Begun Before Midnight, Finished After

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.

Our God, heaven cannot hold him,
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign;
In the bleak midwinter
A stable place sufficed
The Lord God incarnate,
Jesus Christ.

-From Christina Rossetti's "In the Bleak Midwinter"


It has been "snow on snow, snow on snow" here in Syracuse until tonight. Tonight the weather has warmed to the mid-40s or so, and the wind has blown so hard that our power went out for about an hour earlier tonight.

I don't have much to say, to be honest. My days here have been relatively quick ones--reading, eating (too much eating), a little ice skating (that was Sunday), Christmas shopping.

Teaching saved my semester. Studying good subjects in my classes also helped, but the work was so relentless that it's really the experience of teaching that brings me out ahead. Which is a bit odd, because teaching itself was stressful and much more work than fun. But I've already discussed on this blog how teaching feels, and most of what I said there is still true.

Oh, and unrelatedly, I found my digital camera under my bed.


*

This being my first year with a sitemeter, I don't really know who my new blog-readers are (some random person from France has popped over a couple of times recently...I don't really know what to make of that, except that I hope he or she reads English, let alone likes the blog). Just in case I do have new ones: every Christmas Eve I wish a merry Christmas (or other applicable holiday) to all the new friends I've made in the past year. If you don't see yourself this year, check the past years.

I know, I know. Most of them don't read it, so for everyone who does, it's a long list of names that you mostly (or wholly) don't know. But it's a good way for me to remember, here in the bleak midwinter, how much my life has been enriched with each past year. It's sometimes hard to believe that only a year ago, this person or that who's played such a big part in my most recent semester hadn't yet even appeared in my life, or at least wasn't a friend yet.

So in addition to all of you, whom I dearly love, merry Christmas to Megan and Sujin; to Charles, Dave, Jihye, Jillian, Katie N., Kevin L., Sam, and Scott (and, come to think of it, to Dr. Kinney); to Andrew, Barb, Christine, Eliud, and Rachel G.; to Doug, Matthias, Joyce (C.), Chris V., John and Pat, Rebecca (and Anna), Kay, and a whole passel of others from church who were wonderful to me this summer especially; to Cathy H.; to Manfred. Merry Christmas and happy Chanukah to my darling students, my firsts ever.

A merry Christmas to Samweli and to the soldiers who're everywhere but home.

Here's to the past year and the one that's coming. Peace and joy to us all.

Little Notes, Often in Fragmented Sentences

Am back in Syracuse--have been since Saturday. Came back then instead of Sunday because that was the free day between snowstorms. (My brother's still in Rochester 'til tomorrow--my dad set out to get him today and turned back because the snow was so bad on the Thruway.) Saw Jo on Saturday, too--she's set this year's Christmas-present bar high, not through fanciness, but through general funky sweetness.

I've been beginning (in a very just-beginning way) to look at college English departments that may be open to hiring the likes of me...it looks like I may have to spend the end of this break trying to get some application stuff together, since the only application deadline I've seen listed is for earlyish February.

It's a really bad idea to put as many M&M's within my reach as circumstances lately have.

Sweet, Sweet Freedom

I finished and sent off the paper around 3 PM. I hadn't looked out the window in, jeesh, I don't know how many hours; apparently this morning, around the time I got up, a great big-ol' snowstorm started. So when I finished, I heard what sounded like a snowplow outside my window and looked out on a slate-gray sky, a bunch of snow on the ground, and more falling.

So my semester's over with. A passel of my students ended up making out like bandits, thanks to my being way too lenient with the oral-pres and participation grades--markedly better than they deserved--but whatever, it's Christmas.

And the break I've been waiting and waiting for is here, here, here.

Bring on the wedding! Bring on an apartmentful of lodgers! Bring on seeing cousins and trying to randomly catch up with APO people while my brother's curling in Massachusetts! Bring on Christmas shopping (I haven't had time for it yet) and trying to clean this pit of a room! Bring on my finding my digital camera (no lie, and it's got all my DC pics on it...pray?)! Bring it all ruddy on!

I seriously danced in front of my computer this afternoon after sending off the paper. They Might Be Giants, The La's, whatever.

I don't know what to do first: cook, clean, or sleep. I would go out and get a few necessaryish groceries, but Broome County's warning against travel before tomorrow ("Closed Early Do To Storm," read the photography studio I passed). So probably what I'll do is the same stuff I've been doing--eating, reading, blog-following--but just more legitimately this time, heh.

Huh. Well, then.

I was just about to ask what I think I've probably asked before--why the people who play their music at hundreds of decibels (or at least that's what it feels like) never blast oldies, or even country, instead of the ubiquitous rap and reggaeton and the like.

But the people upstairs who've been cranking out the rap, etc., have just, to my surprise, begun to blast a country song after all. Granted, it's Toby Keith's "I Love This Bar," which is the most predictable country song a group of party boys can blast, but I have to admit, even that makes a nice change.

Questionable Holiday Decisions

1. Buying a whole half-gallon of eggnog a couple of weeks ago. No, it doesn't hit sell-by until Christmas Eve. But let's think about this one for a second: a drink wherein half a cup's worth, four ounces, provides a quarter of one's RDA of saturated fat and almost the same percentage of cholesterol. And who is drinking this eggnog? I am. Not my apartmentmates, I am.

This wouldn't bother me so much if the rest of my diet hadn't been consisting, for at least a week now, largely of fat, sugar, salt, cholesterol, and...

2. ...Wegmans cinnamon-swirl sandwich bread, which I was stupid enough to buy this afternoon based on pleasant memories of it from my childhood. I think I've eaten eight pieces of it already--though, in my defense, the slices are considerably smaller than regular Wegmans bread slices. Plus, I feel like two of them shouldn't count because I attempted to be more nutritionally-balanced by spreading peanut butter on them at dinner (I actually mean that when I say it, since part of my lunch consisted of four such slices eaten plain), which killed the cinnamon-sugar taste entirely.

3. Making it all the way to Tuesday night without having either a) started grading the second-round WRIT 111 portfolios (though I have, of necessity, graded my own students') or b) worked on my ESL-P final revision (the written part, that is; I did do the field research I mentioned in the previous entry). Granted, the former isn't due until Thursday and the latter until Friday, so I'm not as far behind as usual, but I really need to do something other than sleeping, napping (I've been soaking up sleep like a sponge), eating while staring at my computer (most notably at the witty blog Ask Sister Mary Martha...things may be going from unexpected to flat-out odd, given that I've now made the leap from Catholic-mommy blogs to a Catholic-nun blog, despite still not having the slightest intention of leaving Protestantism), and undertaking my usual practice of doing housework to save myself from schoolwork (mopped the floors yesterday...they really needed it, but that is probably no excuse).

In short: I can't be trusted to properly manage my time during the semester, when I have classes, and then I can't be trusted to manage my time when I don't have classes. And I have zero food willpower these days for some reason. So I'm pretty much rating an epic fail on all responsbility everywhere.

At least I'm eschewing the Mad Trivia Party for tonight. I'm not even going to look to see whether they're asking really good questions, which means that they probably will.

So okay. One final concession to substitute-work by putting in some laundry. One final peek at ASMM, and saving time later for catching Oregon's airing of Says You!. But I am going to work, too, dang it.

::dance dance dance::

The semester is almost over (I do still have 64 portfolios to grade, some field research to do for my Four C's paper, and the revision of my latest Four C's draft to do, and all in the next seven days). This is gonna be a crazy weekend and no mistake.

But after the 19th comes (or at least should come)...sweet, sweet freedom. Besides the sleeping in, cooking, and folk dancing, early January will bring Joe and Andrea's Wedding, For the Win!, which will pretty much be, for those of us in CNY, a weeklong prep and carryout all-together-now extravaganza. Just thinking about it pretty much makes my day.

So, um, time for bed.

Why I Shouldn't Be Writing This

Because I have to outline and write another five pages of analysis for Dr. Tricomi's class by Thursday. The first five pages took me about twelve hours (just for writing...that's not counting the reading/outlining stages) spread out over three days, which is ridiculous.

I still also have to grade sixteen research papers by Friday--in blatant, if guilty, defiance of the department's instructing me to get them back by tomorrow, not to mention the probable best interests of my students (who have to revise them by the 12th). That would normally take me on the order of twelve hours.

But you'll notice that I don't have twenty-four spare hours between now and my due dates, given that I have to sleep (though, as I've been proving lately, apparently I don't have to sleep much) and attend/teach classes, so this time I really AM going to learn how to comment on a research paper in only half an hour. Like, I'm going to set my cell phone alarm over and over again, or something like that.

Tonight I am definitely not attempting to defend my new Mad Trivia Party title, more's the great pity.

Oh! But PS like whoa!: M2 is apparently just one of those people who never lets anyone off easily, not someone whom I bored and frustrated immensely. He told his friend my class was really good and she should be in my section next semester.