Southwest Allen County Schools are running on a 2-hour delay.

Today I woke up and all of the snow was gone, removed by a late night wind carrying us into the high 40's and leaving only a few colonies of old snow around the herb garden and in other inexplicably persistent patches around the yard. But tonight it is supposed to snow again, so the breeze has been heavy all day I assume to bring in another front that will take us back down to the 30's. There is no name that I know for this weather. There must be a poem somewhere that serves to name it, but I don't remember reading it.

Trying to decide whether to try reading the introduction to a book of Rilke's selected. It reads well so far, but is about 43 pages long and I don't know if I have time for that. The roman numeral "l" is fifty, I now know, because the introduction ends on page xliii.

Gosh but I love Mill on the Floss. Most of the time the narrator's voice stays well on the side of sympathy toward the characters, so tender, really--not mocking or condescending at all, even while it nudges occasionally. One of my favorite parts so far is how she lingers on one of Tom's rough boyhood friends who has just thrown away a jackknife that had been given to him as a gift by Tom, thrown it away as a symbol of defiance and independence but the symbol goes unnoticed by Tom and the narrator lingers to present the friend's sad consideration of the knife in the dust until he decides to pocket it again.

There is something very modern about this scene. If it were a film, it would come across as a very modern disruption of the narrative to pull away from Tom and consider things from the perspective of this scorned kid. If Dickens were writing his, I would know that he'd be back in the narrative in the last 50 pages and so it would all be a part of an overall logic, but I don't think that is happening here.

winter break video diaries

O, winter break, thank you for clearing the mental table a bit. We had all snow for 11 or 12 days or so up in Michigan and I can't remember the last time we had it so good. A couple of igloos, new skates for me, and it always seemed to snow at just the right time. This video documents one of those times--the annual new year's chili cook off held on my wife's family's side of the lake, the lake where we met back when we were silly kids.

If you have older kids, you ski back to "the old sugar camp"; if the kids are younger, you drive to a nearby clearing and walk it in. And then you eat chili and talk to the lake people you see twice a year in July and December which now seems to happen faster and faster. Later, you maybe take an ill-advised night-time snowmobile ride. And they always have this cool old sleigh pulled by some olde horses and that is what is in this video.

I wonder where this goes.

Having trouble with the chopsticks here. I probably had the right and left mixed up hahah. It is nice to not go down the business corridors in "developing" neighborhoods in your town for awhile because when you go back to them, you often find that new ethnic restaurants have moved in since you last looked. That doesn't happen if you watch too closely. This one is Burmese, I know, because the sign on the door was written in what looked like a series of zeroes and sixes. And the food was great primarily because it was so strange compared to the bread and cheese diet I normally live on at home but also because the proprietors of these restaurants rarely seem to understand how to attach prices to the things they make. Two of us ate too much and drank too much sweetened coffee and were only punished $12.60 for it. We also had to listen to and watch a 4th generation vhs of Burmese karaoke, but even that is character building.