Monday, January 15, 2007

In the bleak midwinter

Friday afternoon the department secretary asked if I wanted her to copy my new syllabus, and I said, "No, better not. The last time I copied a syllabus this long before classes started was the year of the flood." Ah yes, we all remember the year floods delayed the start of the semester by a week....after I had already copied the syllabus for every class. Classes start a week from today and I have one syllabus ready to go, but I don't intend to copy it until the end of the week. Meanwhile, I'm watching the weather.

It's a little odd, this weather we're having. I haven't seen the sun since Thursday. It's raining when I get up in the morning and all day long, and it's so warm we've been leaving the bedroom windows open and I can hear it drip-drip-dripping all through the night. It's a soft rain, hardly more than a mist most of the time, but it's enough to cause flood watches all over the area. Our creek is up but not dangerously so, and the rivers look like spring.

But it's not spring. It's January. If it were a little colder, I'd be at home in front of a roaring fire; instead, we're battling bugs inside the house and mud outside. The mild winter means we haven't had many mice in the house, but it also means we have a bumper crop of flies, mosquitoes, and those annoying little orange Asian ladybeetles that hibernate when it's cold and get active as soon as the weather warms up a bit.

The temperature is supposed to drop this evening and I for one am looking forward to it. Give me some snow! Anything would be better than this constant gray wetness.

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