Monday Riffday, the not complaining edition

Enough of the serious posts.  I'm boring myself.

The weather was gorgeous this weekend.  It reminded us all why we love living here, because after last week, I don't think there was anyone in a 100-mile radius that wasn't thinking about moving.  It snowed (heavily), it hailed, it sleeted, it rained; it was foggy, and then there were low-hanging clouds, and it was generally gray and miserable.  The temperature didn't come above 45.  Of course, this time of year, the snow doesn't last more than an hour or two, but still it is depressing to see it coming down in APRIL.

But Saturday and Sunday it was sunny and (relatively) warm and utterly perfect.  We went out to our favorite lake and enjoyed it.  It's not warm enough to get in the water, of course, but it was warm enough to be outside.  We'll take it.

The end of the semester fast approaches.  I have a 15-20 page paper on Jane Austen due by the end of next week, which will be something about Christian Virtue in Persuasion (the Christian virtue part was assigned--is Austen's understanding of virtue on a continuum with Christian thinking, or an example of early modernism?-- but we could pick which book(s) we wanted to work with).  And a week from Tuesday I have to turn in a 20 or more page paper for my feminist literary theory class, which is on needlework as gender performance in Alias Grace.  Then for my independent study, I have to write something about the possibilities of the cybernovel, which is a topic that interests me.

In fact, they all interest me.  I just don't want to write them.  I have to keep a positive attitude, so I'm not going to say that I hate writing papers, even though I do. I'm concentrating on this:  two weeks from now, I'll be done.  I'm not complaining.  I'm feeling much better about this than I was two weeks before the end of last semester-- the papers are do-able.

Then I get to start planning our trip to visit Nell, who is having so much fun in Europe that she can't be bothered to say Happy Easter to her parents.  kidding.  She is (or was) in Krakow for the weekend, and they may not even have access to computers.  So I won't complain.  Not me.

MadMax had his first track meet last Thursday.  I was in UTown for classes so I missed it, but the rest of them are on Friday, so I hope that will be the only one I have to miss.  Sounds like it wasn't much to miss, though-- another mom told me that it drizzled the whole afternoon, and with temps in the mid-40s, don't you know that was a nice outing.  MadMax is (for some reason) all excited about the throwing events.  This meet was just his school, but he threw a discus 83 feet.  Good Lord.  Maybe I'm remembering wrong.  That sounds impossible.

Well, maybe not.  I just googled the world record and it is 74 meters.  Or metres, as your spelling may be.  AB3, the blog where you learn something new every time you look.  But it may not be something you wanted to know.

MadMax is also in a Michael Crichton phase.  I don't know exactly what caused it.  Nell read Jurassic Park while she was home for Christmas, maybe that got him interested.  He is now reading his fourth Crichton.  We watched the original Jurassic Park movie on Saturday.  It terrified me when we saw it in the theater way back when.  But you know, it's not nearly so scary on the small screen, and it's not a bad movie. Laura Dern is terrific, and I always like Sam Neill.

And that's all I can think of.  No complaints.