Thoughts on order.

Since my grades got finished (by the grace of God, a pinch of pixie dust, a sturdy set of rubrics, a malleable set of metrics, and a fair amount of cursing), I have accomplished the following:

• picked up books on hold at the public library
• paid slightly sad amount of library overdue fines so I could check out the above
• found loads of books I purchased from Amazon etc. during bouts of stress-induced online buying
• straightened up my study.

I don't really wish to discuss my method for straightening, since it's more like "moving things off my desk into other locations, such as boxes," but the surface of the desk is tidier, more expansive, slightly more without stuff, more conducive to creative work, which is what I'm after. (Also, my soul feels a little freer, even if I know I'm kind of lying to myself about the true extent of the tidiness--this is my particular bargain with chaos, and I guess I'm sticking to it.)

ANYHOW. I was reading an article in the Innovations edition of The New Yorker, an article about this engineer, Saul Griffith, and his work with renewable energy. Here's the writer's description of Griffith's lab:

Griffith seems to operate on the principle that excessive orderliness is inefficient, and that neatly putting things away is more time-consuming, in the long run, than searching through piles.

If only I had won a $30,000 prize for my innovative invention at M.I.T. when I was a student there (I went where I went, okay?), and then won a MacArthur Genius grant--I could totally be this guy.

If you have a baby, I will bring you food.

This morning I made tomato-basil soup (with optional crumbled gorgonzola embellishment), a salad (with optional lemon dressing, toasted almonds, and chopped dried apricot embellishments); then I cut up a pineapple, and baked two baguettes and two dozen lemon madeleines. All before 10:30 a.m. This was to take over to the historian's son and his wife and their three little girls, one of whom is a twelve-day-old infant, and doing very well, thank you.

This leads me to ponder my history as a person who brought food to people who had babies. In my former life, I used to be in charge of arranging meals, etc., for people who were ill or who were indisposed, which for all practical purposes, since my congregation was filled with young procreating couples, meant bringing food to families with a new baby in the mix. I developed a kind of routine--sometimes I would make a quart of spaghetti sauce, bake a loaf of bread, and bring those two things with some dry pasta to the family. If they didn't want to eat it that night, they could freeze it and eat it another day, perhaps a bad day, when everything went wrong: on such a day, having bread and spaghetti sauce in the freezer could be a little good thing.

I was kind of proud of today's production. Maybe it's a little controlling to make the dressing for someone else's salad, but it was fun to do it. And now, I am prepared to extend this offer to any of my readers: if you have a baby, I will bring you dinner. I will package it in appropriate containers, suitable for freezing. I will bring it to your house in a reusable shopping bag, and you just have to let me hold your baby for a little while. That's fair, right?