No photo today: as long-time readers will recall, I only post images every third blog post or so. Besides, the only photos I feel I’ve taken in the last two weeks have been of our house. Specifically, a catalog of scratches, holes, mars, gouges, cracks, mold, grime, and other unsightly blemishes. Not exactly the kind of thing to pull readers in.

So today is my first day of class. I have only one to attend: English 420, Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy. It’ll be the first university class I’ve attended in twelve years, since I was twenty-two and skipped merrily out of my last lecture at Berkeley. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t slightly nervous. But it’s an undergraduate class (I’m taking it as English 636, the catch-all for “Directed Readings,” whereby I attend the lectures but get a grad-student-sized dose of writing and reading), and as far as I can tell, there was no reading assigned prior to the first day. Should be a breeze, nu?

The last two weeks have been somewhat less of a breeze, though by no means terrible. Our first days in Raleigh we pitched camp amid a houseful of boxes and a cramped maze of furniture. We had given away our old coffee maker in Tacoma, and had unpacked neither grinder nor beans to make use of our French Press, so I hobbled out of bed each morning and out into the glaring, sweltering daylight to pick up large coffees and pastries at Cup-A-Joe two blocks away.

Our house was a Rubik’s Cube: where do you even begin? To unpack this stack of boxes you need to first make room over here to set stuff down, but over here is filled with another stack of boxes. So you have to move the dresser to there so that latter stack can go there so you can have the room you need