Wintry Week in the Midlands

                             Our house in the snow (Mon., 2-16-10)

Dear George,

It’s been an unusually wintry week in Cincinnati.  As I write this on Tuesday evening, the snow continues to come down, and it’s been doing that pretty nonstop since Saturday.  The weatherman on the radio said that we’ve had more snow this February than any year since 1914.  The pile of snow on our patio table is close to two feet high, and we have another half a foot possible by the weekend.  It’s a shame that Monday was President’s Day, since the holiday was a wasted snow day for Katja, but she did get today off too.  We went to the Esquire matinee to see The Wolfman, good escapist fare in the harsh weather.

 

We’re still basking in the afterglow of the Saints’ unanticipated Super Bowl win.  We were emotionally involved, of course, because of J and K’s living there and their total  enthusiasm.  But beyond that, the whole country seemed caught up in the drama.  I can’t remember anything quite like it, i.e., where an already huge event was magnified even further in the aftermath of a community’s catastrophe.  The meaning of the competition took on a whole different flavor, as did its dramatic outcome.  Saints fans seem to feel a sense of destiny about the whole thing. 

 

Sophie, Mike, Duffy, Donna, Katja, and I have had a lot of winter get-togethers in our extended sheepdog family.  Sophie, of course, is Mike and Duffy’s little sister, and the dogs have now made up a pack for almost eight years.  Donna and I took them to Fernbank Park last Saturday after the big snow set in.  The dogs love it.  Ordinarily there are lots of people there, and we obey the leash laws.  In the bad weather though, Fernbank was deserted, and the dogs got to run free.  They dashed about in the snow, nuzzled it with their noses, and herded one another. As the photo below indicates, the dogs also enjoy jumping up on the benches.  Fernbank runs along the banks of the Ohio River which gives it a scenic backdrop.  There’s a long forest trail at one end of the park, and the woods looked like a fairyland with its icy frosting.

                  Duffy, Sophie, and Mike at Fernbank with Donna

Katja and I had a big culture weekend, attending the symphony on Friday and CCM on Saturday.  Katja grew up going with her parents to the Philadelphia Orchestra, while my parents fed us a hi-fi diet of Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman.  As you might guess, one of us is a high-culture person; the other, a lowbrow.  The symphony audience was under-populated because of the bad weather.  The featured artist was Radu Lupu, a gray-bearded Romanian pianist who won the Van Cliburn competition in his youth and who has had a distinguished career.  He played a concerto by Bartok which we enjoyed a lot, though we weren’t enthusiastic about the rest of the program.  On Saturday we went to UC’s Cincinnati Conservatory of Music to see their opera production of “The Rape of Lucretia” by Benjamin Britten.  CCM is one of the top music schools in the country, and we’re always amazed and appreciative of the student performances.  As the title implies, the dramatic production was pretty intense -- even shocking at times, but we thought it was one of their best opera performances in recent memory.

 

I worked a lot in the office this past week.  Some months ago I volunteered to help my friend and department head, Paula by reviewing course evaluations for grad student and adjunct instructors that had accumulated for the past year.  The task has taken forever, in part because I had a stack of course evaluation forms about three feet high.  I wrote a letter for each instructor, describing student evaluation results for each class (a mostly makework endeavor since the instructors are fully capable of looking at the same evaluation results and reaching the same conclusions that I do).  I finally finished with all the grad student instructors on Friday and gave drafts of letters to Paula, who, in turn, will look them over, make any changes she deems appropriate, and distribute the final products.  For a while I was disgruntled because this didn’t seem like something a retired person ought to be doing.  Then I reframed it as “volunteer activity”, and, though still a silly waste of time, I found it slightly more palatable.

 

Now we’re busy watching the Winter Olympics.  So far Katja likes the figure skating best, and I like the moguls.  The timing is good – it keeps us from suffering from NFL withdrawal.  Neither Katja nor I are true sports fans, but we like to participate vicariously in these big-time events.  It’s also helpful because it reduces some of the cabin fever that we’ve been experiencing.  We’re definitely ready for some hint of spring.

 

Love,

Dave

Gmail Comments:

-Linda KC (2-16): the house looks wonderful, i would love one week of that snow, but that is enough