Villanelle, Taco Bell, gee this week is going well

You know it's a good day when you ask a class if anyone knows what a villanelle is and a student promptly raises her hand and explains the complex poetic form in detail, and then you ask whether anyone in the class has ever written a villanelle and three people say yes. I told them that they are required to show me their villanelles because it's something I've never been able to manage and I admire anyone who can make it work. One student admitted to having written a villanelle about Taco Bell, which makes my heart sing even though I'm not convinced that what Taco Bell serves is actually food.

In other news, we are down to 15 baby chicks--the smallest, most delicate ones failed to thrive, as they say. One big bossy yellow chick demonstrates such distinctive personality that I'm tempted to name her after one of my colleagues. The rest are still just cute little fluffballs. 

The chicks remain in the garden shed with a heat lamp, safe from the big bad pine tree that fell just behind the shed during a freak storm on Saturday night. It was a very quick storm--from clear sky to wind rain lightning hail and back to clear skies in about 20 minutes--and in the middle of all that, the top half of a pine tree got twisted off, knocked down a no-longer-in-use phone line, and wedged itself neatly between two rows of pine trees just uphill from the house. 

Do you think Frontier Communications is interested in dealing with their long stretch of phone line that's sitting on the ground in my back yard? No they are not. In fact, since we are no longer Frontier customers, they made it nearly impossible for me to file a complaint, and then when I did, they wanted to transfer me to some sales representative eager to sell me on all the services they claim to be able to provide. I pointed out that they'd provided our landline service, such as it was, for 20 years without demonstrating any evidence of their ability to serve our needs, so no thanks.

But I started the week at a lovely sunrise service overlooking the Ohio River and then zipped upstream a few miles to a backwater where I saw a green heron (which I always want to refer to as "The elusive green heron" in the voice of David Attenborough) as well as a couple of yellow warblers (which thrilled me because I recognized the song before I tracked down the birds, something I could not have done not so long ago), and the sightings made me so euphoric that nothing could possibly get me down--not dead chicks, not falling trees, and not mini-administrators who pat themselves on the back for coming up with a brilliant idea that I've been pushing for at least a decade. The only thing that can make this week better is if those three students actually show me their villanelles.