The following was written yesterday. There's more to come later, after a Halloween parade and trick-or-treating. Happy Halloween!

-----

Thanks for all your suggestions for AJ�s solar system mix. He�s loving what he�s got so far. He keeps monopolizing my computer. He�s particularly taken with Throwing Muses� �Mercury.� It makes him bop around the room. And this morning, I caught him running around the yard with a soccer ball singing, �The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace!� Yes, my five-year-old can pronounce nuclear. Take that, Mr. President.*
- - - - -
It is Monday night and I am sitting on a train next to my suitcase, heading for the city. I�m attending a concert performed by my former place of employment this evening � Mozart�s Sinfonia Concertante and I�m not sure what else. The concertmaster is retiring after tonight�s concert � he�ll be the violin soloist in the Concertante. And then there will be a party afterwards at which I�m likely to see a lot of old friends and also some people I might wish to avoid and I�ll probably have to explain repeatedly why I�m still not done with my dissertation. I�m trying not to let it get me down.

I�m spending the night with my friend H., who lives near the university, thus saving me from my usual early morning routine. I should be able to get a couple of extra hours of sleep on the morning end, although I�m likely to lose one or two on the evening end, so perhaps it will all even out. In any case, I love the idea of being able to get up and walk to work in the morning. After class, which will largely be spent watching a video of Don Giovanni (it�s an all-Mozart overnight apparently), I will sprint home as fast as humanly possible to try to catch at least the end of AJ�s school�s Halloween parade. All the children grades K-4 will be parading around the school, weather permitting. I hate to miss it. Afterwards parents are invited into the classrooms to join the party. And then we�ll walk home, have a snack, and head up to the barn to catch the hayride trick-or-treat wagon with some of the other kids from the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, I�m eavesdropping on two high school students sitting ahead of me in the car. They are classical musicians � one�s a violinist, the other I�m not sure about. They�re discussing gigging and lessons and commuting to the city for Youth Symphony and All-State orchestra and they�re doing it all with deadly seriousness. It looks so familiar and so, so far away. High school students are from a foreign country. They were even when I was in high school. Maybe we were each from our own foreign country.

*I probably shouldn't mention here that the reason I always remember which is the correct way to pronounce "nuclear" is due to The Simpsons. I just imagine the episode where Homer is making a promotional film for the plant. Mr. Burns asks him to repeat his line "Nuclear Power," which he does in a perfect Monty Burns accent. With excellent diction.

4 people said it like they meant it