Catching my breath

Wow.  Has life taken a turn.  For well over a year, I have talked about going back to school.  Researching, applying, interviewing, and planning.  Mostly gabbing and babbling on about it. I now have three classes under my belt, two papers written, four books and too many journal articles read.  I thought retirement was an adjustment.  The history is interesting, with a lot of variation, but the lifestyle is so far a little stressful.  Poor Mary.

Part of the adjustment is that I am now a Kindle guy.  I like not carrying around all the books and paper.  The verdict is still out if note-taking and finding stuff is easier.

Somewhat related to that, we took a day trip last week up to Fort Ticonderoga, making good on a long-awaited interest in seeing both Lake Champlain and this colonial fort which changed hands repeatedly between the Iroquois, the French, the British and the revolutionaries.  We spent more time in the gardens of the old residence/hotel adjoining the re-built fort. While in the fort museum, we found ourselves drawn to the maps showing Pittsfield (Pontoosuk) and the story of Col. John Brown, a Pittsfield resident who led a successful attack on the fort at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, but was killed in military action a year later.  I happened to read about this phenomenon of "personalizing" history in The Presence of the Past, one of the books I read for school.

But enough about me. How's Janet?  We see on Facebook lots of pictures; she's back at school (not sure how) and has lots of people signing her cast.  I think she's now half-way through,  What a long haul.  We spoke with Peter last weekend, and he said he spent the day doing laundry.  We plan on going to Princeton this coming weekend, so Peter anyway could catch the Springsteen concert.

Speaking of which, we got a text from Margaret at the DC Springsteen appearance.  Later we saw on Facebook Jeffrey was there too.  Did you see each other?  They both gushed over the four hours of entertainment.  

We had a long talk with Joe, who is settling into long hours at work.  He still has time for college football.  Do you miss grad school?  And Annie is contemplating a new job.

What else?  Did someone mention a cat?  Yes David did.  We settled on a name for our new boy cat, who we can't help calling "her."  Bubbles, in the tradition of naming pets after characters in the Wire; it's close enough to a dog we used to own, and of course, we will call her/him "Kitty" anyway.

John and Marilyn returned from their long trip out west, after a week with their entire family in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, they headed for Georgia, New Orleans, Houston (for the space center), Austin, Ft. Worth, Colorado, Mt. Rushmore and then home.  I probably missed a few spots, they took in a lot of territory and a lot of our country.

This weekend, we hosted Dan Boyle who was here for his high school reunion.  He joined a full house of two of Mary's former teacher colleagues who took a long weekend to come up and enjoy the Berkshires.  Fun.

It was a week of sadness as well, reading of the events in Libya and other countries in that region.  I did not know Chris Stevens, but I did recognize him, probably from seeing him in the hallways and cafeteria.  He sounded so much like he was doing the right thing, in reaching out to Libyans, and showing them the face of the country that we know, but they don't.

On that sad note, we sign off, with love from over here.