Whoops!

I have so far managed to stick to all the rest of my New Year's resolutions, but the resolution regarding blogging more has somehow eluded me. There are a few reasons for that, mostly too boring to mention, but the basic gist of it is: lots of catching up has made the first few weeks of this semester a bit more stressful than it ought to have been. I have only myself to blame.

Now that I have finally "caught up" (tentatively placed between quotation marks because of the extreme temporality of this state), I thought I would sit down and report back. And so:

I don't have much to report. Whoops again! All my talk about keeping an eye out for interesting things has also been backseated. Yes, I've had some delicious dinners with friends, played plenty with my hopelessly adolescent cats, and put a lot more active thought into eating (which, I should mention, has a lot to do with a part of my resolution with which I have been successful), but I have had practically no time for Actual Wandering. My one real jaunt during the month of February took me to Northampton for a concert, which was perhaps the first time I have seen live music in about, oh, two years or some similarly too-long amount of time. The train across Massachusetts whipped me by trees that convinced me that "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" was in fact based on real experiences of the Brothers Grimm:



I was, unfortunately, unable to get a decent picture of a phenomenon which I have not actually seen before, in which the sun was refracted through small bits of ice held to the crooks and ends of every branch of every tree, which gave the impression of trees with diamonds growing in place of leaves. Because of the growing heat of the sun, there was a very small window of time in which this combination was possible, and the trees, flashing, flashed past and were gone. You'll just have to take my word for it: it was extraordinary.

Northampton, too, was quite beautiful:



See how delightfully snow-covered everything is? No, really:



Maybe for the owner of that car, snow-covered does not equal delight. Similarly, the heavy, stubborn icicles hanging from roofs and eaves were most likely not entirely pleasing to the residents of the houses to which the roofs and eaves belonged. Structural damage was clearly occurring in a variety of ways; for instance: a particularly thick and angry sheet of ice was melting into the wall of the friend I went to visit. She was none too happy. We had, however, a lovely time.

As February deepened, however, and the snow refused to melt, winter began to seriously wear out its welcome. Here it is, almost March, and there is still snow on the ground, some of which has been there since the middle of December and is unbelievably filthy. I haven't been suffering from the same seasonable blahs as some others, but I am ready for the first blossom of spring, I'll tell ya. My California blood has grown tired of this.

I said it before and I'll say it again: I'll be back more often. This time, however, blank passing weeks will not prove me wrong. See you soon.