I'm taking a break from grading, grading, grading. Arggh! How much grading can one Professor be reasonably expected to complete. OK, to be fair, I was the one who assigned all this stuff, so by rights, I should be the one who has to grade it. But there are moments when it becomes mind-numbing. Oops--is this turning into one of those posts that's going to come back to haunt me someday if /when I'm on the job market? And more to the point, really, will there come a day when I am back on the job market? But what I really wanted to say is that for the past four days or so, it's just been cold. I don't think it got to much about 20 today (and that's 20 Fahrenheit, I'll have you know!) And, already, I'm tired of being cold. I'm tired of sloshing through snow. I'm tired of having to worry about slipping and falling in the parking lot. It's somehow all way more complicated than, as a Californian, I would have imagined. And yet it's somehow magical too. I cannot the way that I feel as I sit before a toasty-warm fire and watch the snow fall. I cannot convey the comfort of the long nights, seemingly custom made for reading long novels. I cannot explain the sheer joy of picking just the right scarf and hat and actually layering clothing. Wearing sweaters and jackets and wooly tights and socks is such fun in that J. Crew, non-SoCal kind of way. Maybe I'm just trying to make my peace with winter here--I'm not sure. But somehow the discomforts of winter are, at least a little bit, offset by the sense of coziness. This, I suppose, is winter in New England.