Halcyon Days

Having just paid approximately the value of one month’s utility bills in order to eat grease-covered vegetables at the undergraduate student center, I am now whiling away the last few seconds of my laptop battery, watching the kids toss footballs in the field outside, contemplating whether it would be a truly HEINOUS diet sin to go and refill my root beer.

I was too busy to go to the grocery since we’ve returned from our trip, otherwise I’d have packed a lunch.  As it is, I’m wasting money and time, both too precious, to hike over to this building from the law school and consume an overpriced, undernourishing lunch, and then write a blog post about it.  But some days you just have to let it go, right?  This term has been an exercise in letting go.

But I promise this won’t be yet another post about how busy and unhappy I am right this second.  I am both, though both are temporary and both will cease as soon as I write that last exam in December.  Instead, I’ll write about how I am also having an ok day.  The weather is fine.  I jogged with the boys in it this morning, Liam looking contemplative and impossibly alert and aware for being so small – Jack exclaiming all the way (TREES!  WOOK!  TREES!  DUCK!  QUACK QUACK!  WOOK!)  I figured out how to lock the wheel on our double stroller, which made the jog much easier on my arms and lower back.  We met some kids in the park.  We saw a streetcar, and Jack yelled CHOO CHOO!  WOOK! and his little new friend at the park, same age, said – STEETCAW – and I was like – FINALLY.  WE HAVE MET ANOTHER VERBALLY CHALLENGED  TWO YEAR OLD.  I was beginning to think that New Orleans is populated with Mensa toddlers, with their perfect diction and compound sentences, damn them.

So right now the student body has occupied every green space on this campus, and they are all recreating as if their lives depended on it (does no one have class on Thursdays?), and I have a couple of hours of research time today, and tomorrow is totally mine for research, and so I feel ok.  And my laptop battery is near death, and my time really is pretty precious, so I’ll leave it at that, except to say that October in New Orleans is possibly the best place on earth.*

* Aside from all the murders.