Looking for comfort

 

Yeah. Been one of those weeks, and that was even BEFORE the latest news of the latest school shooting. I had several unproductive interactions, including one very demanding person who - as I said - wanted me to bend a rule for them that I cannot, even if I wanted to. (You are generally a demanding person? I don't do anything extra for you anyway).

Yesterday afternoon, before the mail arrived (it comes late the first day of the week it's delivered) I lit one of the scented candles I had (had to extinguish it not long after; I had forgotten that one had a very heavy scent). 

The stuff-in-the-mail helped. But I found I couldn't read on "Blackout" - it's to the point where all the time traveling historians are trying to get "home" (back to 2060 Oxford from 1940s England) and they can't find their "drops" (the place where the portal opens) or they find it and it WON'T open. And it's funny how I feel my OWN chest get tight, even though I know these are characters in a book and I assume that given there's a second volume AND it's Connie Willis, things will be made right.

And at one point, a kindly vicar (who could be a disguised time traveler himself, I'm not sure) tells the young woman calling herself Eileen that "everything will be right in the end"

And yes, that's a touchstone to hold to, I guess. I mean I suppose in an eschatological sense it will be, though I would like things to be more-right in the here and now. 

I am also weirdly reminded of something I experienced years and years and years ago - over 20 now, actually - when I went to Hot Springs on my fall break. I was walking up the "mountain" there ("West Mountain," I think?) and it was very early in the day. I passed a woman walking up there, an older woman (though she could have been no older than the age I am now) and she stopped at one of the scenic overlooks and looked out over everything and said "Everything is as it should be" to me and....it was sort of uncanny. That's why I remember it. I mean, most likely it was just a nice woman who lived in Hot Springs looking out over a nice fall day and feeling grateful for it, but ... in those days I was still enough of a believer in the mystical to wonder if it was some kind of a message. 

I read a bit of a book on what we know about the Mississippian era of early Indigenous culture but it was rather dry....I may have to dig out one of my lighter fantasy or counterfactual history books for a while.

 

Thursday night I have AAUW salad supper; Friday night one of my colleagues suggested a departmental "whoever wants to come" gettogether at a local restaurant. I did a bit more on the Ruggles Reversible Scarf tonight but I bet I don't get a lot of knitting in the rest of this week.

that's okay, I guess. but it does seem lately my days get eaten a lot by work stuff - it was after 5 when I got home today after leaving for campus at 7 (Grading, mostly)