Another Snow Day

Top Photo: The VW sits in a cradle of snow.
Middle Photo: Rock wall, fallen limb.
Bottom photo: Big foot at the opening of the shop door. Allen had to dig out from around the door; all the cats were trapped inside!

BGSU shuts down another day for snow. This is unprecedented! The sun is out today, snow is piled high in drifts, old limbs are down, snapped by the wind.

Snow Day

Top photo: Our blackberry orchard

Bottom Photo: Our snowy field

Because this is snow country, BGSU rarely cancels classes because of weather. I've been at BGSU since 1987 and I can remember classes being canceled only twice, and that was just the evening classes. Today classes are canceled all day because of snow and wind. All told, they say we should be getting 8 to 10 inches of snow. But biggest factor is the wind. The blowing snow makes driving conditions near-impossible. Just a few minutes ago, I asked Allen to step outside and take some pictures of our yard. The storm is just getting cranked up. More photos to follow...

Baby, it's cold outside.

Photo: Our house.

I lived in the South until I was 30. When I lived there, I thought icicles were those silver things people put on Christmas trees.

How Cold Is It?

That is frost on the inside of the window in my computer room.

Things Keep Coming Together

Photo: Unknown artist. I like using it to depict my writing life.

For a while, I had a separate blog for teaching. I couldn't reconcile my teaching life with my creative life. I felt I was stuck. Happily, the two parts of my life have come together now. Over the summer, I requested to be switched permanently to the English Department. My request fell on sympathetic ears. What this means is that beginning in the Fall of 2007, I will be teaching literature and creative writing classes exclusively (women's studies occasionally), no freshman composition. This semester things are better already; I'm only teaching one composition section, and there are only nine students. They are a sweet group.

For the last three years, I have been studying poetry. I have been reading autobiographies, biographies, and criticism. As it turns out, this was a very good thing, because one of my first new assignments in my new role as an English Lecturer will be to teach a course on Modern Poetry. All said, the Modern movement in poetry covers a time frame of about eighty years. The precursors are Whitman and Dickinson and the movement ends just after WWII. So this would include Eliot, Pound, Millay, Lorca, Auden, and so forth. So things have come together for me once more. A personal interest has ended up being professional preparation. I still need to do a lot more reading and preparation, of course, but I look forward to it! Something I've been wanting to do for a long time is to study Eliot's "The Waste Land" more closely. Now I have a very good excuse for doing that.

This week in the Angst to Art Seminar, we talked about Lorca's essay on the Duende. The students also submitted their Confessional Postcards, all of which were deeply moving. One nearly moved me to tears. The students are starting to warm up to each other. This is good because in April they will be sharing a personal story about some kind of angst they have experienced.

I will write more about all of this later; right now, I have much grading and preparations to do for next week.

By the way: it is cold outside! We are supposed to get down below zero tonight.