mimsy and outgrabe

This week delivered a wonderfully surprising sinus infection (yay spring! yay compromised immune system!) that made me feel as if my brain was trying to escape my head through my eye (we can't really blame my brain for wanting to leave, can we?) -- which did all sorts of inconvenient things to my productivity ... so I'm behind in almost everything: grading, festival prep, applications for conferences and grants, household/children maintenance, etc. I do try to be conservative when it comes to taking antibiotics but after 24-hours of a headache that made it difficult to see or think, I decided to go to the doctor and ask for something. Because who has time for this? And it turns out that -- sometimes -- a good ol' blast of antibiotics to your system is just what it needs. Sometimes.  I can think again! And now that I can, and I'm facing all of this. . .  stuff . . . that I'm supposed to finish by the end of the day/month/semester, I'm also thinking abou...

Welp, I spent this weekend going to the pediatric dentist and soccer games and then nursing a "vicious case of the sniffles" (A.'s charming and ü bersympathetic way of describing my head cold). Somewhere in there, though, I managed to do a tiny amount of laundry AND prepare the final onslaught of September submissions to magazines and book publishers.  I'm really hoping something good comes out of all of this submission-preparing, or -- when all of these magazines and book publishers start sending out their rejections around the same time -- I'm going to have a very depressing couple of months. Perhaps the advent of Vampire Baby will dull the feeling of rejection, though -- he/she seems to be amplifying all of my current emotions, however, so I fear that I may not take the rejection well and will end up burying my face in several tons of ice cream and/or candy featuring Red No. 40, at which point I'll blow up all Titanic-size and give myself a ...

I'm a little behind in my blog posts, I know. Imma little behind in everything, frankly. Practically the second after I posted that last revision of my sabbatical report, and sent the real sabbatical report off to Stuffolk's Sabbatical Committee, I appeared on the radar of some angry and vengeful god who decided it was about time I pay for all of the past six month's writing productivity. Zap! And like that, I awoke to a world filled with all-of-the-stuff-I-haven't-done. And I haven't written much of anything since then. Not a good sign. This weekend, however -- the first low-key weekend in quite some time -- was good for getting some of that done. Mostly homefront kind of work like: paying past-due bills (our usually neat-and-orderly finances another casualty of the sabbatical); laundry; going through stacks of old mail and paper cluttering the kitchen counters; cleaning up the yard; and planting some peas in the vegetable garden. Mostly, it was all stuff tha...

This week started promisingly enough with revision and a submission. On Monday, I revised some of the myth poems according to feedback I received from A.P. on Friday. Also, I put together a group of poems for a submission to a lit mag. Yay me, right? Wrong. Things slowed down drastically after that. On Tuesday, I woke up with the plague . . . not in my eye this time , but in my head. A cold -- and not one of those little sniffly things, but one of those viruses that slowly pulls you down into the depths of misery over the course of the day, to the point where you can't quite remember your name or why you're wearing pajamas at 3 p.m. in the afternoon. Of course, I wasn't IN my pajamas at that point, because I attended a funeral for my friend's father in the morning, and I holed up in the library until it was time to pick up the boy, so it wasn't until about 7 p.m. that I could change into sweatpants and wallow in my misery. But any writing I did in the library (I...