First of all: White rabbits.
1 February 2011. Woke up to ice on everything this morning! Ice! This isn’t Oklahoma! But there was a nice slick sheen of ice on everything. Beth and Jason picked me up at nine, as usual, and Beth and I skittered our way to class. The sidewalks on campus weren’t too bad, really. I was so sleepy in class today that I didn’t say anything.
After class Mary and I went to lunch at Noodle Co. on Kirkwood, which was fun. Good to hang out with her again. We pinged from topic to topic, catching up on almost every part of each other’s lives. After lunch we walked to the IMU together. I checked my e-mail and discovered that G601 had been canceled for this afternoon, so I hurried downtown and caught the noon bus home.
It was strange to be home in the middle of the day on a Tuesday, and I counted on having a long, quiet afternoon to read and practice my flute. I sat down with a cup of tea and some biscuits (proper McVittie’s biscuits, thanks to Alyson) to read, but at about half two, Lindsay came home, and Laura followed shortly thereafter, both of their offices having been shut down for the day. Not long after that, we got e-mails saying that classes had been canceled, and about an hour after that, Lisa came home—and Peter came over, of course, our “fifth housemate,” ready to be snowed in with us.
By the middle of the afternoon it had started to rain again, freezing rain mixed with ice pellets that accumulated on everything. The clouds were so low and heavy that I couldn’t see campus from my window. Rain and sleet rattled against the windows, drummed on the roof, gummed to every available surface. The pine trees across the street bent whippily, and the deciduous trees creaked and cracked in the wind. I spent the afternoon working on paper ideas for L746, in the course of which I found a fascinating article by Renee Trilling on JSTOR about Anglo-Saxon poetry. I read for L629, too, though by the time I got around to reading Middlemarch itself, I was so sleepy that I could hardly concentrate.
Downstairs Laura had been baking blueberry muffins and listening to musical soundtracks, and when she finished cooking, Lisa made scrambled eggs with tomatoes, peppers, onions, and cheese in them for all of us for tea. Laura and I sat on the stairs like a pair of vultures, giggling, talking nonsense, humming songs (Laura humming songs, that is), and generally keeping Lisa company while she chopped up vegetables and whipped the eggs. The five of us sat down to eat at about half six and ate massive quantities of eggs and toast, and told ridiculous stories and talked about all sorts of absurd and inappropriate things (thanks to Peter, of course).
Sitting around the table eating turned into sitting around the table drinking tea, which turned into sitting around the table waiting for a batch of brownies to bake, which turned into all of us settling down to watch Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in the living room. All very cozy, with the trees tipping and moaning outside.
When the film finished, at about half ten, I washed all the dishes. Everyone hung out for awhile before Peter left to try to make his way home and the rest of us went to bed. Having said good-night to the girls, I’m listening to the end of the ROTK soundtrack. Sleepy, but I’ve got another half-hour before the dishwasher finishes its cycle—I can hear it loud and clear because my bedroom’s vent is right above that part of the kitchen. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow on top of the half-inch-deep layer of ice.
I heard about Indiana getting the snowstorm, too, and wondered if your classes would be cancelled. We just had some rain early and cold weather, as opposed to Dallas. It is good to live in the southern part, though the kitties stayed inside most of the day.
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