First things

Today, my husband and I took our first motorcycle ride of the year and it was wonderful. My husband always picks great roads to go on and always seems to know where we're going and how to get back so all I have to do is sit tight, hold on, and enjoy the ride and the views.

Our destination today, before we headed back toward the sunset, toward home, was a dam built on a river but one which (other than the river) has no water. It's like those famous bridges over land in Alaska...

The motorcycle ride culminated a very nice Easter Sunday, which began with my finally getting to attend mass at the Catholic Church in our nearby town. After teaching The Exorcist to my American Fear students, it was rather odd to have the priest ask us to renew our vows as Catholics by renouncing Satan. I got that right but I think I muddled my communion because I only took the host and didn't dip it in or take a sip of the wine. And I think both must be together or the full effect is lost...

But since I'm basically ignorant of the Catholic liturgy in English (they do have a Spanish mass on the last Sunday of the month, which I've been planning to attend for a while but have never made it yet) I'll have to get up to speed at some point. The less exciting part was having to pray for Pope Benedict, who, on top of having been a young Nazi and actively protecting pedophiles, strikes me as the worst pope I can remember. Not that I'm too crazy about the position of pope to begin with (in that I'm more of a Protestant, truth be told).

Regardless of my quibbles with Catholicism, it was a nice way to start my Easter, which got even better when I did a two-mile walk with Dr. S through grassy trails toward my small college on the hill's environmental center. There, we walked through the recently burned prairie and then on to the garden, where we stopped for a while at a small pond to ponder the imponderables of nature and to have fun observing the frogs and the large, orange fish that seemed to be having quite a nice day themselves in their habitat.

I didn't do any school work today but I really needed such a day, one in which the focus wasn't my job, as it is every day, but one that felt like a Sunday, like a day of rest. I'm glad to say I did accomplish that so I now can turn back to my piles of pending things to do before my last five weeks of the semester begin tomorrow.