Buffalo Gal

There is a buffalo pot roast working in the crock pot. It is my first, and actually the first time in a long time I'll be eating a big hunk of meat in a long long time. I stopped eating beef long ago because of an accumulation of cholesterol in my eyeballs of all places, so I am interested in seeing whether this is digestable for me. Apparently, bison contains much less cholesterol than any other meat, including chicken. So I am trying it out. I made spaghetti sauce out of ground bison, and it was good, despite the flu bug my son had that meant I had to revisit the dinner many times after I served it. I might not want to make it for a while.

Last night was the latest workshop. Though only the active portion of the class, the ones who have been talking and turning in stuff, for the most part, showed up after my email asking the others to turn in work, it was a lovely class. The students presented an object they chose, either in the flesh or in photograph, and told why they picked it. Then I had them write poems in which the object became both itself and more than itself--a symbol, in other words, but without simple connection to one particular thing alone but rather multivalence. We had read before this poems like Frost's "Design," Wilbur's "The Writer," and Gerald Stern's "I remember Galileo." In these poems, metaphors morph, taking on the freight of meaning as they go. In fact, Stern's subject in his poem is this very process. I think it was a good and enlightening class, and we all left feeling we understood each other and liked each other, or at least that's how I felt.

We will go to the UCI arboratum on a fieldtrip perhaps next weekend. I hope to ask a botanist friend to come along, even if I have to pay her to do it.