Technology can be such a motherfreakin' pain in the ass (have been dealing with new software, tangled cables, wonky connections, and gnarled-up wiring the past several days), but it has also allowed me to ascertain that my favorite modernization of Chaucer's "Truth" was crafted by Henry Van Dyke... which means it's in the public domain, which means I can use it as the text for a piece I plan to create for the Guild's next exhibit. Huzzah!

Other pleasures:

* Still 70 F here.

* LSU whomped Ohio State.

* Using a Storm Trooper stamp on my fourth quarter tax return. (Petty, yes. A pleasure nonetheless.)

* Finishing Elizabeth Goudge's Linnets & Valerians. I liked it far more than The Little White Horse. The tandem of Uncle Ambrose and Ezra delighted me. (I see that she wrote it eighteen years after ALWH. Two books do not a sample make, but I do like the fact that the later book is more fun than the earlier one.)

* Candy bar: dark chocolate with chilies and cherries

* William Matthews (all from Search Party):

... the hands are flooded
and the need begins to grow
like rice in a paddy
to hold something.
Then if I pick up a pen
and write a poem
I will want to read it to someone
and the poem will be the party
to honor whomever I read it to,
a fallen apple branch
cut into firewood,
cold milk in the morning,
a long walk at night.

- "Sticks & Stones"

...it was when I learned to read
that I began always
to live among the dead.

- "Living Among the Dead"

His was a mind alive by a pure greed
for reading, for the book
which "is a mirror,"
as Lichtenberg said: "if an ass
peers into it, you can't expect
an apostle to look out."

- "In Memory of W. H. Auden"