Consolations

 

It's Victoria Day today and I made a cake--not a Victoria sponge, but a hacked yellow boxed cake mix with melted semi-sweet chocolate and milk chocolate chips as filling. Professional bakers and highly experienced home bakers will comment on how amateur-looking my cake appears. 

So what's been up? Lots of mundane things...I've been going out and exploring academic locations including libraries with both brutalist and contemporary architecture (not my own descriptions). I'm also trying to increase the temperature of my dangerously lukewarm religious and spiritual life by trying my best on weekdays to read scripture and hear mass from this university chapel with what Google described as Richardsonian Romanesque in design--I would describe the physical structure as comforting, silent, and calming. There is beauty everywhere, and it's one of many things I'm grateful for. Cheers.

snapshots in transit

 I started writing this while waiting (on a layover) at a DFW boarding gate where it was warmer than what I'm accustomed to. The PHL skyline surely lifted my mood despite the tiredness. The flight on the way here was very far from ideal--it was dense, stuffy, constricting. 

(I paused for a few days here)

I'm back from bereavement, reunions, and traveling between eastern and pacific time--south of the border. An assortment of emotions were felt; majority revolving around the melancholy and bittersweet. Happy to report that I started and finished James Rollins's The Crucible during this trip. Also, my eyes feasted on scenery and my gustatory sense delighted on new fare including coffee.

This is an instance when I relearned that a lifetime is brief and that we are all transients. That all the little moments of our daily lives matter.