autumn timewarp collage

this week has brought the first cold rains of the season. half of October stayed quite warm and muggy, but autumn is properly settling in now. the time of hats and sweaters has arrived.

yesterday it seemed to rain and rain all day long. I spent the morning grading, the afternoon putting together job applications and writing bits of dissertation chapters. the pug spent most of his day snoozing, as usual, but we also went for a glorious long walk in the pre-evening. having a dog is such a great excuse for going on walks every day. I never thought I was a dog person, but walking a little pug around the neighborhood has become an unfading pleasure for me. I like being outside. it's amusing to watch him sniff at everything.

it's also amusing to watch him in general, whether he is curled up in a puddle of wrinkly fur or whether he is stretching up to look out the windows and grumble at bicyclists. 

my time this semester has an interesting grounded uncertainty about it. I'm teaching an online course, so my teaching efforts fit into whatever slots and nooks they need to. and so does everything else. morning walks, housework, reading and writing and research, cooking, spending time with dear husband, writing and reading and research, notebooks, evening walks, and making lists of more job applications that need filling out. 

the mountain photo there is from two weeks ago when my youngest brother was about to get married. the Chagall above is from a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago several years ago now--I'm not exactly sure when. maybe it was during an October.

last October had art in it, too. Washington DC art. and also Hamilton.

the October before that was more nature-y than artsy, it seems. 

there are ten Octobers chronicled in this blog. ten sets of intermittent records of my thoughts during the tenth month of ten different years. much has changed since the October of my senior year of undergraduate work, when I was neck-deep in building websites and waxing exuberant about the first USB drive I ever owned. so much has changed.

and many things have not changed. autumns are still the best. academia is still a great cozy, challenging cocoon of crazy curiosity. I am still writing.