Lapham's Quarterly (one of those online miscellania sites; I was directed to it from a link in Messy Nessy Chic) ran a little chart of "daily planners" - real or imagined scheduled for the famous (and one unknown: a Benedictine monk in the 900s).
It's here.
If I could pick any of those to be, I'd pick Queen Elizabeth (the current one). (And in case you're wondering: Milton was blind, which is why everything is read to him and he dictates.)
Anyway. Got me to thinking about my daily schedule. This is an 'average' weekday; I am leaving out things like my weekly 5:45 pm piano lesson.
4:30 am: get up, workout
5:15 am: check overnight e-mails (if any), faff on internet a bit
6:00 am: wash, get dressed, make lunch to take over to work, make and eat breakfast
6:30 am: piano practice
7:00 am: leave for work
8 or 9 am: first class of the day
8 am to about noon: teach, hold office hours
noon: eat lunch
1 pm to about 4 pm: work on research, grading, reading articles, etc.
4 pm: go home, practice piano
5 pm: fix dinner, eat dinner. (Stomach problems force me to eat early these days; I am much less likely to have problems overnight if I finish dinner before 6:30 or so)
6 pm: knit/read/watch tv/whatever
8 pm: get ready for bed, read for a while
9 pm: try to go to sleep. (insomnia is back a little bit. I don't know why. I suppose it's having been out of a schedule recently)
(Not a lot of time in there for "fun," sadly. Fun is for weekends, I guess.)
****
Today, in My Profligate Ways: I kept thinking about "that Johanna Spyri book Grandma had." I remembered reading it, I remember it had a chapter evocatively called "Under the Lindens," but I didn't remember the title.
I had wanted the book, but when my grandmother passed away there was a lot of kerfuffle. Her house was rented out for a while and a lot of the things left in it wound up either stolen or thrown out, so I presume that book is gone forever. (My mom did inherit SOME of her books, just not that one).
And I realized: hey, I have the Internet now. I can FIND the title of the book. And I did: "Uncle Titus in the Country." And then I thought: I wonder if Amazon has an inexpensive copy?
Nope. They will print me one on demand but it's fairly pricey for a very plain paperback with an icky cover. So I did a little further searching. Found one, described as being in excellent condition and with illustrations, on an antiquarian bookshop's webpage. It was $30.
And I admit, nostalgia is a powerful thing for me.
I ordered the book.
I am *pretty* sure, based on the fact that it's a Bobbs-Merrill imprint (it's in translation, of course, Spyri originally wrote in German) and based on the cover picture, that it's the same exact edition Grandma had. Or if not, it's an earlier (or later) reprint of the same.
So it's on its way to me. I have a special little bookshelf of "antique" books (Uncle Titus was originally published in 1913 but I think this edition is 1926, so it's a decade away from being a "true" 100-year-old antique). And I really do want to re-read it: I remember it as being a fairly peaceful story and one that took me to a time and a place I knew little about. (I have a copy of Heidi, also. Not a *great* copy - a 50s era, I think, reprint snagged cheaply from one of the antique shops in the area, and I always thought if Folio Society decided to do a version of Heidi, I'd buy it....if they come out with a book I want a "permanent copy" of I buy it, even if I already have it in another edition. I kind of loved Heidi....again, the idea of a different time and place and way of life.)
(And yeah, if I had a Kindle, I could have it for free....but it's not the same, somehow. For me, a big part of the "book experience" is the physical book. And the edition I'm getting has illustrations; that is important to me.)
No comments:
Post a Comment