Spent last night dreaming about teaching, and now I have woken up to a day of teaching, and it's annoying to have already done such a bad job of it in my sleep. My dream brain would like you to know that I am a terrible classroom manager, can't stay on topic, forget the names of my students, have no useful goals, and am constantly overwrought. Hire me, please. I guarantee uproar.

I'm staying in lodgings I've never stayed in before. This time, for some reason, the management gave me an entire house to myself, and I feel like a pea rattling around in a barrel. Outside, the passing cars hiss over the wet road. The drive north was sloppy and nerve-racking--drizzle, with temperatures hovering around freezing for two-thirds of the route. But I arrived without incident, into this land of three-foot snow drifts, and now I am staring across the street into the construction site where the gas station stood two weeks ago, wondering why it has vanished. Ah, the mysteries of life.

Today my class will be whittling away at their final projects, messing around with stanza breaks and line breaks, paragraph breaks and sentence lengths. Meanwhile, snowmelt will dribble from the eaves, and grumpy robins will peck in the plowed driveways.