2011.01.29
121 Days Remaining

01. I started composing this post two days ago on Thursday, where I was writing from home, where I would normally not be at this time on a Thursday, because Baskerville College was closed due to snow. We didn't get hammered quite so hard as points south (apparently Wilmington got about a foot, we seem to be somewhere between 8 and 10 inches at the most), but New Aldwych isn't good with handling snow, and neither is Baskerville's campus, and so we were closed. On the 4th day of the semester. Several students wrote to ask me about how this impacted the class topics for Thursday (are we skipping them, pushing them back to Tuesday next week, or adding them to Tuesday's scheduled class - it's the third option, btw). I went out for a walk yesterday and the accumulated snow from the past few storms is hovering around 2 feet on the ground (and that's after having had intermittent warm days and upper-layer melting). The roads are mostly plowed, although none so well as I would like, and I once again shoveled my car out from a mound of snow (this time on the street, rather than attempting to shovel in-between cars in a parking lot).

02. Though I'm not normally the type to pass around items of utter cuteness, I saw this today and thought it was adorable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBU3BwWpR8Q&feature=player_embedded . It starts off slow, but once the pony starts, it's very cute.

03. Today I've been doing some research and working on various things. It occurred to me that I wish I had a larger and more diversified living space just so I had housework to do, if that makes sense. As it is, here, I get up, have breakfast, and have my computer to work with. I was actually kind of glad to do the snow shoveling yesterday, as I was outside and working for about an hour. I shoveled some of the rest of the street, just because.

04. Anyway, while working today, I played (god bless Netflix) a fairly uninteresting Rick Schroeder-starring version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was not bad as such, but contained an egregious number of silly scientific errors (dinosaurs lived over a million years ago, says the geologically and paleontologically trained main character). With that around, I also browsed the rest of Mr. Schroeder's oeuvre, and came across two films from my childhood: Earthling (where he stars as a kid orphaned in the outback who is saved by a terminally-ill man going to die in the ruins of his family's settler homestead) and Champs (where he plays Jon Voight's son). I have fond memories of Earthling, in particular, from repeated viewings on what I assume must have been HBO when I was very young.

04. It got me thinking about the number of very sad films I saw when I was small, or at least films with a strongly sad theme in them: Earthling (which ends with 8-year old R.S. burying his mentor and heading "north" back to civilization), Dot and the Kangaroo (the ending of which actually still makes me cry to think about), Raggedy Ann and Andy (the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees being a bittersweet character), and later on, at the end of Quantum Leap Sam never makes it home. Those are just some random items from the list; there are lots more, but I won't list them all.

05. I don't have a lot more to write at this moment. Just wanted to post something and keep things up to date. Have a good night!