Spring Break

I don’t seem to have been writing much here lately, and I’m not sure why.

It could be that mentally I’m on spring break, and so I have prepared this mix for your enjoyment.

The University is actually on spring break this week, but poor slobs like me are working anyway. As one (faculty) friend of mine teased, “So that means you have to surf the web all day at your office instead of at home.” I laughed, but I really don’t get that kind of humor.

We do have Maundy Thursday and Good Friday off. In this Catholic town most people call it Holy Thursday but I think Maundy is a much cooler name. Plus it’s how I was raised. In fact, I’ve been recalling the Tenebrae services I sued to attend when I was growing up. This was surely the most dramatic service of the church year. The candles were gradually extinguished until the sanctuary was almost completely dark. The music was haunting and mournful. The pastor slammed the bible shut making a huge and scary noise. The congregation left the dark church in silence. I’ve kind of got the itch to experience that again, but my daughter might still be a bit too young to appreciate it.

My mother-in-law has come to visit. She’s fattening us up with her good home-cooking and buying all sorts of housewares and whatnots. I think she may be caulking our bathtub right now. Her original plan was to stay for the week of Xy’s spring break, but then we realized P’s spring break is the following week, so she’s staying two weeks in order that I don’t have to blow a whole week’s worth of vacation.

But why have I been so “quiet” here? I don’t know. Maybe I’m in a funk with the changing of the seasons. It is finally warming up after a long, cold winter, and I’m happy about that. But I have also been going through various permutations of a sore throat and cough. Perhaps it’s allergies, though I normally associate allergies with nasal congestion, which I don’t have.

Or maybe it’s something completely different. I get the feeling the whole city is kind of collectively holding its breath in anticipation of the impending change in the administration.