my heart makes answer

Having the busiest period of the year at work come in the last six weeks of winter really seems to accentuate the seasonal change. By February, everyone's sick of winter (especially this cold, bitter one), all the overtime/work stress is beating us all down down, and everything is generally miserable--and then suddenly I'm walking across campus and there's a hawthorn tree flowering, these white flowers all over what I swear were entirely bare branches the last time I saw it a few days ago, and it's like some fairy creature stepped through the veil and settled here for a while, it's so surprising and otherworldly. Spring! In this land of endless winter and misery!

I didn't stop in my tracks, but there was definitely a hitch in my step when I caught sight of it.

This tree prompted me to notice today that daffodils are blooming in tight little bunches at doorsteps and along sidewalks, down in the little hollows in the neighborhood yards that always have the first of a long parade of daffodils. I've also recently had to switch my alarm clock's alarm sound from birds tweeting to a generic (but thankfully not shrieky) musical tone, because the birds are starting up an hour or so before I normally rise, which leads me to think my alarm's going off. Spriiiiiiing.

And and and, as of today we are finally done with the Big Huge Federal Report that makes life a misery through February, not to mention the Big Annual Program Event and the Big Thrice-Yearly Workshop Events, all of which came within two weeks of each other, and it is as if the sun has come out! Birds are singing, warm breezes are blowing, college students are getting drunk and making embarrassing porn videos in Florida on spring break! (One of these things is not like the others...) I can catch up on non-essential work stuff! I can take a lunch break! Not that it won't still be busy, but it will be a manageable type of busy as opposed to chaos.

(I don't ultimately mind the work at this time of year--it is, after all, job security for the rest of the year, and I suppose it builds a certain kind of team spirit--but it would definitely be nice have it spread out instead of all bunched together. Federal deadlines being what they are, this is unlikely to ever happen.)

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I haven't written much over the past couple of months because my brain's been too fried, but this weekend I AM going to plot out the next several scenes of the not!drawerfic and get started on them. I'm so close to at least joining up the ~80K chunk of continuous beginning and middle with the next few pieces of the middle I already have written, if not moving towards the end.

I did at least get some reading done over the past several weeks. Nothing really worth writing about here, but it was nice to do. Well, okay, one thing I did want to say was that I just finished The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt's newest) and thought it was great, but still a bit flawed. The rambling at the end needed to be cut down a lot. She approached Joycean--it was very reminiscent of the style of the ending to Portrait of the Artist, which is always a plus--but I rolled my eyes at some of it. That said, the book as a whole was intricately crafted and rich with interesting and well-realized characters, and despite myself I liked Theo a lot, so it was certainly worth reading.

Right now I'm finally reading Broken Homes, the latest Rivers of London novel. After that is Push Dick's Button, which is Dick Button's memoir and promises to be entertaining.

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I voluntarily stepped onto a sheet of ice at 6:15 this morning so I could have a session to practice/warm up before my lesson at 7. How did this become my life?