Booking a Room with a View

Sometimes we dig ourselves into holes (rabbit warrens?) of commitment and find ourselves floundering a bit to keep our heads above water. On the rare occasions this happens to me -- me being who I am -- it more often than not has something to do with books. And so while two months ago I was merrily going about my days, working at Target, reading in the evenings, exercising at the gym, watching Family Feud with my wife during supper -- I'm now (in addition to working at Target and riding the elliptical for three or four hours a week) taking tennis lessons on Monday nights, teaching a community education class in fairy tales on Wednesday nights, hosting a film series at church on Thursday nights, engaged in a handwritten-letter dialogue with a friend in which we tackle a different poem each month, have put together (i.e. have solicited signed copies of novels and memoirs from writers all over the map) and am now raffling off book baskets for our church fundraiser this summer -- and have fallen a little behind in both my Eclectic Shade Tree and Dickens bicentenary reading as a result of this whirlwind of busyness. To paraphrase Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson's adaptation of Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring: I feel a bit like butter scraped over too much bread. Come the end of July, the fundraiser will be over, as will the tennis lessons and the film series, and I'll be able to start looking ahead in earnest toward teaching English Composition II in the autumn, to spending the early winter curled up with coffee and Little Dorrit, to Les Miserables and Anna Karenina and Cloud Atlas hitting the big screen.   

Onward.