Shamefaced

My cheeks are actually burning as I type this--July to November is an inexcusably long time to avoid one's own creation. To my credit, I have been very busy with classes this semester, busier than usual, it seems. And now the holidays loom ominously in the not so distant distance.
Much has happened since late summer. We have a new driveway and an actual sidewalk that leads from said driveway to the front porch. Imagine that! We've tilled two enormous flowerbeds in the front yard (which will remain unplanted until I have energy and money enough to address the problem next spring). I have graded hundreds of pages and re-read Dante's Divine Comedy as well as Milton's Paradise Lost for my honors classes. My daughter had her nose broken during basketball practice just last week and must wear a scary face guard for the next month (during games and practice only).
My hair is longer.
In contrast to all this activity, I barely managed--with the hair-growing and all--to get through even the simplest magazine article. That article was Anthony Lane's review of the Incredibles, which I read just this morning over my cup of tea. Mr. Lane is, in fact, my cup of tea. My husband is on notice--if this lovely Brit ever shows up at the school, for instance, or my favorite restaurant--if he happens to be pumping gas at the local Village Pantry--I reserve the right to drop all pretense of wifehood, motherhood, and teacherhood to run off with him to the Bahamas--or New York. I don't care. Anyhow, I did make time for his review, which was, as always, precisely modulated to suit the film, and based on it, I will make time to see the Incredibles this holiday season.
Books have been out of the question until this week, when I picked up Grendel, which I have, by turns, hated and admired. Some of it, the flights of philosophy offered by the dragon and Grendel himself, are simply unreadable. Other sections offer a wonderful elaboration, in contemporary terms, of the beautiful old legend of Beowulf. All of it is perfectly suited to bedtime, wind-down reading. It has not once failed to send me successfully off to sleep--which is not to say it's boring. It is, instead, meaty and satisfying to a frazzled mind.
That, I must report, is the sum of this autumn's reading. As Grendel feels shame for his sorry state, I'm ashamed of my shortcomings as well and should perhaps resolve to take it out on my students by becoming a holy terror in the classroom.