Quick update

The lack of updates recently is due to a plethora of goings-on in my non-blog life (which, as some readers know, makes up rather the majority of my life). A few things in particular:

• Betsy, Evan and I all got sick at roughly the same time last week, and are still recovering. This is Evan’s first time ever being sick. He’s taking it reasonably well for a baby — which is to say, still crying a lot. His face is also somewhat wetter than usual, because babies are not skilled at what you might call “fluid management.”
• Evan turned seven months old last Saturday.
• He got a flu shot yesterday, and took it like a champ — much better than I reacted to my own flu shot, last year.
• This past weekend, my dad and stepmom and stepdog drove up from Texas to visit, which was great! The previous weekend (Easter), Betsy’s parents and sister and niece and nephew came to visit, which was also great. Introverts that we are, we’re not used to having so many people over in such a (relatively) short span, so it brought us out of our shells a bit, and that’s a Good Thing.
• At the end of March, I finished copyediting a book about programming, called Programming for the Puzzled, for MIT Press. That was a big job, but pretty exciting to be working for a client like MIT.
• Various other editing projects in progress.
• Still working on the first draft of Crane Girl, now over 115,000 words and counting. I may have to cut this one somewhat, but I suspect the finished product will still be pretty long.
• I’m on season 3 (of 5) of Teen Titans. It’s pretty good! It’s closer to the “kid” end of the kid/adult spectrum than, say, Avatar: The Last Airbender, but still very enjoyable, and surprisingly deep and serious in places. It’s also really well done visually, clean and dynamic and powerful.
• Betsy has started watching The Durrells in Corfu, which only has seven episodes so far. I’ve been gradually watching it over her shoulder more and more, i.e., it’s sucking me in. The show is based on some books which are, in turn, based more or less on a true story. It’s about an English family that moves to the Greek island of Corfu (a real place) in the 1930s.
• The March for Science was on Saturday — a successful event, by the sound of things.

I’ve also been reading some poems. Here’s an old one you may not have run into before — I especially like the last two lines.

God’s Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.