October 6th. I always liked doing a re-read of The Lord of the Rings right about now, so that I could hit the October 6th attack under Weathertop (and it's "under" – sooo much better and creepier in the book than Peter Jackson's movie staging of it) at the right time of the year, maybe reading by a window with the dark and the wind and the moon on the other side. Thinking about just the reading of my favourite novel now always gets me excited for the day when the next generation of the family can read it, although at seven years old, Grace is still too young to handle it. Although she might be about ready to read or to have The Hobbit read to her. But autumn is the best time of the year to read The Lord of the Rings, because the look and the weather make it all the more easy to enter into the story. This was especially true growing up in Oregon, Illinois, which looked so much like Tolkien's descriptions of the Shire to begin with.

I've been working all day on job applications: plodding, pedantic, detail-oriented work, with each school needing something just different enough to demand lots of consideration for each version of an application. And all I can really think is that I'd rather be talking to Sophie on the phone, even when she has lots to say about nothing, and most of that unintelligible to me. I had a phone message from Mom the other day, when she was over there babysitting the girls, and she started to laugh as Sophie was anxiously screaming in the background, "I want it! I want it!" regarding the phone, although she didn't quite get that I wasn't actually on it. So Mom asked her questions or prompted her in lieu of my actually conversing with Sophie:

"Say 'Hello.'"
"Hi!"
"Say 'How are you?'"
". . . ? Goood."
"Say 'I'm behaving.'"
"No!"

I'm really looking forward to seeing all the kids this weekend, when Joe and Daniele bring Nate up to celebrate his immanent first birthday with the family.

I actually met Professor Morales today for the first time, a young guy the department hired to do Pauline work last year. I knew he was a friend of Deirdre's from our conversation at Summerfest this year, but I didn't know that he was also a friend of aristotle2002 from when he did his Master's at Notre Dame, while I was teaching at Saint Joe's. He popped in when I was talking to Mickey during office hours today, and we all ended up mostly talking about Notre Dame's catechetical initiative and Mac hard drives. Go figure. Anyway, he seemed like a great guy – someone who would make a good friend, and so it's too bad that I met him as I am on my way out the door.