The little northern city by the sea is encased in ice, and the ice doesn't show any interest in melting, though everyone's been trying. I had to go to three stores yesterday before I found one that still had bags of rock salt on the shelf. The clerk at Walgreen's told me that a desperate customer had settled for a canister of iodized salt. Desperate is no surprise: the roads are passable but the sidewalks and driveways are a misery, and we've got another round of mess coming tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it's cold . . . seven degrees and windy. You know I love weather, but this morning I am glad not be to be outside skate-wrestling with firewood and barn chores, as I would have been doing in the old days. I've lost my affinity for ice storms, if I ever had one.

Anyway the weekend will already be intense, without adding skate-wrestling to the mix. I'll be teaching both days--a revision session, with a fully subscribed class--and I'll be trying out some new approaches that I may fold into the Monson conference this summer, if they work out well in this context. So I feel like I'm not only preparing to teach in the present but also preparing to observe myself teaching in the future, which is just as convoluted as this sentence is.

However, for the moment: hot coffee, lamplight, a quiet room, my red bathrobe, warmth seeping through the registers. My current favorite song is flickering through my head--Beyonce's gorgeous "II Most Wanted," which I replayed maybe fifty times yesterday. If you haven't heard it, the song is a duet collaboration with Miley Cyrus, overflowing with rich complicated harmonies and a soaring chorus: love song, elegy, road tune, and beauty, and two women singing their hearts out to each other. I have a giant crush on it.