I Feel Like I'm in an Eliot Poem

It's November, cold and rainy, for the first time really. I am blogging while I watch college football, and Robyn is listening to a book-on-tape (or book-on-mp3, whatever) while she works on her homework. Coraline is perched on the back of the futon behind me, and Marlowe is asleep on a blanket. All-in-all, kind of a quiet fall day.

The trees are more or less completely bare now. This week, the weather has been mostly sunny and in the 70's, uncanny for the middle of November, but today it is cold and gray and muted. A good day for self-reflection, I suppose, and the strange thing is that even Facebook seems to be in a state of melancholy today. From coast-to-coast, my Facebook Friends all seem kind of sad today. Coincidence, or do you think that there really is something in the air, something about the Earth slowly dying, that is making everyone just a little more thoughtful today?

Pictures Of A Cat And Several Trees

Columbus Day Postcard

Things are good. The weather here has been beautiful this past week, although generally I have been too sick to be able to take advantage of it. A nasty cold has been going around the middle school where I work, and it finally caught up to me, laying me down from about Wednesday through Sunday. But I feel better now.

Columbus Day has been one of my favorite holidays for awhile now, and so that made me feel a little awkward this weekend when several of my friends were circulating this video about "Reconsidering Columbus Day." At first I was put off, but then I began to think about why I have such strong feelings for this holiday, and I realized that it had nothing to do with Christopher Columbus or patriotism or history or whatever. I just like it because the weather is usually nice, and I think that it is ideally situated between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, and I have good memories about sneaking off to New York City by myself during "Fall Break" when I was in college. So I guess that I'd be down with changing this holiday's name, or changing it's emphasis towards Native American history, just as long as I still get the second Monday in October off.

Addendum: I'm going to start putting most of my sports-related posts here. If I think that something I write is particularly clever or interesting, I'll post it on this blog. But I found myself just making one inane sports list after another, and felt like they needed their own space.