Friday

Wow, this has been some week, and boy am I glad that it's Friday. This is my view from my desk, where I am trapped for another half hour, until a meeting, and then finally-- finally! --I am off duty.

Unless you are from Portland, the miracle of this picture may not strike you right away. Can you see it? Look closely. Give up? It's sun! (I suppose for the East Coasters reading this, the miracle might be the green grass that you can just see through the tree.) The rain has ceased for a couple hours, and everybody rushed outside and got a little crazy. Even my fern is going nuts and trying to escape. You can see it better here:

This asparagus fern is like a sibling to me. Some of you may recognize it, because it is in fact (drum roll) well over thirty years old. That's right: this fern is even older than me. My mother and father moved it from San Francisco to New York with them when I was just over 2 1/2, and Jamie and I recently moved it back West with us. To my knowledge, the fern has never been repotted. Periodically it starts to die and drop needles everywhere, and then I cut it back. It seems to go dormant for a while, but I think it's just thinking-- because all of a sudden it will shoot out a new stalk (that looks like an asparagus). Those suckers grow quickly-- the new branch on this one (that's reaching out the window) appeared just before last weekend and was two feet tall by Monday.

Anyway, the beautiful glimpses of green are just a distraction. This is what my office really looks like, just below the fern:

And that is what this week has been like: piles of papers moved from one stack to another, chaos threatening to burst forth at any minute, starting one thing to be distracted by something more urgent or interrupted by something else. Student crises, last-minute proposals, and lunch at my desk.

But some great things happened this week, too. One is that a collection of articles I edited with a colleague has been accepted for publication, by Oxford University Press (eek!). This meant a lot of jumping up and down and squealing with my co-editor. And another is that I am going to be test-knitting a hat designed by Suvi S., one of my favorite knitters anywhere. Check out her blog. It makes me want to move to Finland (well, which I kind of did anyway). But, then again, I am kind of enjoying having spring in February.

Sun has come back out, and I am hoping for a nice walk this afternoon. Then a weekend of knitting. Happy weekend to you, too.