seasonal heat-and-serve affective disorder

Texas weather remains so unseasonable as to merit the first line of a journal post. The evenings dip down to forty degrees or so, in line with the form book. Then the days heat up over 80 degrees. Everything is frighteningly dry. To our west, entire towns are eradicated by grass fires, which sounds very cinematic but is unfortunately real.

I love our usual January, when a fifty-degree rainy day might be followed by a seventy five degree sunny day which might be followed by a thirty degree snowy day which might be followed by a sixty degree balmy day. The constant variation, coupled with the thrill of stark landscapes and winter birds, makes me glad I live here.

I enjoy the warmth of the winter days, but I know it's got trouble embedded within it. It's a bit like the 2005 Spring. Glorious, gorgeous days--but there's a price to be paid for such things. The absence of the Spring rain that gorges and muddies the clay and blackland meant we now are in a deep drought.

I hope for rain, and snow, and miserable weather. But I'll enjoy the sun as best as I can until it arrives.

playing cricket

I got a poem published in an ejournal this past year. This journal runs a contest to determine a "peer award", in which the folks published during the year get to nominate and then vote on the best poem of the year.

This afternoon I got a note from the editor that offered me the chance to vote on the winning poem from among the finalists. I was pleased to note that I was one of the nine finalists for the award.

Then one of those wonderful kindergarten dilemmae arose. One is entitled to vote for three poets. Does one vote for one's own poem?

Ms. Nelson, who taught the little one-red-room private kindergarten where I gained my higher education, in a time before public schools were expected to offer calculus and sensitivity training to five year olds, would have had a simple answer. I am a big fan of simple answers.

I voted for three poems other than the poem I wrote.