A heavy, swelled- but also compressed-feeling head and upper respiratory system have kept me in bed all day.  I'm very good at telling my advisees when they need to slow down--when their bodies will intervene to tell them that they're attempting too much--but I'm not so good at living it out myself.  ONe thing I am good at, though, is stopping myself short the moment I sense illness coming on, and somehow I suspect that stopping and dropping have, over the years, helped to keep me from getting even more sick, when sickness arrives.  I'm hoping that another nearly ten-hours' night sleep will kick this one; waking up after nearly ten hours and still feeling knocked down was one of my signs this morning that all was not right.

The signs are all around us here, despite the snow that has covered the ground for nearly a month.  Under that snow, the snowdrops and tiny yellow lawn flowers whose names I always forget must be getting ready to shoot.  The branches are lengthening out, reddening and greening and gathering into bud.  Suddenly the silhouettes of tree branches are fuzzy at their tips.

It can be made to hold peanut butter.  He loves it in an almost embarrassing way.  (I should make clear that that's "a way that almost embarrasses me," not at all "a way that embarrasses him.")

Eventually, he gets tired of my photographing him.

I caught this image several days ago and am just now getting it out in front of you.  Days when there's sun by and large have a better baseline, and a slightly wider range of pleasant surprises for one's walk home.

I was part of a radio broadcast for Black History Month this weekend, and I found a piece of graffiti I'd never seen before in the student radio station.

"Do you always carry a camera with you?" a colleague from another department asked me recently.  "I do," I told him.  "If you always have a camera, you'll always see things to photograph.  If you never have a camera, you might not ever see what's camera-ready."  He seemed more amused than anything.  I let that go.

Our multistorm total snowfall is now apparently more than 18 inches; the dog and I have to fight to get out of our driveway, because I have not in any way even attempted to free my car since the first storm nearly two weeks ago.  There are obvious analogies to be drawn between our repeated snowfalls, which have added up to more than I can remember ever having seen here at one time, and the piling up of work all around me.  I suppose I'm drawing them, at least a little.  But mostly, cocooning and hibernating and being stranded in jeans and high boots and treading carefully through knee-deep snow and dog-high snow and snow-slickened streets has been startlingly unobjectionable.  As has much of the piling work.

It's been so snowy here for the past couple of days that I haven't wanted to get my camera out of my backpack--the camera itself was snowed in!  But today came some relenting.