I don’t know how to start this. I’ve been blogging for the past 7 years in one form or another, or on one page or another. I’m not going to recycle any of that here. You are reading totally fresh material. The first entry seems like it should be working on some higher level. This one won’t, so forgive me in advance.

It’s going to start thunderstorming soon. The window next to my computer gives me a view of an intersection. The house at the end of the intersection works as my marker for when I need to unplug the computer. The dark sky drops from the tree level to the telephone wires to eventually the roof. It hasn’t hit the roof yet, but it’s raining. I haven’t had to water my ferns outside this week, because it’s been pretty drippy.

I made salmon and vegetables for dinner, along with some leftover mashed potatoes. For breakfast, we had biscuits and gravy with scrambled eggs. I like cooking here much better than cooking in Flagstaff at high altitude. I haven’t burnt anything yet (knock on wood), and my only cooking disaster has been the meatloaf incident which had absolutely nothing to do with the oven. We don’t talk about that.

On Sundays, I watch TV—well, TV shows…and more than usual at least. In Flagstaff, I always watched Law and Order: Criminal Intent on Bravo for the five hours before the marathon started repeating itself. Now, I watch Gene Simmons: Family Jewels, Kendra, Entourage, and Hung. Tonight, Kendra Wilkinson is getting married, so the episode is going to be an hour long and eliminate Entourage for me. That’s okay.

I just found out today that one of my UNCA professors died a month or so ago: Dr. Rackham. He was a forgetful man, and he had become ill by the time I took Romantic to Modern with him in 2006. We didn’t have as many classes as we should have, and I’m not sure we wrote as many papers as we should have. I read a lot, but I don’t remember much, except for Death in Venice, which I appreciated much more when I reread it in Queer Fictions/Lit class later on.

What I do remember is meeting with him when I was a scared freshman. Dr. Moseley, for my freshman colloquium, required that we meet a faculty member who had been working at UNCA for over 15 years or something. I found him in the course catalog and picked him totally at random (not knowing that I would become a literature/creative writing major later on. Remember at this point I was pre-med/environmental science.) I met with Dr. Rackham. He told me about he joined the Peace Corps and was stationed somewhere in the mountains of South America. They sent him a chest full of books, and he fell in love with reading. I wrote a reflection paper about this “interviewing” experience, and I can’t find it now on my computer. It might not have been something that I thought was important enough to keep, but I’ll always remember how excited he looked when he told me about that treasure chest full of books. He was a good man.