Sometimes, the unexpected. 

Let me explain. 

During Christmas break, I joined a freelance networking site. Premise is simple: employers post freelance jobs, workers post bids, employers award winning worker with job. This could be useful for my future life as a starving English major in the real world, I thought. So I joined and read some of the jobs posted and got intimidated. Thank goodness I don't have to think about that stuff for another year and a half, I thought. In May I saw I'd been invited to submit a proposal for some random project, and I thought, well, what's it hurt just to get some practice posting a bid. Have to start sometime. And promptly forgot about it. 

Then today I logged onto the email I never use, and saw I'd been awarded the proposal. Yes. $300 to update some book from the 1880s, and 12 days to do it. Whoops. 

So now I've got school in the morning, research project all afternoon, and ghostwriting a book in the evenings. 

As Stephen Fry says:

Lord-a-mercy, shut my mouth. 

***

Yes, I'm taking a class during the month of June. Heavy sigh. I really didn't want to. I mean, I really really really didn't want to. But it will save me from having to take thesis and Shakespeare at the same time as Brit Lit 1798-present (I just can't get over how relevant my chosen major is), so I'm taking the plunge. And it is Dr. W.'s last class ever before he retires. And I am one of only two students. Yep. Two whole students. Get ready for some absolutely rousing Coleridge discussions. 

***

In other news, today Mom and I went on a bike road. A pleasant, carefree, Sunday afternoon bike road around the mountain top. Until we rode by a massive beast of a German shepherd that was like two German shepherds packed together and we had to ride uphill past it and Mom's chain decided to break right then and I was just glad it wasn't the chain holding the dog to the tree (which I frown on as a rule, but approved of heartily just right then). When we got to the top of the hill and past the monster we didn't say anything for a while. For one, our lungs were shriveled ruins. For two, our mouths were dry as August cotton. When we finally could communicate, all we could manage was:

"That was a big dog."

"Uh-huh."

Blackball that road. 

***

And now I'm going to enjoy my remaining few hours as a free woman before I am consumed by work (and now I'm sidetracked because I just realized referred to myself as a woman instead of a girl. Umm). But before I leave - a poem (oh, you knew it was coming).

What is my apology for poetry?

The empty briar is swishing

When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face

Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.

-Seamus Heaney, "Glanmore Sonnets"