Morning, munchkins. …

Morning, munchkins. It's still mostly dark here, but the sky is starting to lighten. I have a white orchid framed in one of our windows, with three blooms fully open, two partly open, and with any luck, six more to come. For a city dweller with northern light, orchids are a great deal -- I wish I'd figured that out earlier. They last a good month, at least, so a twenty dollar orchid offers an awful lot of flower power. If I could afford it, I'd buy a new one every week, so that I'd have four or five different ones blooming at any one time. That might help alleviate the dismalness of winter ongoing.

There's supposed to be some sunshine today; we'll hope that comes through. In some ways, March is the hardest month for Chicago weather -- you keep thinking that winter ought to be over now, there should be some signs of spring, but no, it's still thirty degrees and dark out. For day after day after day. If I had planned my travel better, I'd be in Sri Lanka right now, rather than in April; I'm a little sad that I'll be missing actual spring in Chicago. There's such a brief window of beautiful weather before it gets painfully hot...

I got my offer letter from Roosevelt yesterday -- very exciting to see it all laid out in black and white. They addressed me as Dr. Mohanraj too, which I'm still not used to. Dr. Mohanraj? You must be looking for my father...or if not him, just possibly my sister. But you can't mean me... The letter tells me that I have two days of mandatory new faculty orientation, 8/23 - 8/24, so that means I'd better be finished with all the New York book promotion stuff by then. Should be manageable.

Yesterday, I only got partway through both the student marking and the writing -- didn't manage to complete either task, which was frustrating. Venu and Nilofer took me out for drinks and munchies to celebrate the new job; met a friend of Venu's too, who was interesting and nice. Several fun hours, though the place we went was almost unbearably hip, the Wave Lounge at the W Hotel. No, I didn't leave any letters off the name of the hotel. I had a pomegrate-champagne cocktail, yummy, and we shared a really terrific duck confit and sliced apple appetizer, eight large appetizer portions for only seven dollars or so. Great deal, delicious.

I had hoped to do some more work when I got home, but I was too tired; just watched Monk with Kevin and then crashed. But I'm free until 3:00 today, so that's about seven solid hours of work time. Hopefully I'll make the best of it. There's also three loads of laundry to put away (I did them yesterday, but then they all just ended up on the couch, masses of clean, warm clothes), and then at 3:00 we're going to go meet a realtor and look at a few townhouses. Thanks for everyone who's been e-mailing in about storage and other housing-related options; we're pretty aware of what they are, I think. Kev's good at researching all this stuff. We'll be making a decision within a week or so about how we're going to handle this all; stay tuned.

Tea now, followed by work.