Thursday, April 28, 2005
The cold is starting to go away. I felt well enough to work from home today. Usual oatmeal breakfast. I was incredibly productive today going through the backlog of e-mail and getting lots and lots of web updates done, including new home page news stories from Susie. Lunch: pastrami and provolone sandwich, tortilla chips, fruit smoothie. Dinner at home with Patrick: hanger steak (or hanging tender) marinated in garlic and red wine, wild mushroom couscous, organic red pepper and tomato soup, bread and butter. Patrick today interviewed for—and got—a job with S.W.I.F.T.—which makes him sound like the Man From U.N.C.L.E. but SWIFT stands for Student of the World Invitation to Friendship and Travel, an organization committed to enriching peoples' lives by offering cross-cultural exchanges between all countries of the world. He'll be teaching English conversation to French high school students in Oakland 5 days a week for 2 months this summer. Hooray! We put together promo Lodestar postcards which will be included in registration packets at the Saints and Sinners writer's conference in New Orleans this May. Patrick will be attending it with AJ—a long weekend. Read "Debriefing Scalia" (thenation.com), a response from Eric Berndt to his classmates after he asked U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, "Do you sodomize your wife?" It is written with brilliant clarity of thought and logic, desperately passionate but with a tempered tone, and it convinced me we need more people like Eric Berndt on this planet. Thanks to Tony A for the link.