Bright Sunshiney.

We come up this morning cold and bright under a white-blue sky, birds and birds and birds, delivery trucks all in the streets. There's a wind. We're not supposed to see 40 degrees. What's in the shade is ice. What's in the sun is water. Winter slides back in for the short term, at least.

Three weeks in and I'm finally starting to carry around a vague memory of what the pace of the classroom is supposed to feel like, which this morning leaves me still in my robe and three marked stories in and cups of coffee drunk and no time spent in the shed, which is all at once bad and good, because if I was out there, at least I'd be out there, but I'm so deeply stuck right now it's hard to say what's next or why. I'd be staring at the screen, adding a log to the fire, sitting back down, staring some more. Though now that I set that down in pixels and light it seems better than inking up the margins of stories not mine. No offense, younguns, but if I'm worth a damn in those four walls it's because I try to like working on my own work better than I like working on yours. And if I've failed at that this morning, why then, this afternoon's exercise out at the puppet show ought to come off like a sack of potatoes. At least the sun's shining.

Cold. We'll see the mid and upper forties through the weekend, but set those bloom calendars back one week. This'll hold us up a little.