Ouch, Haze. I’m sorry. They should have asked you somthing simpler, like, ‘what was the last paper you wrote?’ 
Remembering dates is hard.
I’m glad the date thing went well-ish, rosie. I hope things develop nicely, romantic relationship or no.
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It’s a beautiful book, but hard to describe, and not a book you can just speed read through. I’ve borrowed it from the library, but I’m going to buy it just so I can read it slowly again and ponder some of the passages.
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(Marilynne Robinson fanatic mode on)Everyone should buy it(MRfmo) In the review in Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt, Nick Hornby said he had to re-read many passages a couple of times before he half-understood them. It’s something you want to inscribe into your brain over slow reading so that your subconcious can work on it. It’s probably the most meditative book I’ve ever read.
I’m going to quote a passage, and forgive me if I’ve posted it before. For anyone who hasn’t already gotten synopsis and plot from me, it’s a novel that’s a series of letters written by a dying man to his very young son. He himself is in his late 70s. He’s a minister, the son and grandson of abolitionist ministers.
“For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone. I feel I am with you now, whatever that can mean, considering that you’re only a little fellow now and when you’re a man you might find these letters of no interest. Or they might never reach you, for any number of reasons. Well, but how deeply I regret any sadness you have suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed. That is to say, I pray for you. And there’s an intimacy in it. That’s the truth.”
*"This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?
If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefi (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it."*
Two passages. I don’t think that violates any Board policies. Everyone I know is getting it (as well as chocolate and cookies) for Christmas.
Today I’m doing the laundry, cleaning the kitchen, making the yummy Oreo truffles from another thread, baking a cake, and then we’re going to Mr. Lissar’s godparents’ house for dinner, and I will ask them if we can hold Christmas Eve at their house. Whee!
