Saturday, February 1, 2014

¡Pa'trás ni pá coger impulso!



Hail February! I'm just plain glad that January is finally over and done with after it proved to be one of the coldest on record. Simply gray, frigid, windy, and depressing. Some days it was colder here than in Alaska or Iceland! One thing's for sure, I wasn't built for the sustained cold (animically or physically) and neither was my husband.

Neither is Hamlet who, ordinarily, attempts to run outside any chance he gets (he stopped being an inside-outside cat when he came home mauled one-time-too-many and the costs at the vet of putting him back together again were getting prohibitive). On one such unforgettable January 2014 day, my husband let him out so he could get a taste of what it means to live outside in this weather, and he was begging to be let back in only a few minutes later. Walking Lizzy, one of my favorite parts of the day, was halted for three whole days because there was no way to go out in subzero windchill.

But February has started much better, thankfully in the thirties, so it feels like Indian Summer around here (although everything is very much covered with a thick blanket of snow and ice).

On the home front, my electrophysiologist said this past week that having had two flutter episodes so close to the ablation likely means that it didn't work. I had a third episode last night (what it is with Fridays or Saturdays we cannot understand!) and we were on the way to the ER when the emergency med finally kicked in and we were able to return home, for which I am kneel-down-to-thank-the-Lord grateful since I hate having to go to the ER at this point. But all is well that ends well.

Ultimately, I'm focusing on the moments when I feel awesomely good and not spending too much time pity-partying over lost hopes. The doctor says we'll have to do the procedure again but it wasn't a walk in the park so I'm not sure about that. I'm going to give this a little more time and, unless it starts happening more often, then I'll see what we want to do.

At any rate, my papi always said "pa'trás ni pá coger impulso" so it's full steam ahead (without overdoing it, of course). In better news, I submitted a proposal on the intersections of race and gender in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables for a June conference in the Berkshires that looks like it's going to rock, I've arranged to submit an essay on Julia de Burgos for an edition in honor of her centennial in the main Puerto Rican Studies journal, and I've been asked to contribute a chapter on "The South and the Caribbean" for an upcoming collection on the Southern Gothic. That'll my scholarly agenda for this year and I'm more than excited.

I'm also very grateful that my classes are going great. I have two strong groups (although the 43 students I have this semester are almost double the number of last semester) and am having a ball teaching the Latin@ Lit and Film and the American Fear classes. I had forgotten how much fun these 200-level classes can be.

Thus, other than this tell-tale heart of mine, and the ridiculously cold weather that's attacked this country, everything is better than it could be. Una de cal y una de arena, they say. And they're right.

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