Warm and sunny in Oakland. Yesterday Bill and I went for a hike in the Redwoods, came back to Oakland and had a burrito. A good day. Today is Monday and I don't have to go to work and in fact, it sort of feels like the semester is already over. The fifth round of a papers is finished (though I have a few stragglers to read in the next couple days) and all that's left is collecting the final drafts and the presentations. No more deadlines, progress grades, lesson planning or student wrangling, and I can just sit back more or less and enjoy the next couple weeks. I told my Friday class, that since they're my last class at my current institution, they better do a good job on their presentations, that I don't want to go out on a bad note. As they say, the quality of your last thought determines the first thought of your new life. I'll let you know if it works.

My apologies for lack of context for last week's posting of a Ted Berrigan poem. For some reason I've always liked that sonnet. Don't know what it means but I'm 18 so why are my hands shaking? It came to mind two weekends ago during Buddyfest, but I'm not going to go into that. Instead I need to register for classes in the fall and pay some bills. The total damage of my fractured thumb (won't be able to softly pinch for three months or fully use my left hand for six months) has come to be about 1,800 dollars, which, not having much of an insurance plan is kind of a bummer. That said, my hand doctor has been really great, and has cut me a break on payment because of my limited insurance. It seems important that my left (opposable) thumb heal correctly, bi-pedal descendent of the ape and all.

On the front page of the Sunday paper was a longer article about frontotemporal dementia, which is something I know a little bit about as my dad has had it since 1999 (and probably many years previous to that). The article does a pretty good job explaining the specific characteristics of the disease (that it changes personality, language, social interactions), as well as injecting lots of narrative to "show and not tell" about the disease. Most articles about dementia are about Alzheimer's, so it's nice to read something in the mainstream about "Pick's Disease." I miss my dad.