Home Sweet Home

Well I'm back in Champaign. In celebration, Mother Nature threw me a ticker-tape parade...made of snow. And wind. And ice. On the day I arrived, we got 8 inches of snow. At first, I was pretty excited about this. The balmy Vancouver winter has been nice and all, but I wanted a little taste of "real winter." (Lord knows why, but I think it had something to do with how pretty and bright snow is and I probably imagined myself sitting on the couch dreamily sipping hot cocoa and watching the snow fall like something out of a Nescafe commercial).

I soon realized, however, that the snow was 8 inches high and I can lift my left leg roughly 1 inch (on a good day) off the ground, causing me to pretty much drag my bad leg through the drifts. Between the dragging left leg, the normal right leg and the cane imprints, I've left some pretty bizarre tracks. Somewhere in the Champaign-Urbana area, some kid is getting excited because he's found proof that the Sasquatch exists. Sorry, kid. It's just a rare species of Canadian Amazon Girl.

Despite the foul weather, however, it's good to be home (well, "home" until America breaks up with me, which will happen this summer). Last night, after a feast of Black Dog BBQ (thanks for the gift certificate, Karo!), A. and I were sitting on the couch watching a Utah Jazz game (they got a pants-down spanking handed to them by the Lakers who didn't even have Kobe...don't even get me started) and Mika crawled up on my lap and permitted me to pet her and then we listened to a bunch of Destroyer records and it was all kinds of awesome. Then I ate frozen yogurt with a collection of Erins (everyone should have a collection of Erins). Tonight, I will watch Project Runway and catch up on the English Department gossip.

So even though we don't currently have internet at my place and even though this inconvenience has required me to sit at a coffee shop listening to undergrad creative-writing majors recite from memory their poems about sunsets (I'm not even kidding) and go on and on and ON about, like, how no one in their workshop really reads their work deeply and how, like, amazing it is how your experiences influence how you perceive the world and something about Virginia Woolf, I'm happy to be back.

Wait...did I just write a blog post that isn't whining about something? All that BBQ must be making me soft.