Sorry it's been a while, and sorry that that'll require a quick post.

I had a terrific vacation with my family to the Aspen, Colorado area, camping, hiking, enjoying beautiful music, and even taking a shower now and then. We photographed the (apparently) most-photographed peaks in North America, saw beautiful meadows, and stood on high ridges...




...and that was only the first day. (Sorry, Nate, this was the one day you and Heather were behind, so my picture is of Claire.)
[Edit: the third picture isn't showing up for me, though it's definitely in the source code. Sorry, Claire, maybe Blogger doesn't want you on my site.]
A few more nice ones:





Since then, I've proctored a lot of entrance exams. (About eight hours' worth, and that's just the one-on-one ones.) The weather has been extremely hot until today, which I took advantage of by making bagels, and managed to improvise a quite nice whole-wheat bagel recipe with the surprise of finding whole-wheat bread flour at Sahara Mart. Craig--who has moved in (and we're getting along great)--helped a bit, and even bought some sesame seeds to put on top. They turned out better than last time, and I have some pretty good ideas for making them even better next time.

Now, I can't believe that school's starting today! That's kind of awful. It doesn't have the same sense of excitement that I've had in past semesters, but maybe that'll change once I actually get into classes and, especially, once I get back into the hang of teaching. (I think my choice to hardly teach over the summer will haunt me--I felt ridiculously nervous even speaking in front of the assembled music theory graduate students the other day about my class, and feel at a loss whenever I put a lesson plan in front of me to be revised.)

A Tafelmusik concert of music inspired by Ovid has got me going back to my Ovid text and trying to translate. Boy, is it slow going, and after hours of giving tests I haven't mentally been up to it much lately, but hopefully on my light days. We'll see. Here's the great opening paragraph, with just a tiny bit of help from an English translation I found online. I've got a literal and a meaning-centered translation, both, because the rhetorical effect is *definitely* lost in the English translation: you get a sense of the appropriateness of the beginning ("In nova") and the exciting flourish of the end ("perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!") from the literal.

Latin:
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!

Literal: Into new moves me my soul changed to speak of forms bodies; gods, beginnings (for you have changed also them) favor my and first from the genesis of the world to the current my epic spin out time song!

Meaning: My soul moves me to speak of forms changed into new bodies; gods, favor my beginnings (for you have changed them also) and spin out my epic song from the first genesis of the world to the current time!