They announced the names of the dead and injured in the campus shooting on CNN. None of them were people I knew (When you have attended several different universities, gone to lots of professional meetings, and served on committees, you often get to know people briefly and then lose track of them).

It's still one of those sad and freaky things but I've concluded that the shooter HAD to have something else going on... I have been in a couple situations where someone on my campus failed to get tenure (or if they were TFT [temporary full time - edited for clarification], they didn't get their contract renewed). The worst that happened was one person who went around and told everyone EXACTLY what they thought of them. Though I think their perceptions were skewed; they said several people I regarded as brilliant were "idiots who should not get tenure" and I was told I had "anger issues" because I got irritated with the person ONCE when they didn't uphold their end of a promise.

(And I went home and felt bad about that for three days. And then concluded it was bunk and sour grapes on the individual's part. Because I'm actually pretty good at not expressing anger to other people, even when I am angry with them.)

Anyway. On to happier things.

I have a pot of beans done on the stove (I am keeping them warm, I need to get off here and make the cornbread I said I was going to have with them for lunch). Just simple pinto beans but it makes me happy to be able to take something so simple and relatively cheap and make good food out of it. I used basically the recipe from my Texas cook book: the beans, cleaned and rinsed, in water sufficient to cover them plus 2", an onion cut in chunks, two cloves of garlic. I also added about a teaspoon and a half of cumin (because I like cumin in beans) and a couple pieces of cut-up bacon (Because I didn't have salt pork, which is sometimes more traditional).

It's easy enough to do - just bring the beans to a rolling boil, then turn them down and check every hour or so to make sure there's still enough water in the pot. They're done when they're soft enough to eat. (The old trick from "The Long Winter" works, too: take a few beans out of the pot, blow on them, and if the skins split, they're done)

I made the whole 1-pound bag, which makes a lot, but I might freeze some, and I'm thinking of using some of the leftovers to make homemade frijoles refritos later this week. (Refried beans are one of my favorite things to eat, now. It's funny because as a kid, I would not touch dried beans in any form, but now I use them a lot - they are probably my second most widely used source of protein, after dairy)

I'm also knitting on a funny little thing...my Valentine's day gift, of a sort, to myself, using a Mochimochiland pattern. (And I got another couple valentine's things: my mom sent me a couple of homemade whoopie pies (the church my parents belongs to sends goodie boxes to college students...so she made extra of what she made for them and sent some to me and some to my brother and sister in law). And one of my friends on Ravelry - and this is one of those things that just blows me away about the generosity of people - sent me a valentine (one of those funny ones that kids exchange - hers had Captain Jack Sparrow on it) AND a bag of sweet and salty pecans, and some dark-chocolate pomegranate seeds (both from Trader Joes. I've never even BEEN IN a Trader Joe's.) And a couple skeins of yarn, enough for a scarf. And a beanie-baby version of Manny from the Ice Age movies. (Which cracks me up, given my Twitter comment of the other day about wanting a mini woolly mammoth. And I'm also reading a book on the end of the Ice Age right now.)

I'm also thinking about doing something for the youth group kids. If I can find a version on line of the "love letter from God" that one of the ladies read as a "devotional" at one of our meetings, I might print out enough copies so each kid could get one, and put it in an envelope, and give it to them.