The weather man says it's going to get warmer this week - could this possibly be the start of spring? In North Carolina, yes. And we're ready! The garden is in a state of readiness for the first seedlings which will hopefully go in at the beginning of March. Nataw and I shovelled shit yesterday afternoon - our next door neighbors have bulls, and so we brought wheelbarrow loads over to make a pile for spreading later on. Paul mended fences while we did that.

Our 4 chickens have doubled their egg production this week - we now get two most days, instead of the one that they've been giving us all winter. We've learned that they taper off during the darker months. Who knew?

We had a visiting lecturer at Meredith this week - Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza - from Harvard Divinity School - when I looked her up on the net, I found a description of her as "a feminist theologian's feminist theologian" in the same way that you talk about a doctor's doctor. Her hermeneutics (did you know the etymology of that is hermes - i.e. the messenger - so hermeneutics are about the message, the interpretation) are solidly feminist. Her topic was "Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire" and her argument was that, if the New Testament (she called it the Christian Testament) was written in the time of the Roman Empire, then colonialism and unequal power structures inform the rhetoric. I hadn't thought of it in that way. Her book on the same subject comes out in June and I'll get it.

Oh, and the most striking thing she said was this: She had been talking for about 10 minutes and said "women" did something or other. She looked up and said "Oh, by the way, I mean that inclusively." After all, she said, women includes men, female includes male, she includes he - and only in the English language is that true. And so, during the whole lecture, she used the word "women" when she meant "women", but also when she meant "women and men." It really sounded so different. I think I could get used to it!

Paul and I watched "Seven Days in May" this weekend - a movie (1964) with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner and Frederick March and Kurt Douglas. About a planned military coup (fictitious) in the US at the time of the Treaty on the Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. We thought it was very good.

Friday dinner, we had Margarita (a colleague from Meredith) and her husband David and a student of mine, Piper, who returned to get her bachelors degree when she ran into a brick wall in the field of, I think she said, waste water treatment. She wants to work with Engineers without Borders. We plan to have each of my students to Shabbat dinner during the semester. And Ian, Paul's son, came too. Oh, and Pat and Susan - the marvelous plumber women I've worked with the last 2 summers, and who have become very dear friends. It is so much fun putting together people who don't know each other, and watching them enjoy each other.

We had a mouse visitor last week - she/he left a little trail of droppings through most of our kitchen drawers. Yuck. So we opened all the drawers and cupboards for a couple of days and shut the cat in the kitchen at night. She's usually a very good mouser, and certainly knew this one was here - she would lie for hours with her beady eye on a spot she couldn't reach her paw into! But she failed this time. So Paul set a trap (humane of course) that lures the mouse and locks the door. The mouse came and then we set it free a few miles from here. Very sweet.