A Crazy Week

Well, I sent off nearly 30 pages to my adviser on Sunday.  Then today I realized that a page and a half-- what I thought was a brilliant new insight-- was actually a totally erroneous reading because I hadn't done my history legwork and had relied on someone else's notes.  It's okay, I noticed it before my adviser could point it out to me, I revised it, and I sent him the revised edition, but boy, do I feel foolish.  We all make mistakes, I guess.  Luckily, this doesn't affect the overall thesis. 

The craziness of this week doesn't come from a faulty reading, however.  In the past week or so I've had a snow day, a trip to New Mexico, a six and a half hour delay at the Denver airport, and my fifth anniversary with Zan.  The snow day was kind of fun-- I didn't have to go into work.  We had some friends in town so we went to a late breakfast at a roadside diner style restaurant.  Kind of a relaxing day (if any day is relaxing when I'm so far into thesis mode).

New Mexico was beautiful and sad.  We're putting my grandma into hospice care.  They found a cancerous mass in her abdomen.  She's 82, very weak, and her kidneys aren't functioning well.  The doctors said they didn't know if she had a few weeks, months, or a year, but they recommended hospice.  It seems like it might be months-- if that.  My mom and I booked a flight to see her immediately.  I thought of waiting until Spring Break in mid-March, but I'm glad I didn't.  She's rapidly declining and I didn't want to wait until too late. We had a good visit, though.  We did some fun things: got to see my aunt's new frozen custard/fudge/popcorn shop (it's all SO tasty!), had a few nice dinners out with my aunt, uncle, and cousins.  Mostly, though, my mom and I tried to spend as much time as possible with my grandma.  We watched a Peanuts special together, talked as much as didn't weary out my grandma, and my aunt brought us all Chinese carry-out for lunch.  After my grandma had gone to bed, my mom and I went to our hotel bar and got margaritas and sat outside by a fire, looking out over the mountains.  For, in spite of it all, these were hard days.  It's not easy watching someone you love... you know.  I'm sure I could write more eloquently if I tried.

But the American West is really something.  You feel so small, but not in an insignificant way-- it's like, a kind of gratefulness washes over you.  I kept thinking, "I get to live on this Earth.  What a magnificent place."  It was warm while we were there, too.  The second day, while my mom and aunt had a long meeting with hospice, I sat outside in the sun and worked on my thesis.  I felt so able, somehow.  I wrote around 12 pages in two and a half days.  At night I could see the stars so clearly, and I just kept thinking of a line in the poem I'm writing about, "This dead of midnight is the noon of thought/ And wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars."

...and then getting home we got stuck in Denver.  Not because of snow, but because of a mechanical issue.  I appreciate that we can't fly with a mechanical problem, but wow.  We didn't get home until 3:00 AM-- when we were scheduled to arrive just before dinner.  Still, I got a lot of writing done in the airport, and we had some really tasty Wolfgang Puck Pizza Express.  Seriously, the guy cooking the pizzas was an artist.  Good food really improves any experience.

And on Monday, Zan and I celebrated FIVE WHOLE YEARS together!  Since he had work until 9:30 we couldn't do anything super special, but we ate lunch at Ray's (we get burgers each year on our anniversary) and then for dinner had some homemade soup and exchanged gifts.  Simple pleasures.  So happy to have spent five years together.  What a five years it's been!