It's coming! Only 8 weeks until we see these babies!
A beautiful early morning romp on frozen Ponkapoag Bog and Pond with Sophie gave me some space to think about my long-term goals. It's amazing how caught up in the day-to-day struggle I can be, zooming along month after month, and never reflecting on where I'm going. Sometimes I feel I better not look too closely because it's impossible for me to fulfill my dreams, but that's really nonsense. There is always a way. I just have to be more clever about figuring out a plan to make the things I want happen. I'm working on it, which at this point means I'm thinking about it.

Valentine's Day! Don't worry, I'm not going to blog about romance novels, but I will provide a link to "What Authors Read on Valentine's Day," an article from the Christian Science Monitor. Many of the authors I don't recognize, but it was mildly entertaining nonetheless.

I finished Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld several hours ago--all 400 pages. (To link to the article about Prep and Sittenfeld, type "Sittenfeld" into the search box that comes up when you follow this link.) I'm glad I read it, but it was 100 pages too long. She needed an editor to go through with a red pencil and write "Cut, cut, cut!" I would imagine that the book makes the prep school world uncomfortable--its focus on wealth, status, class, and race are hard-hitting. And I think it must be difficult for Sittenfeld to work at the Washington, D.C., prep school where she tutors, with this novel making the rounds. No matter what she says, people are going to believe it's autobiographical--that Lee Fiora's opinions are hers. If I were a journalist, I'd be on the phone to her classmates, trying to figure out where this novel came from, and what was Sittenfeld like when she was at Groton (class of '93).