Spring?

We're just off for a weekend in Toronto. In spite of the fact that I've got too many balls in the air (and a few more just about to be tossed up), I'm feeling upbeat. No particular reason to be -- I've just learned that my book pub date will be delayed, possibly for as long as six months, which means that the parts dealing with technological matters will probably need to be rewritten a couple more times. I didn't finish my main goal last week on my non-teaching week (to finish writing a paper that doesn't excite me much). We've just decided to send one of our kids to a special school next year to help her get over some of the carnage wrought by an educational system being run on a shoestring by exhausted and ill-trained teachers--I suppose this is a good thing on balance, though it will cost about the same as a year at Harvard I think. So lots of reasons not to be particularly chirpy, yet I am. I've got this sudden desire to find some room in my life for fun again. I need to get busy outside. I need to start running, or at least walking again. I need to start planning the garden (which begins with the quest to find an effective squirrel combat weapon). I need to finish the pirate story I began in LaHave. It got lost in the important upscale non-fiction foofarah, but it was a great idea.

I think spring must be coming.

I always figure that as a Canadian if you can make it to St. Patrick's Day, you've got the thing licked for yet one more year. The thing being the great white monolith we call winter.