John Keats

Thanks to Indigo shopping bags, which have reminded me of the Keats quote .. "Give me books, fruit, french wine, fine weather, and a little music..." We're still missing a couple of those on the picket lines but at least the fine weather has showed up for the last two days! And we had some fruit brought in, too, which was a very pleasant change from the Timbits.

Speaking of pleasant things: one of my ex-students came by with a load of firewood for us and (although I was unfortunately not there at the time) spoke to N____, also one of his former professors. He's going to come by with more next week, so I hope to have a chance to speak to him. If you find this posting, Jeff, thanks very much! And yes ... we ARE too old to be stuck out here :-))) Other pleasant things -- two former faculty members were out on the lines in the last couple of days, bring moral support and goodies like hot chocolate. It was great to see them. They were out in '84 and '89 and know how important support is. Thanks, O___ and R____ we were very glad to see you. And thanks, too, to Steve, our local host at Louisiana's, and the rest of the wait staff there, who treated the 7:30 - 11:30 gang to cabbage rolls after the shift. You're the best!

I would encourage anyone here to read the Centennial blog. Its author worked at Sheridan many years ago and he brings his wonderful sense of humour as well as his delightful prose to this blog, and I think you'll enjoy it. See the blog link on the right for the "Unfettered" from Centennial for his comments.

Back to Keats. For the first time in ages I feel no guilt about reading just for pleasure. My usual reading is job-related except for maybe 1/2 an hour just before retiring for the evening. But this week I have shamelessly ignored all course-related reading at all. (What the heck, who knows what parts of the courses I teach will be deemed "not essential", or even if I will have the same courses when we do get back, so why should I bother keeping up in the field until that is defined.) So I am O/D-ing on my favourite fiction. The nice thing about having a birthday the day before a strike is that I have several new books for my birthday (thanks to my friends and my nephews/nieces) so I can happily indulge in escapist fiction. I am trying to portion it out so that they last me for a while. My sisterin-law works for local libraries, so when they are done I'll get her to get me some others. I was going to take some out of the library before the strike, but we were sent an email warning us that we would be fined if our books went overdue during the strike. (Someone told me that they have since changed this policy, but by then I was on strike, so it does me no good that they have rescinded the policy now.)