I'm also waiting to hear back on some bloodwork I had done two weeks ago. Either teaching is the next fad diet or I'm shrinking for other reasons. Since coming back to Little U. on the Prairie, I've lost enough weight to make at least one pair of pants too loose to go without a belt and one skirt too dangerous to wear, period (would make class too interesting if that were to fall down in the middle of discussion). If it's just the demands of teaching -- and it's possible since this happened to me in New York too, though not to this degree -- then next semester will require a wholesale wardrobe change. I'll be teaching two sections instead of one. Yikes.
But yes, some answers from my local M.D. would be much appreciated. He's the old-school sort who has practiced privately in these parts for decades and has a staff of two (nurse, receptionist). So he processes all of his patients personally -- but also more slowly.
Sigh.
In other news, D has been playing around with our camera lately, and a few experiments have produced some pretty pictures. Here's one I especially love (downtown Seattle at sunset from the top of a skyscraper on the Eastside as the city lights are just beginning to come on). The space on the blog doesn't do it justice, but if you click on it, you can see it in a larger format:
Coincidentally, while reading W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn for one of my classes this week, I came across a lovely passage that seemed written for that image. As translated from German by Michael Hulse, Sebald writes,
Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night ...I get shivers thinking about that, the ephemerality of it all. And yet, because time is so elastic, our moment in which we sputter into existence and then back out again stretches beyond our field of vision. We are sparks in slow-motion, blinded by our own flame.
I guess it's nice that we get to have such a concept as "tomorrow."
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