(Title taken from the ever-popular not-very diplomatic sticker: )

I haven't written for a while. Everything's fine, but nothing much has been going on. Maybe a quick bullet list:

1. Things with Anna go so well and smoothly that we find it sort of unsettling. No drama, just a seamless meshing of gears and everything works out.

2. I stopped sitting in on ESL classes, because I was getting a little antsy. Before finishing, I designed and ran exercises in both classes, which was excellent, though nerve-wracking. I think I'm actually quite good at the classroom interaction part; however, faced with a blank page and creating an exercise from scratch, I have a similar reaction to trying to do a mathematical proof, which involves huddling in a dark corner and rocking back and forth and hoping it will all go away.

3. Still making bread. I'm very good at it, which doesn't seem very hard to me: for yeast breads I learned from the incredibly explicit illustrated steps in The Tassajara Bread Book, and quickbreads are easy to mess with. Anna tells me many people follow all the steps in a bread recipe, but don't end up with good bread at the end; that seems surreal, but she knows these things. Regardless, I maintain that it's not very hard if you pay attention, and everyone should try it.

4. Books I've read since unemployment (omitting a few I started and gave up on because they weren't good):

                 How Starbucks Saved My Life
                 What The Buddha Never Taught
                 The Lotus Sutra (half of it, anyway)
                 Cave In the Snow
                 The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam
                 All Is Change: The Two-Thousand Year Journey of Buddhism to the West
                 Warm Smiles From Cold Mountains
                 The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins
                 In Search of Zarathustra
                 The Catholic Imagination
                 Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit
                 Hardcore Zen
                 Why I Am A Catholic
                 Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
                 Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
                 The Food of A Younger Land
                 Children Who See Too Much
                 Matter
                 Consider Phlebas
                 Use of Weapons
                 Meetings With Remarkable Women : Buddhist teachers in America
                 Ad Infinitum: a biography of Latin
                 Born to Run
                 Sitting Still (interesting book about a Zen-Catholic intersection)
                 caught up on Fables
                 The Steel Remains
                 Fight: or, everything you ever wanted to know about ass-kicking but were afraid you'd get your ass kicked for asking
                 Waking Up: A Week Inside A Zen Monastery
                 One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism
                 Teaching English As A Foreign Or Second Language
                 Buddha Or Bust
                 The Night Of The Gun
                 The Power of Babel
               

   They're all pretty good, but the top three I'm recommending to people are Born to Run, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, and Destiny Disrupted.

   ---

   Chris