Snow day!

Monday night I worked the late shift on the reference desk; when I left at 9 pm it was snowing and apparently my town had misplaced all its salt trucks, so the drive home was slow and uneasy. Tuesday we'd had about four inches of snow, and when I left work at 6 pm the freezing rain had begun, so it was another uncomfortable drive home. The freezing rain continued until after I'd gone to bed last night. When I woke, we had a good 9 inches of snow on the ground; I lay there in bed listening to the school closings and dreading how difficult it was going to be to get to work.

Then the miracle happened -- my university was declared CLOSED until at least noon! Understand, it's a residential campus and they very, very, very rarely shut down -- maybe twice in the last 15 years or so. By 10:30 in the morning it had stopped snowing (leaving a little more than a foot of the stuff on the ground -- according to the evening news, this is our biggest snowstorm since 1996) and they'd updated the closing to an all-day thing. Whoooo!

I finally gritted my teeth and put on my boots and headed out to shovel the driveway in the early afternoon. The sun had come out, and although the temperature was only in the mid-twenties it was actually kind of pleasant out. And I wasn't out there five minutes before a neighbor I'd never met materialized in my driveway with a shovel in her hand and a smile on her face, asking if she could help. Considering that yesterday morning a good friend of mine showed up to dig me out after that first wave of snow, I think I've had some ridiculous shoveling-assistance luck this week.

After shoveling I came in and had a lovely, lazy afternoon of listening to music, watching a bit of tennis on TV, and listening to my cats purr in the sunshine. You really can't ask for a nicer snow day.

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The reason humans make music is that we are in love with time.

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Yes, it's true that my favorite rockstar is the halftime entertainment at this year's Super Bowl. He's also going out on tour in a couple of months. Tickets for the US dates go on sale Monday. I'm planning on chasing him to Denver and Chicago; unfortunately, there are no other dates within anything like plausible driving distance for me, and I can't really swing more than one fly-in show this tour. But at least I get to see the E Street Band at least a couple more times in my life, which I wasn't sure would happen after the last tour. My little three-city road trip (aka the "summer vacation in the E Street Nation") this past August was so energizing and inspiring; I'm tremendously glad to be looking forward to a couple more evenings spent in the company of the greatest rock & roll band ever.

* * * * *

So I have all these poems in this series, and some of them really need the context of the series in order to work, I think -- or at least they need to be read alongside a couple of the other poems. Can anybody think of journals that especially like to get clumps of related poems, and might like to publish at least a couple or three of them? I don't think I want to try to pull together a chapbook -- the poems are coming along quickly enough that there will be a full-length ms. ready to send out within a year or so, I think -- but I'd love to get a few of them out there. Recommendations, anyone?