Not too many words this time, unlike my last daylog. Tessie graduated! I made it in time for the ceremony, no thanks to Amtrak's eight-hour delay and having to get on a bus to finish the journey from Portland and my phone not working for the entire trip.

To the main event! Video link to her actual moment inthe spotlight is here, but the opening speeches are also well worth paying attention to. Congratulations to you, Tessie, overcoming obstacles that would have ground lesser folk to mush.

Tess keeps telling me how much I've helped her get here, and to, my dear I say "I was lacking in your life for so long after you left and you did so much without me, but thank you anyway". I'm as proud as proud can be. Chuffed to bits, in fact. You'll go a long way, you with your bravery, conviction, humanity and drive. You're truly your mother's daughter, and you can be proud of that. You carry her light out in the world

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                                                                                 It is not a cliff,  it is not the end of a continent 

 

it is, instead,  an abstract idea- the cusp of the horizon

 

We consider it at the beginning or end of long trips,

headed out or headed home

 

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This is another book that I have surprisingly not read until recently. And this is despite the fact that I am an Umberto Eco fan, and have read most of his other books---but I had not read this book, his first novel, and still probably the most popular. My edition, an English translation published in 1984, has a quote on the back to the effect that Umberto Eco had written his first novel! It is hard to imagine, now, an audience surprised by that one Italian semiotician writing a novel,

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