Eugenious

Mom called to check in on me, since I’m all by myself for a few days. We commiserated about how hard it is to take well-written source material and fashion it into decent prose without plagiarising. So far, so good, but it’s difficult.

I got my weekend writing goal accomplished. I rewrote a 6,000-word section that needed significant work. Seventeen thousand down, fifteen thousand to go, according to the word counter. I’ve got a 5,000-word section to work on before work every day this week, which will leave a brutal 10,000 words for next weekend. If I can do it, I’ll have something pretty nice to line-edit during ten hours of flights to New York on Monday. It beats watching The Da Vinci Code.

If these numbers bore you, you’ll want to skip reading the weblog for the next week. It’s all I’ll be able to talk about, and I’m just kicking around this empty house with nobody else to talk to.

A joyful end to a long day.

Up at four to take Julie and Sylvan to the airport. Everyone else had the same idea; lines were long. We saw Mike, Brooke, and Kylie (going to Hawaii) as well as Annie, Damien, and Oscar (going to Denver). Julie stood in the “security” line while I waited in the long line to hand her suitcase over to the friendly suitcase inspectors. It looks like their flights all went fine, except for the fussy fifteen-month old boy in 20H.

Later in the morning, I went to a memorial service for a retired faculty member at my school. It was moving. His children and one of his grandsons stood up and talked about him, followed by a number of his former students. They said that he knew the difference between happiness and contentment (hint: contentment involves sitting and watching television). They said that the highest compliment he could pay to a person or an object was “vigorous.” Vigorous meant that something, or someone, was full of energy, and still a little rough-hewn.

If people say a quarter of the good things about me when I die that they said about Philip, I will have lived a life wonderful beyond measure.

In the afternoon, I took a nap. Tephra helped. She’s helpful that way. I woke up and worked on an easy part of my thesis for a few hours. I revised about 2,500 words today. So far, so good.

I rewarded myself with a night at the opera. Well, at the symphony. They didn’t play Take Me Out To The Ballgame, but they did start with two short pieces. The first was a choral work by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Julie’s favorite composer, based on text from The Merchant of Venice (Act V, scene 1). The second was a rousing Bruckner choral piece based on Psalm 150, a psalm of praise, music, and loud noises.

After the intermission, the choir had decided to stay, so the orchestra played some Beethoven. Thirty minutes of crashing, zooming, and teasing followed, until finally the cellos and basses relented and warmed up the Ode To Joy theme. A whole lot of hollering followed, most of it apparently in German. The tenor had the most fun.

I had a cheap seat, which ended up being in the second row. I got to watch the conductor’s remarkable variety of facial expressions, but I didn’t get to see the timpani, which is the best part of the Ninth. Sounded good, though.

Seid umschlungen, Millionen.

I took my last exam in my last class on Wednesday. Now all I have to do to finish my master’s degree is finish my thesis. My plan is to hand in a good draft to my advisors on January 8, then have it completed and turned in to the university by the end of winter term, March 16.

It looks like it’s going to be about 30,000 words (100 pages, yow!), of which about 10,000 are in good shape. The rest needs to be turned from a structured collection of notes and excerpts into readable prose that makes sense.

Julie and Sylvan left for New York this morning; I leave in nine days. That means I have five excuse-free weekend days and four workdays to rewrite about 20,000 words. Hmm, 3,000 words of rewriting each weekend day, and 1,000 words each workday. That should be possible.

This morning, Chris (my co-worker) asked me if I’d found any more dollar bills lately. I told him no. An hour later, I stopped by and wordlessly held up the dollar I had just found on the floor of the busy hallway.

This is getting strange.

Three times in the past two weeks, I have found paper money, dollar bills, on the ground. I have found a single dollar twice and two dollars once. It’s unusual. I’m used to seeing pennies, probably because nobody picks them up; they are useless, a waste of everyone’s time, and should have been retired years ago. Every once in a while, maybe once every couple of weeks, I’ll find a nickel, dime, or quarter (I pick those up; that’s real money). I almost never find bills just lying on the ground, though. Until the last two weeks, I probably found a bill once every couple of years.

I’m going to assume that somewhere above 80% of people would notice a dollar bill on the ground and that more than 90% of those people would pick one up. That means that the four bills that I found, all of which were lying on the sidewalk or floor in plain view and in public places, hadn’t been there long.

The first time I found a bill, I was surprised. I looked around on the street, and there was nobody. The second time, I found two bills inside a building. I looked around again, holding them up to see if anyone would claim them. Today, though, as soon as I saw the bill, I knew it was for me. I just slowed my bike down, bent over, put it in my pocket, and kept going.

Somebody out there is taking care of me.

Must be Halloween.