I'll stall until I feel particularly brilliant and have time right then to write, which is, oh, about never.

Thanksgiving turned out very nicely, with my folks driving out all this way from Newberg just to eat with us, and Serendel peeling mounds of apples and potatoes, and rearranging her dining room to fit us all in. Now we're winding through the no-man's-land between the holiday and the return to school, no appointments or events, just poetry homework, Middle Earth and lovely chilled turkey.

Ruby and I Skype occasionally. The picture and sound quality is fair to dreadful. Sometimes she looks like a wraith filmed in Atlantis on Super 8. I am amused when technological advances play out as regressions; true, we didn't use to have picture phones, but for sound, land line calls are never as wretched as many cell phone connections. Price we pay for portability, I guess...unintelligibility.

The next two weeks are going to tear by like a hundred yard dash, I think. One final this Wed., two more next Wed. and a poetry portfolio due. And that's it--we'll be done with the semester. All new classes in January. I think I'll miss doing math and learning geology. Speech class, glad to be done with it. As for poetry, I will take the intermediate class next semester, yay! The poet Robert Wrigley, who teaches here, visited our class one day, and left me heartened--I enjoy his work; it's intelligent but accessible. If that's standard in the department I am well pleased. And have some wild hope to fit in.

Seri's neighbor down the grassy hill from us (snow's gone!) is putting up a string of Christmas lights as I watch through the venetian blinds. Festive. I am brainstorming gifts to make instead of spending nonexistent cash: should be fun! Got some inspiration from a tumblr blog called "loveliness," plus it shared this great Cezanne work:

Ah, the green world. Home. I know it's still waiting, out West.

Cthulhu and All Souls

I spent Halloween week reading H.P. Lovecraft in order to write a poem. A humorous (I hope) How-To poem assigned to the poetry class I'm in. We got to pick our own topics, and I thought this would be fun, and it was, a hoot, but required a surprising amount of research and thought. It's called "How To Survive With Your Sanity Intact Inside an H. P. Lovecraft Story." I'll email whoever would like a copy.  Oddly, I did not have arcane or eldritch dreams all week!

I think we may have found a church here! I won't say "home church" because CVP still bears that title, and because this is a relaxed little congregation that doesn't actually have memberships. You just show up. Some of the folks have been just showing up for twenty years, though. It started as a home church in Evan Wilson's home, and he is still the pastor. The Wilson clan pastor and/or have planted acres of churches in the Moscow/Pullman area, especially the patriarch, Jim. Evan's brother Doug Wilson is the most well-known of the tribe and leads a large congregation, Christchurch, which we visited but didn't feel was a good fit.

All Souls Christian Church (nondenominational) meets in an ancient slightly-heated church building downtown. We have only visited once, so I may be jumping the gun. But I don't think so.

 Oh, and that stuff on the ground? We had some today. Didn't stick, though.

 Monday, we can register for spring term classes. Wow. A new set of subjects and instructors. I'm not used to these big regular shifts in my world any more; I'm that old.  Ah, well. I shall spend a proper part of the weekend wrangling my schedule.

My new job has not actually started yet; likely next Tuesday and/or Thursday bright and early I will serve a long line of bagel-frenzied students, though. I am preparing for this new responsibility by drooling into my pillow long into the mornings when I don't have class.

Hemp to Hemingway, Swedes gliding poetry boats

Ben, armchair researcher, informs me Moscow has a Hemp Fest in April. Hmmm. Followed by a Renfaire. Might take a lonnnng time to come back to the present after those festivities nose-to-tail. Coming up sooner is the Hemingway festival; seems the old fellow spent some time here, so now a Big Deal is held every year in commemoration. Sounds fun. Maybe. Curt and manly.

I am reading an online literary journal entitled Blackbird in preparation for an essay about it for my poetry class. I don't know when I've read so much poetry at one time. I'm tangled in a taffy of words; I'm crossing a river of thoughts and images...each poem is a spongy rock underfoot. Oh, yes, lacking sleep too...Could you tell?

Blackbird is featuring 2011 Nobel Prize winner Tomas Transtromer's work this month. (His last name is supposed to have double dots over the "o." I forget what that's called--oh yes, umlaut. Don't know how to make it appear, alas. Let us squint at the "o" and pretend.) Anyhow, his work is wonderful. There's often a clarity and simplicity of expression found in translated poetry when it's well done, like this work by Patty Crane. I find it so appealing. Especially here in Mr Transtromer's selections from his book with the lovely name, Sorrow Gondola.

Today I sat in on Serendel's speech class to hear her tell us all how to make cheesecake, which she did swimmingly and with fierce competence. The sample cheesecake she brought for everybody was a big hit, too.

Now, off to bed, or finish the Laurie R King podcast? I follow her grand Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell books. No I don't, I hug them tightly to my chest. My eyes are giving way from so much happy reading.

Birthday points

Moscow is raining on us tonight, making me feel at home on my birthday. Ah, the moist air, the well-wishes of many friends online, a sweet fun poem from Roo, and a spot of investigative journalism for my informative speech in progress--a lovely day all around. Seri's gone to the store for cake mix (we're being lazy). 

                                                                Here's my speech topic:

Yes. This is a giant bronze porcupine on a pole. I live in one of the apartments you see behind it. (There are more trees now, though.) Here's a closeup:

This talented beastie is also a weathervane. She can turn with a breeze in a smooth and terrifying fashion as we hurry past underneath her. (I say "she" because Ruby named her Harriet Vane, after another prickly character from the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.)

Why? Why does a 350-pound, seven and a half foot tall porcupine spin 26 feet above the married student and family housing, next to the campus childcare center? Well, I have some partial answers.

Walsh Construction, the Portland-based company who built the housing units nearly twenty years ago, has a habit of perching weathervanes atop their big projects. Kind of a signature. Their go-to guy for the sculptures is a talented fellow named Keith Jellum, who lives in Sherwood. (Seeing this last on the plaque at Harriet's base made me warm and happy inside, even as I prepared to run for my life at the least tremble of the pole.) You may have seen some of his creations in Portland; for instance, his "Sky Cephalopod" rises above the roofs of the Oregon Zoo. Check out his website; grand work.

Mr Jellum had a curious encounter with a porcupine on a walk out on the Alvord Desert once, and was fascinated enough to research and sculpt and cast his "Porc d'Espine," as she's called (French for "thorny pig"). I say "curious" because there's absolutely nothing living out on this desert, it seems, but for the two of them at that moment. They got close enough to check each other out, pondered for a while, then went their separate ways. And we lucky Muscovites got a permanent commemoration.

Honestly though, I enjoy Harriet. She's weathered to a bearlike brown now, but she's still breathtakingly spiky. The child care staff say the children don't even notice her. I guess only we new residents do. ~tremble~

All right. Enough with the prickly piggie for now. Pretty soon I'll try a first draft on my Imitation Poem for poetry class (based on Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition, by Wislawa Szymborska).

But first, Doctor Who! Hey, it's my birthday.

Vaguely newsy summing up of life in these parts

 Fiona spots my phone, grabs it and presses it to her ear.

"WOE!" she says.

Things are not so bad.

A lot is ducky, actually. Here we are, the Jeffery clan (somewhat truncated), at the University of Idaho. Ben and I get to be students again. We have a low-maintenance little dwelling on Sweet Street (just, wow) we call Lavender Flat for the fragrant bushes out back. Jess and Luke are with us, Ruby...well, she's in L.A., but only a text away, and Serendel is down the grassy hill in another apartment with her hubby and two-year-old Fio.

My classes--this is embarassing--they are easy. Not because I'm a genius but because they are freshman-level. Little nuggets of learning I so far had passed by on the road to education. Oh, but important nuggets, so here I am faithfully picking them up and storing them in my backpack. My math class is Math 123.  I enjoy that fact. Actually, it's been fun: we just finished a unit on methods of fair division, stuff every playground child ought to know for those troublesome three-friends-two-cookies occasions. But also helpful for inheritances.

Right now I am heading off for a study session for the geology lab midterm. Rock and mineral identification. Twice now I've mistaken chalcopyrite for pyrite on a quiz, rrr.

Yesterday in speech class we gave impromptu speeches. I was prepared to be serious and succint. What topic did I get? "Pretend you are a mad scientist. Tell us about your latest invention."

So I did.  :)

We do have our troubles.  There's the "missing you" issue I talked about before. Some of Ben's and Seri's tests have been tough, the timed computer science ones. Probably the main hurdle, though, has been finding work, which is going more slowly than we'd hoped. My best bet is the Campus Dining program--lots of food-related venues on campus, from the food court in the commons, to the bagel shop, to the campus Denny's. I shall keep bugging them till they hire me. And learn more about faith vs.worry in the meantime.

All in all, I guess we have our hands full.....

...but that's not so bad!