Shelf Help

Tonight I was “installed” as faculty at a service in my new school’s chapel. I felt a flicker of embarrassment while standing up front with the other new folks. But my better self said to enjoy this moment. The feeling was a little like graduation. I almost didn’t go to my ceremony last May, but my advisor talked me into it at the last minute. And in the moment she draped my doctoral hood over my head in front of the crowd in the arena, I realized she was right to urge me to go. Ceremony is important. It gives us a way to cope with change.

In general, I’m finding that going is better than not going. I’m trying to say yes whenever possible, to accept all invitations.

Yesterday I bought a shelf at Goodwill in hopes it would fit under my sink and house my growing collection of dishes. Of course I could have measured the area under the sink, and measured this shelf before I wagged it all the way home in my car. But my eyeballing was pretty close. The shelf is about half an inch too tall. I may cajole my landlord to use his workshop tools and saw off the excess trim. Likely I’ll just move the shelf to another room. Dickens seems to have accepted it as another playhouse (complete with a patch of wheatgrass I picked up for him the other day).

The shopping I did tonight was just a quick run through Safeway on the drive home from campus: seven tins of cat food, a big carton of organic half and half, and a shingle of ready-to-bake cookie dough. “I’m becoming that woman,” I thought. “Yeah, that doesn’t really look like much of a party,” said the cashier. “Where’s the catnip?”