A Morning of Regrouping

The sun is shining beautifully in my window this afternoon as I sit and write. I love winter days like this, clear and cool, not brutally cold. With just enough deceptive sunshine to make you believe that February will, in fact, give way to Spring and possibly sooner than one hopes.

Had the day off classes today in honor of President's day - one week early, so as to give the kids a midwinter breather of 5 days while we go to the METC (Midwest Educational Technology Conference) tomorrow and Wednesday.

So I have had a "breather day" - never a bad thing. Often such days are provided by the weather as snow days, but we have remained virtually snow free this winter. Nemo missed us (mercifully) and now the buds on my forsythia bush are actually starting to swell in the sunshine.

The best thing that happened today was that I discovered my mentor, Hamilton Salsich, is alive and well. Ham is an educator of 45 years who lives up in CT and is still teaching at age 71! He is a brilliant guy who reads widely and thinks deeply about a variety of things that inspire his classroom and life. I have been following his blogs for almost 3 years now, and today I discovered that he hadn't posted about his classroom since last Oct. I immediately became concerned... wondering if in my absence, Hamilton had packed his bags and headed for the heavenly classroom... but he appeared online in response to my brief and somewhat fearful query about him. Seems he's been writing on a different angle than just English and didn't think he should post it on the Ning where I usually read him. I felt relief and then became more thoughtful.

In this crazy digital age we are in, how easy it would be to lose a dear friend and not discover it for quite some time! We are bombarded by emails, status updates, blogs, tweets, and news bytes. It seems like the stream of words, words, and more words is never-ending. And for a moment I felt quite small. Then I realized that Ham's voice was one that sounded clearly to me in all the cacaphony of cyberspace... and THAT made me realize that I need to think more and write more than I have been. The beauty of this thing called the internet, is that our thoughts can have an almost endless shelf-life, if we BOTHER to put them out here. There is something wonderful about that. Something I will need to think a lot more about in the weeks to come.

A Gift of Snow

Today the snowflakes FINALLY fell for real in Missouri. It's been such a long, gray winter and we were about to lose hope of seeing ANY of the white stuff. However, today it arrived. It made one little 4 year old person VERY happy!

Syd is staying with us for a 3 day visit and she and I headed out into the white stuff just as soon as the grass was covered. We slid down the neighbor's hill, rolled in the snow, threw it at each other, and made the mandatory snow angels. She giggled the entire time and I have to admit, so did I! What is it about the magical combination of cold air and water that can make us drop our stress levels and just act like a kid? I don't know... but I am not about to question this wonder of meteorology! For a February snowfall- this was just right! Thank-you God - and any of your assisting snow angels as well!

You get an Inch... You Slide a MILE!

Syd came over to play on the sled this morning. Our next door neighbor has a modest hill in his yard that has become the "orientation to sledding" hill for the newest generation of intrepid snowbunnies! (It seems like yesterday this was Gret and Katrina! In fact, we think our sled might be close to 30 years old!) Here's a collection of shots of all the fun a little snow can bring!

It's Cold Enough to.....

FREEZE BEER!
My dad used to laugh when he said it, but today we proved it's possible. Ed usually keeps his beer in the garage in the winter in order to save space in the fridge. This afternoon when he brought one in and poured it, icy lumps came out and floated like foam on the top... FROZEN BEER slushy is what he got! (In case you're curious, he still drank it; one doesn't waste good beer, frozen or otherwise!)

Soup, Snow, & Slimmer

It's been an interesting past 3 days. St. Charles was hit by a reasonably good-sized snowstorm on Monday night that continued into Tuesday and made roads nasty until Wednesday. This resulted in 2 snowdays for Ed & I. Well, only for Ed, actually. I have been attending the Midwest Educational Technology Conference on Monday through Wednesday of this week. It was an awesome educational experience that would have (could have?) cost me three days of teaching time. Thanks to the snow, it only cost me one.

Meanwhile, we've been hunkering down and enjoying how pretty everything looks covered in the white stuff. Time to make soup! I made veggie soup on Sunday night. And since I haven't posted a photo of myself lately, I made Ed take a shot of me while I cooked it. So you can see the newer, down-sized version of me while I am doing something I rarely do... cooking! Wish you could smell the soup... it was delicious!

The Time of Greyness Begins

My husband and I are not great fans of the return to "non-daylight savings" time. It seems that we get up in darkness and return home in darkness at a time of year that one can barely tolerate being in darkness... the weeks just preceding the Winter Solstice. Then you add rain and cold damp weather....

What you see here is the view outside my classroom window. Wet, grey, chilly... miserable. I am not excited for the arrival of the wet times.
On the other hand, I love winter. Pure, crisp, cold winter. It seems like it's the genuine article. No fooling-around-flat-out cold! I say let's skip the grey, wet, murky days of late fall and jump right into winter. Oh wait! I live in Missouri! There's SNOW in the forecast for tomorrow! Huzzah!

Winter in the Vineyard

There's nothing quite so eerie and beautiful at the same time as snow in the vineyard. There's a hushed coldness to the sleeping vines that makes them so strange and lovely all at the same time.
I keep thinking of that poem by Robert Frost about the orchard sleeping... called "Good-by and Keep Cold"



GOOD-BY AND KEEP COLD
This saying good-by on the edge of the dark
And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark
Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
An orchard away at the end of the farm
All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.
I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,
I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse
By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse.
(If cetain it wouldn't be idle to call
I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall
And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)
I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun.
(We made it secure against being, I hope,
By setting it out on a northerly slope.)
No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
"How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below."
I have to be gone for a season or so.
My business awhile is with different trees,
Less carefully nurtured, less fruitful than these,
And such as is done to their wood with an ax--
Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard's arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.
~Robert Frost

Brrrr..... it's a cold snap!

Winter has officially arrived temperature-wise in the past few days. Below normal daytime temps and single digit overnight temps have been the pattern. All of this makes the idea of getting out of bed in the a.m. difficult. Especially when it would be so much nicer to snuggle in under the cozy quilt and wait for spring.
Late Jan. and early Feb. are always tough times for me. I maintain it's because I have to teach "Julius Caesar" every year at about this time... and all that murder and mayhem gets me down. But I am also teaching Wm.Wordsworth in my AP classes... ya know, "the world is too much with us..." and Tintern Abbey and all that jazz (I really love Wordsworth!). So, what is it about this time of year that is such a bummer. Doctors talk about Seasonal affective disorder, brought on by short days and lack of sunshine overall... but I don't buy it. I think it's got more to do with "post-December" stress disorder. Whatever it is, I hope it lifts soon.... if I have to grade one more essay about 'noble Brutus" - I might hop a plane to Bermuda!

Winter at its fiercest! Good-bye trees! :-(

Well, dear readers, it's been a pretty wild and wooly weekend here in ole' St.Chuck. Friday evening a wicked winter storm hit us; not with snow, but with ICE! LOTS of Ice!! Then beginning at about 3am Saturday morning the sounds of trees breaking and crashing became common. First the snap, almost like a gunshot. Then as you held your breath, the thump on the rooftops of tree limbs falling. Our poor maple in the backyard lost many branches from its center. Fortunately, no damage was done to the roof or the pool. The oak and the sycamore surprised us by dropping hardly a branch.

All over town, branches came down, taking power lines and electricity with them. By 6am Saturday we had no power... and neither did over 100,000 fellow St. Charlesians! So we lit our ventless gas fireplace, dug out all our flashlights, oil lamps, and candles and hunkered down to wait for power to return. With the fireplace, we were able to keep the house in the 60's... but not all our neighbors were able to do so.

We greeted Sunday morning with the loss of our favorite Bradford Pear tree which snapped due to the load on its poor branches. The photos here are minus a full pickup truck load of logs that Gret and Leon will use for firewood once it seasons. With their help, we were able to clean up all of what you see here.

Good news arrived about 1 on Sunday afternoon when our lights came back on! Then, when their house reached the low 50's on Sunday afternoon, our best friends the Gaunts, who had no power until Monday afternoon, moved in for an 24 hr. stay. So we had fun playing with their grandkids Victor and Gwen which successfully took all our minds off the weather outside.

Presently it's late Monday afternoon and the temps are plunging into the upper teens. The wind is supposed to pick up tonight, but since much of the ice melted away late yesterday, we should be okay. Our only worry is if any previously weakened lines fall down. We are praying that doesn't happen. St. Charles County is slated to be back to full operations by Wednesday night.

We'll miss our pretty pear tree seen here just behind the pink crabapple last spring.