"our helper sure amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing..."

Just finished my preliminary plan-and-outline for the service I'm leading Sunday after next. Neither I nor my car are happy-functional at the moment (operational, yes, but not in top form), so other than a walk around the 'hood later today, I'm spending the rest of the weekend drinking copious amounts of tea and trying to get some semblance of work done.

Still, I can almost see the surface of my dining room table again, and there be an abundance of good things and inspiring people:

Vanderbilt beat Georgia (football), and the Tigers are World Series-bound!

A quote from Muhummad Yunus, this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner: "...I decided that, rather than worrying about what happens to the whole world, or Bangladesh, or the famine situation, I would just find out what I could do to help one person have a better day."

matociquala, on the lessons to be gleaned from slush-reading: "What I'm saying is that a perfectly functional short story is not enough."

Eleanor Wilner. I heard her read when I was an undergraduate, and "Sarah's Choice" has stayed with me all the years since (I've scheduled it as the meditation text for this month's service). I may reward myself with my own copy of Reversing the Spell (her 1998 New and Selected) once I work through my backlog -- her work resonates very much with me in both her choices of topic and tone.

Orchid oolong tea (was reading some of the Wilner at a tearoom in Smyrna called "The Chatterbox").

Maria Mitchell -- specifically, Henry Albers's edition of her journals and letters. I'm less than 60 pages in, and I already have a half-dozen slips of paper marking passages that strike me as potential fodder for poems or sermons, or are just funny, such as her comment on Wordsworth's "simple, I am almost ready to say silly poems." (She continues, "I am in doubt what to think of Wordsworth. I should be ashamed of some of his poems if I had written them myself, and yet there are points of great beauty, and lines which once in the mind will not leave it.")

As it happened, Tintern Abbey was on one of the cassettes I was playing today. Some good stuff there. ("Strange fits of passion...", though -- *wince*)

Mozart definitely trumps Wordsworth, though.

Made pot roast with eggplant, garlic, and red/yellow peppers; boiled a week's worth of rice with some stalks of the monster bok choy (it came in the half-bushel of veggies I picked up at last week's art show); chopped and mixed the rest of the bok choy into a casserole; drank a bucket of tea; roasted a couple of radishes as a snack; and baked an almond cake.

Fleecy cardigans and robes.

There's more, but I am verrrry sleepy now. So, to bed.

*flails* (but in a good way)

Gravity... Look at what jen_deben made for me! *glee*