Well, now on top of our winter woes, I have a cold. Bobby has been fighting one off for days, and it was inevitable that I'd catch it, and I did.
It was back to work today; Baltimore County schools opened regular time. (Carroll County schools remained closed since we got hit with the worst of the storm.) The drive to work this morning was quite startling. Branches and trees are down everywhere. The damage is substantial. It looks worse than the tropical storms of the past few years.
Everything here is still coated in ice. Drive even just five minutes south, and most of the trees have thawed, but it doesn't appear to have gotten above freezing here today. We lost another branch in the yard from one of the maples that took down part of the chicken run. Luckily, the damage was not bad, and Bobby was able to repair it this afternoon.
Freyja was due to be spayed today, so we loaded her into her carrier to drive her to the vet's office this morning. Ten minutes on the road and they called to cancel her appointment because the office is still without power. So we turned around and drove her home. She is spared again! She was originally scheduled for Tuesday, but we had to reschedule for today because the after-school program started up Tuesday, and we would have had to pick her up right in the middle of it, which was impossible. Hopefully three is a charm and her next appointment will actually happen.
I am almost ready to start writing my final paper for my current class. I really drag these things out ridiculously. I have one more article to read; I have written a draft thesis statement and a quick outline, so it will just be a matter, this weekend, of writing each section. If I can do two or three sections a day, then most of the paper will be done this weekend. Those who think I work too hard will be proud that I downloaded another book by Rousseau yesterday (my Kindle has 3G--dangerous because I can continue to download books even without Internet or power) that I do not actually intend to read for my paper. I decided against it. I have already read three books by Rousseau in excess of what I was required to read for the class, plus the usual collection of articles and book chapters, so I decided to give this one a pass.
This means that I am actually reading something at the moment that is not school-related! (It is still academic-related, for my "Tree of Tales" paper ... baby steps, people!) The book is called The Song of Middle-earth by David Harvey. I'm actually rather disappointed in it so far. It was written about 30 years ago, so the Silm and UT were available, but the book seems to mostly summarize the texts. How annoying! I would assume that if someone is buying a book about Tolkien, then one has actually read Tolkien. He frequently reaches the point where I think he is going to get into something deep and thought-provoking, and then just kind of peters out. He makes some good points about Tolkien's legendarium not being derivative; he starts to delve into world cosmogony but flakes out with a statement that Ainulindalë shares several themes with other world myths. Aaaaand? (He also falls into the trap that I've found to be rather frequent of stating that a particular archetype is "common" in world creation stories when reading a boatload of world creation stories has convinced me that this is not the case.) He also doesn't seem to be much of a writer, and it is hard sometimes to see how his ideas are connected. (This reminds me of an objective that I frequently include when writing Written Content goals for student IEPs: The student will use transitions to show the connections among ideas within and between paragraphs in a multi-paragraph composition. He could use that objective in his hypothetical IEP.) Since he deals with mythological themes and cosmogony in particular, then it was a book that I pretty much had to read before undertaking the next revision of my paper, and I do hope my opinion of it improves. But so far, I'm not enjoying it much more than if I'd read the other work by Rousseau, and that is saying something.
