We have one more day of winter break, a winter break that we did not know we were having until Monday night. Usually as the spring semester begins, students and faculty are all counting the days until spring break, which occurs midway through the semester. By that point, everyone is ready for a break – either to get out of town for a real vacation or to just sleep late and enjoy quiet time at home. We have barely started…
Christmas break is now officially over and everyone is back to school. I had five weeks off, which seems like an eternity until you cram an eighteenth birthday, a twenty-first birthday, Christmas, another birthday, New Years, house guests, sort of moving, and then the recovery from all of the above into that time frame; then it feels more like two days, sixteen hours and thirty-six minutes to be exact. Well, not really exact. The point is that the break seemed…
It has been five days since snow blanketed our area . . .and much of the ground and steps and deck here are still covered. In the 27 years that I have lived in North Texas, the snow has never lingered this long. Usually, ice and snow cover the roadways early in the morning when decisions about school closures need to be made; by lunchtime there is no evidence that the snow and ice had been there only hours before….
When your kid is twenty-one, you usually aren’t still thinking of firsts that warrant recording in one’s baby book. Many of the firsts that happen at this point in life are best left undocumented first week subsisting entirely on rice and beans first all-nighter first bounced check first time filing your own taxes first hangover first time buying beer legally first . . . Then there is the first cable. No, not cable as in TV, knitted cable. My freshly…
So here we are beginning a new year. A few days ago, on my birthday, I said that I was not in the mood for a sappy romp through the past. Today I have changed my mind. I am a woman; changing my mind is a woman’s prerogative, isn’t it? Prerogative or not, I am about to take a look back at the highlights of 2010 in my world. The early part of the year was calm for us though…
Today is my birthday. I thought about all of the things that I could write about to commemorate this occasion and then I thought again. I’m not really in the mood for one of those sappy romps through the past nor am I in the mood for a prophetic foray into the future. My solution, which may or may not be a good one, is to share a poem that I wrote a couple of weeks ago. I don’t often…
t is December 26th and I have emerged from beneath the Christmas rubble into the after-Christmas haze. The empty boxes, shreds of wrapping paper and abandoned bows have all made their way to the trash, most of the gifts are resting comfortably in their new homes, and the holiday leftovers have been tucked away in the refrigerator. We tried to keep things simple and low-key, but that is not the way things looked around here yesterday. When you have seven…
So why was I at the mall again this weekend? I was on a top secret mission. No, I was not looking for a Christmas gift. And no, I have not finished Christmas shopping, but yesterday was not the day for that. Despite what you may be thinking, I was not checking up on Santa to make sure he was doing what he is supposed to be doing at this time of year. My assignment was to be in the…
For reason I will explain in my next post, I found myself yesterday afternoon at the same mall where I spent last Saturday afternoon. What are the chances? I have lived in Dallas for twenty-seven years. In the past eight days, I have doubled the number of times I have set foot in this particular mall. I was glad to see that with only a week until Christmas, Santa is beginning to get serious about his job. He is no…
The semester is over! At exactly 4:14 Thursday afternoon I turned in my grades. What have I been doing since then? I’m not really sure. All I know is that we have made three trips to the airport in the last twenty four hours; everyone is coming home for the Christmas break and I have done very little, well actually, I have done nothing to get ready for the holidays. In an effort to remedy that sad situation, we went…