Saturday

Bill and Jane have returned from Egypt! I have a lovely gold piece of jewelry that has my name written on it in hieroglyphics.

So far I have made the chocolate pudding, watched March of the Penguins and finished another egg poem. I was thinking about my egg poems when I was watching March of the Penguins.

If you've seen it, you know that when it is time to mate, the males walk very very far to their breeding grounds. They pick a penguin to make an egg with. The females lay the eggs and take off. They walk back to the ocean and get food to bring back for the males who are sitting on the eggs. The males go for almost three months without food while the females are gone. They all huddle together for warmth. Some of them die. The eggs hatch while the females are gone. Some of the male penguins die. Some of the penguin babies die. Some of the females don't come back because they get eaten in the ocean by sea lions.

While all these events are taking place, it is very very cold.

But most of the females return -- en masse -- and the females and the males cry out to each other and when cries are recognized, families reunite and the babies and the males finally get to eat again.

While watching it, I thought, how sad to be a male waiting for a female who, unbeknownst to you (because you're a penguin and can't really know things except instinctually which isn't really the same as knowing now as it?) has been eaten. Do those widowed/orphaned penguins starve? No doubt. Ah, cruel nature.

I have been reading Try by Cole Swensen this weekend. And The Shape of Reason by John Gage. One is poetry, the other is rhetoric. Also read Allure magazine, and a really intriguing student essay about being at a meditation center that had some pretty strange rules.

I'm going to go see if the kids want to play CLUE now.