icicles

First in the long standing trailer versus Bonnie battle the trailer is up two. On the way to music 101 I slipped on the ice in the doorway and fell on my butt. Yup metal and ice make a particularly treacherous combo. Then on way to seminar I got hit in the forehead with a falling icicle. I’m not making this up. The irony of the second injury is that my post lunch stupor was rudely interrupted by some facilities guys knocking icicle off the roof so they wouldn’t fall on people’s head. They just didn’t get to my side of the rig. The minor head injury may have been what prompted me again to remind my grad students of how little I know about the subject matter of the seminar and suggest that we google a few things. I also confessed that I spent most of the day reminding myself to say reconstruction and not reformation, which comes much more easily to me. Oh and I asked another student to keep my vigil with the cville schools website during class.(I was vigilant enough yesterday that I actually saw the announcement change) I can already see where these evaluations are going. However I did learn that one of my grad students made the same earth shattering discovery that I did. Both of us noticed that one of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite composers the well known Thomas Arne wrote an opera called Thomas and Sally. Both of us were convinced that we had solved the whole Sally Hemmings dilemma and that if only people paid more attention to opera everything would make more sense. We were both wrong---the opera was a couple of decades to early. But at least I’m not the only one who fell for it.

I need also to thank my friends Liz and Ellen for their technological victories last night during the super bowl. Ellen got us out of a true super bowl tragedy involving a giant black box that appeared every time the super bowl came out. Amazingly the black box did not appear during the entire puppy bowl which the children had been anticipating and talking about all day. After my calling the cable companies and various husbands sitting on the couch pushing the volume button on the remote multiple times to make it go away Ellen actually approached the machine and fixed it the old fashioned way—by pushing buttons ON THE TV. She used her google talents to determine that the closed captioning was on. Liz meanwhile used a pen to fix our disposal. Eli I believe had thrown his banana peel into the sink which the disposal did not like and Liz after sticking her fingers in down the disposal to pick it out then figured out how to use a pen to push reset. (Note when I stuck my fingers in there another friend yelled “no you’re a musician you need your fingers.) I was so happy about the disposal that I almost gave her a giant kiss but given power outages, kids swaps, and slumber parties we're already heading too close to some sort of incestuous commune and I kept my hands to myself. (Rebecca spent one night in bed with Kiren and one evening in the bath with Reid)

And yes the cville schools are closed again tomorrow. That means that in the last ten days the children have actually gone to school for only two. The general consensus from parents seems to be shoot me now. Even the kids are getting sick of all of this togetherness. I came home to Eli yelling at his brother “I am the writefull owna of this litesaba you get out a my face…..”