New England Living and Other Stuff

We got our first good, solid snowfall this week, about 4.5 inches overnight Thursday, and then another 5-6 inches yesterday. It was beautiful! They're well prepared for snow here, and all the main roads were plowed and sanded by the time I commuted to campus at 8:00 a.m. Friday morning. Though we missed church this morning (somehow I woke up with a fever??), I managed to improve enough to go play in the snow with the girls. We made snow angels, I pulled them around in the sled, and we had snowball fights. I felt so amazingly blessed and happy to be here! We don't often feel that way in life, do we? Or, if we do, it seems fleeting and somehow associated with something temporal, like a vacation to some place exotic or something.

I mustered the gumption to head to the gym this afternoon, a much needed event since I didn't make it in the past two days. I forgot to mention that I've lost over 1% body fat in about 10 days!! That's a huge thing for me to see as progress, since the scales aren't actually going down. I still occasionally have some back and neck pain, but the doctor is planning on doing a second ablation procedure, which basically burns the nerve endings so that they can't send pain signals to the brain. The procedure lasts anywhere from 6 months to 2 years, and I'll be thankful for any pain-free time I can get!

I've started teaching my classes, and I know I'm going to LOVE teaching Shakespeare!! My students are fun, they're talking about how interesting the historical context is, and they're putting the context alongside the text in really productive ways--hooray!

The new schedule is still a bit crazy, and I'm supposed to be home schooling Eliza, yet I haven't chosen a curriculum yet. I feel completely unqualified, and I really don't know *how* to do this. So, for now, we're doing several worksheets, covering basics, and I'm trying to get a solid idea of what she knows and where she needs to do some extra work. I'm really hoping I can something more formal in place soon, so that we'll feel like it's more "school"-like.