Winter Cometh

Sorry, I'm here, I swear!

Life has gotten a little overbusy due to having approximately three million papers to grade, projects of my own to nail down, and a house that keeps doing bizarre things (the policy is now to keep the plastic cover off the kitchen light so that it doesn't crash to the floor in the middle of the night to scare the holy crap out of me).  I have spent huge amounts of time in the library.  On a side note, I really appreciate the Dewey Decimal system, but sometimes, I think it goes insane.  If I get really inspired, I will document some of the cases where a single book is labeled correctly, and yet has subject matter in totally the wrong direction for its little library neighborhood.  Maybe someone who knows can tell me: does this make sense?  Or do librarians just get a kick out of putting a dated book on dinosaurs right in the middle of the section on new media in the classroom?

So what happened since the last update is that in the last update it was fall, and everything had beautiful fall colors, and there were crisp mornings and pleasant afternoons.  Fall happened so gently I had barely noticed the transition away from summer, and I wasn't really missing it.


Then, earlier this week, after a weekend of the lightest jackets and outdoor romping... I woke up to a world gone suddenly bright and monochrome with this damp white cold stuff clinging to everything.

Campus T-Rex is probably cold and disoriented too.

Okay, okay, despite my desert rat tendencies, I really have seen snow before, and lots of it, and it's not that this is staggeringly alien to me.  But it's still suddenly very cold, and then it gets slippery, and for those of us who are not graceful, there's a new terror to the simple act of walking.  Unlike certain heroines of certain vampire pseudo-romances I could mention, my klutziness does not only happen when it's cute or will drive the plot forward, nor does it net me tall, dark, broody stalker-saviors, and while I'm glad for at least one of those things, I do have to be careful.

I guess this means it's officially winter, since the white stuff does not seem to be going anywhere.  Seriously guys, I watched it, and it got all wet and melty, but I think that just made it mobile so that it could shift around in a sneaky way.  So I tried to make peace with it.

I made a bunny out of snow to sit in my flowerpot.  It was getting exponentially colder for some reason as I did so, and it became a race against time.  I started off with nice wet packing snow, and ended with freezy garbage that fell apart the moment I made it a shape.  Also, those little fuzzy gloves are not adequate protection against getting frozen fingers when handling snow, it turns out.  In fact, the snow loves to stick to those fuzzy gloves so that eventually, your fingers are just caked with it and the gloves are helping the traitorous cold stuff leech your heat away.

I hope Snow Bunny is grateful for the near-frostbite I endured to put his dumpy little self together.  His eyes, by the way, are rosehips, and his nose is a stone.  He has a cottontail in back, but I was really losing the ability to move my finger joints by that time, and it was not wonderful.

The snow and I are not yet friends, but I'm putting forth an effort, and that should count for something.