sad . . .

Today is the anniversary of my brother Eric's death.

Always a sad time.

M. and I are both home today, and were planning to go up to the cemetery, but it's a gray and drizzly day, and as it would involve taking the train up to Valhalla (yes, our family plot is in Valhalla, NY) and being outside quite a bit, I decided not to.

Still miss him.

. . . and the other stuff: academic, mostly

Yesterday started off on the down side -- for once, M.'s insomnia was catching, so I dragged myself into school in the morning. Wore entirely the wrong thing; somehow had decided that a rather frilly dress, bought in London and in style a couple of years ago, wasn't getting worn enough; ending up feeling somehow like a fashionable dork.

My students owed me papers that day, so they were unusually quiet due to the usual post-paper lack of sleep, and *my* lack of sleep had me not dynamic enough to pick up the slack; the section that meets for two hours on Tuesdays got out an hour early with the injunction to be ready to talk on Thursday.

Then I spent three hours at the NYU library, ready to come back for a teaching meeting for one of the courses I'm doing next semester -- only to get back to school and discover it's next week.

But my Trollope class was terrific. It's in a church hall uptown, lots of mature ladies, and they were *great* -- really interested and engaged. I'm excited about that.

And this morning I realized that *The Warden* fit my dissertation perfectly; there's the legal case, and law vs. conscience, and Trollope's more conservative take on reform, and his specific address to Dickens as Mr. Popular Sentiment. It would be a good countertext to what I'm writing about.