The crab apple tree in the front yard has outdone itself welcoming its new tenants to the apartment. It burst into unbelievable bloom this spring, and shepherded its weighty crop of miniature apples to maturity throughout the summer and fall.
And now, they’re ripe, and the birds and the squirrels are gorging themselves on the fruit. Robins fling themselves awkwardly at the higher branches, and you can just see their jealousy of the birds that are more accustomed to perching while they eat. Squirrels hunker down in the middle of a particularly crowded clump of fruit and stuff fruit into their mouths methodically, mechanically, eyes glazed over.
The evidence of their overindulgence is splattered all over the ground under the surrounding trees on the block. Pinkish, gritty diarrhea, all over everything.
Sometimes I wonder, as I use up the last of the old shampoo bottle and mix in the first of the new, if the shampoo company changed its formula between bottles. And if the combination is explosive.
Growing up, when any of my family were sick we didn’t stay in bed; we took our pillow out to the couch. When more than one of us were sick, we pulled out the hide-a-bed in the couch. And one time I remember there being 3 of us in the hide-a-bed, one on the love seat, and one on a bed on the living room floor made out of the unused couch cushions. In fact, I only remember one bought of the flu when I spent most of my time in bed, and that was because we had guests staying with us. That’s the bought of the flu where my temperature spiked to 105 a couple of times and when I read David Copperfield. That was a memorable flu in so many unpleasant ways… I’m pretty sure I don’t like that book just on its own merits, but it’s entirely possible that I don’t like it for some fever-related reasons, too.
Anyway, this “going to bed” when you’re sick was something we’d heard about from books, TV, and friends, but we couldn’t really see the point. There wasn’t much about spending a day in bed that sounded appealing. Our bedrooms weren’t interesting, and there was really no call for them to be interesting. They were just for sleeping in at night. There was no TV there (and for the earliest part of my life, TV was a kind of magical thing that only appeared during the Olympics or when we were sick). There were no books or toys there. And why go out to get those and come back when all you had to do was go out to the daytime areas of the house and rest there? No, being in bed was boring. The couch was the place to be.
Even now, with Netflix and the entire internet on my laptop, I generally move dutifully out to the couch when I’m home sick. I can count on one hand the times I’ve decided to stay in bed. Bedrooms are for night time — everywhere else is for daytime, and old habits die hard.
Today, though, not moving out to the couch freed me from the default of turning on the TV, or facing the book I didn’t want to read anyway. Today I just wanted lie there and feel the cat snuggling against the backs of my knees and play Settlers of Catan on my iPod or listen to Wait Wait Don’t Tell me or watch the breeze flutter the curtain. Today I stayed in bed.
Thursday and Friday were Reading Days at Carleton. I love reading days. You never know quite what’s going to happen.
Goodsell becomes R2-D2
On the last day of classes (Wednesday), students decked out our observatory like R2-D2, complete with recorded sound effects. It was kind of fun to wake up the next morning to Minnesota Public Radio’s Cathy Wurzer talking about the prank during Morning Edition.
Then the whole campus seems to have taken a breath on Thursday.
Mass Spooning for Posterity
Then on Friday they decided to reprise the Silent Dance Party in the Libe (as seen in this amateur documentary).
But there was a lot of Friday yet to fill, and nobody really wanted to study any more, so breaking a Guinness World Record seemed the thing to do. Before yesterday, only a measly 432 people had ever participated in mass spooning. Thankfully, that pathetic record has now been shattered. 529 students saw to that. (Which, by the way, is more than a quarter of the student body… er… population.)
I didn’t get to see R2-D2 in action (he was dismantled disappointingly quickly). I did, however, wonder what all those people were doing lying down in the Bald Spot yesterday as I walked to the student union to get coffee. And then I forgot to wonder about the people lying down when everyone’s attention was diverted by the streakers.
While all of that was happening, the investment team that manages our endowment was receiving an award for the way they handled things recently.
So yeah, busy times here this week. But today, everything’s much more serious as finals get underway. The library is full of people studying and people getting ready to say goodbye and people saying goodbye. The end of Spring Term is always bittersweet.
