Journal of a Sabbatical

September 15, 1998

and, somewhat surprisingly, tuesday feels like monday

Copyright © 1998, Janet I. Egan

I know it's Tuesday because they always have elections on Tuesdays, but it still feels like Monday. The sky is the darkest gray I've seen it in weeks. A couple of thunderstorms moved through and the air did not cool off.

There was no line at the polling place. I was in and out in less than 10 minutes. In fact all my encounters today seemed truncated, like they should have been longer and just weren't.

I returned a book to Tom that I had borrowed from his daughter. We didn't have time for conversation because I had to get to therapy.

Therapy went by fast.

I called the East Providence DPW to ask about the sign and the person I talked to didn't know about it and said I had to talk to the engineer. I guess East Providence is so small they only have one engineer in the DPW?

Then things slowed way down. I spent well over an hour downloading the Corps of Engineers' environmental impact statement on the Providence River dredging project. Partly it's that I have a slow modem and partly the network was just slow today. I would've thought everybody who wanted to read the Starr report had read it by now. Maybe that wasn't the problem. Who knows?

Once I downloaded the EIS, I scrolled through the PDF file looking for all mention of the Watchemocket Cove site or ducks or birds of any kind. I was relieved to find out that the Corps at least does know that many wild ducks winter there, but I thought the assessment of the impact on them was fairly minimal. I need to read the whole thing start to finish and at my current reading speed it could take awhile as it's a couple hundred pages or so. No wonder I never get any pleasure reading done :-)

I read not one single page of Glass, Paper, Beans today. Somehow sediments and sewage seemed more compelling.

I spent the remains of the afternoon and early evening finishing putting together the MRFRS volunteer newsletter and updating the volunteer database. Somehow, writing about precautions to avoid transmission of ringworm and FIP seemed like it fit in with sediments and sewage just fine. Even watching the election results on tv seemed to fit in with the theme of the day.