Monday

Spent most of today outdoors studying.  It's easy to forget how nice it is to be outside, and now I've mostly outgrown my spring allergies.  It's really the only place where you can find total concentration--indoors, I feel too distracted by other thoughts, and the internet, of course!

I have three tests this week, Tuesday through Thursday afternoon.  Sometime this week I want to really make a dent in my reading list.  I'm a couple of chapters into South, by Ernest Shackleton--first-hand narrative of his attempted crossing of Antarctica.  So far, they have not made it to the continent yet, and it's unbelievable how slow and tedious and careful they had to be, navigating the ship through the ice. Sometimes they would have to go the wrong way for miles and see the same ice berg again.  Oh, and sometimes he mentions more human aspects of the voyage, like the crew playing soccer on the ice, or naming the sledge dogs.  It's those things that make a hundred years seem not so long ago.

Writing-wise, I have added several more poems to my collection--at this rate, it will have to wait a while before getting published.  But that's all right.  I had entered some of them in a contest, and now that that's over, I realise I could be as overly kind to my poems as I am overly harsh to my novel WIP's.  But that's all right, too.  I admire artists who have confidence in their art; this is one exception in which I am (or try to be), too.  I actually love my poems, and maybe they're the best thing I've written so far (for what it's worth).

And here I'd better stop and study for that first test...  Typical me, I forgot Poli Sci was tomorrow and wrote the essay outlines for US History instead!