Snow, Snow, Go Away

There have been many drawbacks to the incessant snow.  First, my shoulders and back are aching from the shoveling, wrestling the snow blower and, today, hacking at six inches of ice with a hatchet.  On the other hand, I've lost about five pounds.

Second, and no less exhausting, is the fact that Thing One and Thing Two have been in school for about an hour and a half since December. On Monday, there was school, but Thing Two was sick and stayed home.

Both of which means you're always tired and can't do some of the things you NEED to do (grading most especially) much less what you WANT to do.

I have one very important ritual.  Every Wednesday after seeing the Things off to school, I go down to Susan's Country Kitchen for a sausage, egg and cheese on a hard roll, a toasted buttery muffin and several cups of perfectly adequate coffee.  The real attraction - besides a very good sausage, egg and cheese - is the book I take with me.

Some time in October or perhaps September, I started Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought as part of my quixotic commitment to reading all of the Oxford Histories of the United States.  The book is long (about 850 pages), the chapters run about 40-50 pages, but each chapter is broken down into subsections that are quite manageable during a Wednesday morning breakfast break.

The book covers the period from 1815-1848.  I finished Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty, the preceding volume in the Oxford series, and could hardly wait to read the next one.

I'm supposed to be a teacher, not a professor.  I'm not a scholar first.  Or at least, I'm not supposed to be.  Teaching and knowing aren't the same thing, and teaching is supposed to be the priority.

So, my Wednesday morning is my own attempt to be a "knower" as well as a "teacher".  And snow days are killing it.  We have a long weekend and I just spent an hour reading about Lowell mill girls and slaves participation in the market economy and agrarian revolt in upstate New York, while my car was having an oil change.

I have no idea whether that will make me a better "teacher" or even if it will stick in my head enough to improve me as a "knower".  But I figure I have to keep trying.

If only it would stop snowing long enough to have an intellectual moment...