We woke to brilliant sunshine reflecting from the white, white snow. That's a nice change from the weather lately, even though our local weather person announced that the temperature was a hefty minus 2. I guess we should be comforted to know that this is an unusual winter, with record snowfall. Somehow, knowing that we have at least another month to go of this near-daily snowfall, I don't feel that cheerful about it. But maybe I should think of it this way--we're on the backside of winter now. Barely. We won't really be able to say the snow is over until May. If we're lucky, maybe April. Just a short while ago, the news reported a huge traffic pile-up south of us, near Chicago, on a road that we travel each and every time we head South to visit our sons or other relatives.
Beloved Spouse drove me to Big Rapids and back yesterday since we were worried about the lake-effect snow. I didn't need him to. If anything, I get more practice driving in bad conditions than he does, and I'm certainly a more cautious driver than he is. He also missed a dental appointment accidentally, which we discovered once we got home. Hope they don't charge us. We don't normally miss appointments. As it turned out, the snow and ice weren't really bad yesterday, nothing I haven't been dealing with. And it was certainly not as bad as it was last week.
I guess Friday morning I'll be driving in the dark in order to arrive on campus for my all-day fun and frolic. I'm not going to worry about it. Yes, I've been interviewed half a dozen times to no avail since we moved to Michigan. I've been turned down for jobs for which I knew I was the better qualified candidate. It may once again be the case this time, and in fact, if I do get the job, it will be such a change that I'll be shocked. But I certainly am not going to start planning all the great things I'll do with the increase in pay. (Actually, it won't be tremendously higher than what I make now, but I'd have retirement and medical benefits.) It's almost hard to justify the cost of driving to a town 66 miles away, with gasoline over three bucks a gallon. (We paid $3.17 per gallon yesterday.) It's costing me well over $100 a month for gas, and given the other costs of driving a car (especially considering that I'm making car payments), I can't say I'd be saving money if I wasn't teaching, but if I could teach totally online, I could save money.
It would be lovely if I could take off the winter semester and teach summers and falls, but that's not how it works. This morning I was flipping through some catalogs that had arrived in the mail within the past week, and of course, they are all advertising summer clothing--shorts, bathing suits, sandals, sleeveless tops. I kind of miss the days when I had one wardrobe that functioned winter and summer. In Louisiana, when the weather got colder, I threw on a sweater and, if it was raining, a raincoat. I was still wearing thin short-sleeved blouses and lightweight pants. I could wear sandals year-round. No boots. No YakTrax to keep me from slipping on the ice. No heavy coats. No hat hair. No itchy scarves.
Oh, well. I can't change anything. I can only get out of bed each day and put one foot in front of the other, with the hopes that the footing won't be so slippery that I land suddenly on my butt. It could be worse. I could be living as a Muslim woman in Afghanistan--a harsh, harsh world. Dr. S.
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