I should mention that not all is sturm und drang. It's true; I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed by the sturm und drang at the moment, but there ARE a few bright spots. To wit:

• Brenda came over for dinner tonight. I made pasta of a genre with which I've been experimenting for the last few months . . . you start with olive oil and butter, rather more than you'd think (because it eventually coats the pasta), and you fry things in it that will impart flavor to the oil. Today I sort of carmelized onions and garlic, and added mushrooms, oregano, and sweet Italian sausage. When the noodles were done, I added a bunch of spinach and a dash of lemon to the mix, and when the spinach was wilted, I tossed everything with the pasta (farfalle). It was wonderful, if I do say so myself. (I made something similar for Louise and Elliott a while back; that dish featured red peppers, my all-time favorite vegetable.)
  
  
• And then for dessert, we had the squash that wasn't ready in time for dinner. We turned it into dessert by adding butter and sugar and cinnamon . . . yum! There's nothing I love better than making dinner out of what looks like it'll be nothing at all . . .
  
  
• And on Sunday, I was Code Warrior. I've been thinking of a program I wanted to write, to keep track of the comments I've written on student papers. So on Sunday, I just decided to write it. I spent a few hours polishing up my PHP and MySQL skills, managed to get through to my database at my ISP, and actually got the page up and running. Maybe it was pure procrastination, I don't know, but I felt enormous satisfaction at being able to create the database and the pages to access it. It's been a while since I've done coding, and actually, in some weird way, I miss it. When I had to do it at work, I found it very anxiety-provoking and fussy (in the general run of things, I tolerate far more errors than your average human being), but then again, it was enormously satisfying when it worked. The Pharmacy Staff Calendar will forever live on in my mind as a triumph. (They're still using it; sometimes I go look just to admire it . . . )
  

So not everything is terrible around here . . . (still, keep those cards and letters comin'. I appreciate the support.)