Right. I bloody well hate the bloody stinkin winter, I do. I�m damned sick of it. Only January, you say? Fuck that.

Excuse the grumpiness. I have a very good reason, which I refuse to divulge. Yet.

I spent the morning making my student bulletin board look pretty. Yes I did. And yes it does. Pretty colors. Fantastic blood red arrows shooting all over the place. Arts and crafts, my friends. Arts and crafts are fun fun fun.

My neck still hurts.

I ran over a dead squirrel this morning. The squirrel was already dead when I ran over it. I keep having to remind myself of that part. I sat down on the curb afterward. I felt so ill. I sat right next to the dead squirrel, its eyes half shuttered. Somehow it looked like Basho and it just filled me with dread.

Rutty rut rut rut. Tut tut.

I like reading the Caldecott and Newberry award winners. I still get excited every year when the winners are announced. I love Avi. I used to dream that someday I would either be on the choosing-the-winner committee or be the winner. Actually, I still dream both of those things. I am a sucker, an absolute sucker, for YA books. I like picture books too, but I like stories more than pictures. See�that�s it, really, I�m here for the stories. Tell me all your stories. I want to hear them all. I want to hear your first memory and I want to hear the one where you make a fool of yourself and I want to hear the one about your broken heart and the one where you tell the dream of your perfect life.

Oh boy. Some people who try to use fancy words in their writing, especially when it�s clear they aren�t quite sure how those fancy words work (meaning�maybe they got the denotation down, but they got no sense of how a word feels, how a word slides up against other words, how its personality reacts to all the other personalities on the page), some people like that are insufferable. Really, they are. I�m just saying. Writing is not a scientific inquiry. Seriously. Who on this planet is impressed with ill-used (and I don�t mean incorrectly used�that�s a whole other mess) fancy schmancy language? I like my words true and simple to the bone. I think I�m repeating myself. I know I�m repeating myself. It�s just�I read some people�s writing and it makes me want to barf, it�s so phony and so so self-satisfied and so pretentious and ugh a bug gug gug. No more. I need lean prose. I need simple language and complex ideas. Not idiotic ideas hidden in overly-complex sentences chock full of fully rehearsed and researched words. When the writing gets in the way of sense, gets in the way of the loveliness of an idea or the loveliness of two words pressed up against each other, that, my friends, is when we've got a problem. I'll take shitty grammar, shitty spelling, lousy sentence fragments, no punctuation, I'll take it all if I can feel the personality at work beneath the words, if I can hear the true speech of someone new.

Grouch grouch grouch.

I was so happy last night. I piled myself in all my winter gear into the truck after class and it was dark and oh so cold and I listened to my rock and roll music and turned my rock and roll heater up very high and I was perfect.

As long as perfection cruises through at least once a day I think I may just get through this cold. Today, already, at lunch, Basho jumped up on the wicker ottoman (another lovely Bathsheba hand-me-down) and we hugged for about five minutes because I�ve been trying to get him to jump up and sit on that thing since September and he never would because it makes him nervous�so tippy. But not today. He just did it and it was a lovely perfect moment.

Onward now, I�ve books to catalog. Next up: Mud, Sweat and Beers. No lie.