Squid himself picking up his gold keys (I almost wrote "god keys"!), one of which he won for the portrait of me in his glasses, above. He made the thing with a set of toy watercolors! Kid is going places.

I think the rule has to be that you always hope for the snow day. Even if you know you will pay for it, that it is going to eat a day of your summer on the back end. When the summer gets here, that day would have been anticipated, planned for, already lived. The snow day, though, is the closest thing we can get to literally making time. It is just a plain, unexpected, unburdened day that you can fill or not and nobody will care. Snow days are like the stem cells of days. So that's my new philosophy, anyway. Never wish away snow.

So for Tuesday's day I spent some time in the morning watching the poor people driving to work and then settled down near a window and read The Mill on the Floss in the snow-reflected light for a long, long time. For a mid-morning break, I briefly read my way through some of the talky disorientation that is John Ashbery and even liked some of it but before long I had to see if Philip was able to sway Maggie's mind one way or the other and went back to the big book.

"Is this my favorite book?" I keep asking. It is for now. Each character is too big to hold more than one in your head at once and even when I try to single one out I don't feel like I can see around him or her entirely. It has been all about Philip for me for the last day or so. The awkward balance of his early relationship with Tom might be my favorite section of the book so far. And he's got the most sensitive mind of them all, like when he's talking about how music changes him and says that if the change would only last, he "might be capable of heroisms." You turn the page and a year has passed between his visits with Maggie and it feels like a year, you know what Philip has been feeling, and what Maggie hasn't, without the narrator sharing a single detail.

I don't want it to end, but I also feel a pressure to finish the thing before I stumble on the ending by accident while poking around the internet. I just had a close call a few minutes ago. The internet is just one big spoiler.

Charlie Brown study

Charlie Brown. Why is he so tough to draw? Doesn't make sense. To this day, the literary figure I identify with most, next to Bob & Ray's Calvin Hoogevin.