Upcoming:

• getting up at the crack of dawn tomorrow so I can teach my class, then 
• getting up at the crackier crack of dawn on Saturday, so I can fly away to a conference in Philadelphia.

Me: Let's go on a date on Friday. 

The historian: are you sure? you have to get up so early the next morning.

Me: What am I going to do? go to bed early or something?

Historian: [snickers] 

In between now and the crack and the date and the crackier, though, I have to

• make a snazzy conference handout, yo
• teach my class
• attend a meeting
• figure out what clothes I am going to wear, for the love of all that is holy!
• etcetera, soaked in stress and rolled in toasty flakes of anxiety.

And it's snowing. As in to snow: as in, when I was driving downtown to a meeting of this board I'm on, and I was listening to a truly hilarious story about this Quebecois chef who just wrote a book about maple syrup (sample recipe: squirrel sushi--no, the squirrel is not raw, but yes, the squirrel has, apparently, delicious meat because of all the acorns it eats, poor squirrel, and yes, there is maple syrup in the soy sauce. Now: say all of that in a Quebecois accent), and I got about halfway there and I was clearly driving into the snow. The kind of driving into the snow that makes you want to turn off the radio, slow down, notice you're not sure if you're driving in an actual lane anymore. 

Long story short, I got there and home safely, and when we just took the B for a walk, the snow was almost sheeting down, but a little gentler than that. Shaking my hair and clothes off, I created my own little storm.