Deep Impact

Well, Mr. Strega and I went out to try and see Deep Impact happening--but the ubiquitous Santa Cruz fog rolled in, even though Jupiter and Spica (one of the main stars in the Virgo constellation) were clearly visible. We went home and tried to see if it was on the news, and there was NOTHING about it on the telly.
We had nothing to turn to but the Internet, and there we saw the amazing photo of the impact, though the comet itself looks a bit like
a potato. But then, I suppose most comets look like potatoes. I'm an amateur astronomer, among other things, and really love to go out and look at the night sky. I haven't been doing much of this lately, and decided last night I would get back to doing things like that again. I seem to really be needing a time of recovery from grad school. As I've said before, there was much good I got out of it, and a large helping of destructiveness and marginalization--and I truly don't think the marginalization was self-perceived; there was definite favoritism going on among certain faculty members--sometimes, I truly believe, inadvertently. I tried not to take it personally, but some part of me obviously did, or I wouldn't need some recovery and down time from having been in grad school for four years.

An announcement: after two years of "poetry celibacy," I have begun to write a poem again--just a little thing. I can't blame everything on my poetry professor, who came in drunk to class all the time until the students complained about the amount of alcohol being consumed in class. Sometimes poetry is just like that--it's somewhat of a teasing muse. I find that writing in a journal as abundantly as I can and never forcing the poems really does help--plus, my personal life in the last two years has been difficult and that alone can contribute to the poetry going quiet. I'm glad I've had this big, raggedy book to be working on.

News from the strega's garden: the Mr. Lincoln roses Mr. Strega and I planted in the fall have bloomed with giant, fat, smoky, purple-red blooms that look like old velvet, and they have a lemony/sweet, overpoweringly old rose scent. We got this rose at Costco!
How come all the roses I get at places like Costco and Rite-Aid live forever, and the expensive Jackson & Perkins ones are like the prima donnas of the garden, getting all kinds of fainting illnesses and megrims?