The icy days of January

The snowy, icy cold days of January are hard on almost everyone. Everything is iced over, like an iced sugar doughnut, but not as fun, since the ice turns every surface into a dangerous and inadvertent ice rink. These are the perfect days to stay inside, warm and dry, and to avoid driving anywhere, if at all possible.

Magellan stays mostly under the guest room bed, as close to the baseboard heater as possible, and the few times she deigns to come out, the part of her body that has pressed against the heater is warm to the touch. Darwin, bored and cabin fevered, prowls the apartment, looking for something to do, which usually involves Trouble (his middle name).

Thankfully, at least during most of the day, they each enjoy their favorite reality show by watching the birds flit in and out of the feeders, and the countless squirrels sit on the window ledge outside, munching on their corn and peanuts and pumpkin seeds.

Even Geni tries to persuade us to leave her inside and not drag her into the cold and the ice-crusted snow, and she does everything in her power to thwart my new project of placing red booties on her, so she doesn't have to suffer from the salt on the roads and sidewalks, and the painful pebbles of ice that tend to form under her not-made-for-snow paws.

She obviously doesn't comprehend the purpose of the (very stylish, I think) booties, and dislikes the feel of them on her legs. And once we are outside, I think she does her best to continually shake them off (I'm still not sure if the booties are just too small for her feet!) so we have to stop and I have to put them back on, repeatedly.


My husband doesn't agree with my project and thinks we should just let her walk unfettered by the booties, but I'm persuaded that she will gradually come to understand that it's in her best interest to protect her paws rather than to feel the ice and the cold on them. I guess I have my work cut out for me.

The end of the weekend marks the end of my break since the spring semester (right, what a joke!) begins on Monday. The syllabus are ready and photocopied, and I have nearly finished the first-day lesson plans for the 3 classes I'll be teaching. Today, I've also written a conference proposal and sent it to a friend for comment, and tomorrow I will put the finishing touches on an article I plan to send to a journal to see if they'll publish it. Monday will be class-plan-finalizing day and Tuesday is go-to-Columbus-day so I can get my hair done in anticipation of being back in the classroom, starting Wednesday.

I'm glad the fall semester is behind me, and while I learned a lot about being more organized and making sure I'm not overwhelmed with work, I'm not sure how I'll manage teaching 3 classes. But all my colleagues do, at one time or another, so I'm sure I'll get into the groove of it, too, eventually. I have 2 brand-new classes to teach this semester (what was I thinking?!), so that'll be a challenge, but I've planned those classes as well as I can so, hopefully, they will work out.

Last semester, my evaluations for both classes were pretty terrific, which was a relief given that they're the first ones in my tenure-track career, and that my U.S. literature class (which spanned more than 4 centuries of writings) was brand-new as well, and I made many changes to the syllabus throughout the semester. But students didn't complain about that and, instead, most said they'd "learned a lot" and that the class was "very challenging." Students in my postcolonial class also made similar comments, so I can't ask for more.

When I go back to teaching next Wednesday, the early forecast is for a low of 3 degrees in the morning. The air itself will feel frozen as I leave the apartment to go teach my morning, first-year, writing-intensive class, and the high for the day isn't expected to break the low 20s when I'm teaching my afternoon Latin@ literature class. Things will be pretty much the same, if not colder, on Thursday, when I start my very first senior seminar, which is on Hawthorne.

All anyone can do now, from the wildlife, to the cats, to Geni and to every one of us, is look forward to January ending quickly, although February (albeit shorter) isn't much better. At least March is now only 2 months away, or so. That's something to look forward to, indeed.