I don't want much to be in this foul mood. Not on a day in February that promises this much beauty (60 degrees! Sunshine!). Not when we've got four new lovely and (as Jeff says) delicate and dainty pigs. Wilbur is white and gnarled and likes to be scratched right between his eyes. His special lady friend is Harriet who is the beauty of the bunch. She is very shy and all the other pigs seem to like her best. Lawrence (aka Larry, as the pig rescue woman calls him) is so dang ugly he's gorgeous. He likes to make a lot of noise when he's close to getting what he wants. He covered himself in hay and hung out alone for most of yesterday. And then there's Gertrude. She's likes her belly scratched and she roles over like a dog. She's super friendly. But the other pigs don't like her. Wilbur got all up in her face this morning. She sleeps all alone in the big house and last night Lawrence, Harriet, and Wilbur slept together in the tiny house.

Harold has started making friends with them. Peaches barks and Basho lunges. I read up on some pig things and apparently pigs and cats make great companions (but Harold makes friends with everyone and everything) and pigs and dogs are natural enemies (predator-prey thing). Peaches is dead scared of em. Ah. I love watching animals. I would like nothing better than to hang outside with the crew all day. Except I have 40 papers and 20 assignments to grade. Which brings me to my foul mood.

Except Jeff just made the most delicious! omelets! He's playing Patti Smith on the radio and it sounds good.

This is the part of teaching that I totally hate. The never-ending sense of impending doom. Ugh.

I need to do laundry, too. Laundry and dog walking and vacuuming and dusting are my chores. I hate chores. I do like to do laundry, though and I love walking the dogs and I think vacuuming is quite satisfying as far as jobs go. I just got the Sunday blues.

On Friday afternoon (Friday afternoons are the best time all week), my student Nathan showed me a used bookstore in Siler City. Before we went there he had to go to a pawn shop to buy back a gun he pawned to pay some bills last month. Nathan really likes guns. And books. We got into a an actual fight in class last semester because he thought that I was trying to make him think like a liberal (apparently only liberals require evidence to be used to back up your opinions in essays you write for english class. Growl) and I yelled at him. In class. The yelling only happened after we had discussed (hours and hours of discussion over about three months, ugh) and argued and arrived at some consensus. That was a first for moi. I've never yelled at a student and don't ever plan on doing it again. I was embarrassed. What's great about Nathan, though, is that we're still friends. He and his wife and kids are going to come over some time for supper. The one friend I've (almost) made in the last couple of years and he's a super fundamendalist Christian, neocon, gun nut, militia-survivalist type. Of course we are more than the sum of our parts and Nathan is actually a really interesting and thoughtful fella, if a little scary at times.

Right, well. Papers. Jeff is setting up the tent in the living room. One of his buddies, Travis or Mark, gets the tent and one gets the loft. This should be fun.